ServiceNow; J. David Ake via Getty Images
Casey Coleman, the former chief information officer for the US General Services Administration, says giving federal workers access to AI will result in more higher-value work being done.
Coleman, 60, told Business Insider in an interview this month that when she was in government, she often struggled to identify the right agencies she had to work with to get things done.
“Everything is done in concert with multiple stakeholders, and so workflows involve approvals from different groups, and sometimes I didn’t even know who could approve a particular course of action,” she said.
“So automating those processes, being able to connect the dots across organizations, will help give people their time back,” she added. “It would be a net benefit to all of society.”
Coleman worked at the GSA for over a decade and was its chief information officer from 2007 to 2014.
Since leaving government, she’s worked at AT&T, Unisys, and Salesforce. She joined ServiceNow, a California-based cloud and AI company, in 2025, and oversees its public sector business.
“People go into public service to serve and to give back. They don’t go to manage bureaucratic workflows,” she said.
Coleman said rolling out AI is unlikely to result in fewer government jobs. Instead, she said that AI would raise productivity and quality of work.
“In my own experience, we always had so much more work to do than we could possibly get to,” she said.
“Just think about the things we can do now that we couldn’t do in the past because we have better technology. It’s not that we are going to need fewer people. It’s that we are doing better, more creative, higher-value work,” she added.
In August, OpenAI and Anthropic said they were offering federal agencies a year’s access to their AI models at a nominal cost of $1. OpenAI said its ChatGPT Enterprise plan will be made available to federal workers next year, while Anthropic said agencies could subscribe to its Claude for Enterprise and Claude for Government plans.
Google said in the same month that it was also offering its AI products to federal agencies under its Gemini for Government programme. Each agency can pay $0.47 for a year’s access to Google’s AI tools in 2026.
Darrell M. West, a senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation, told Business Insider’s Brent D. Griffiths earlier this month that tech companies are offering these deals because it “boosts their long-term potential.”
“There are a lot of AI companies now, but that is probably going to narrow in the future,” West said.
“So if you are getting government employees to use your products, it increases the odds that you will be one of the survivors,” he added.
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