What the federal workforce could look like with AI government employees

Artificial intelligence agents have the potential to enhance federal employees’ productivity and improve the effectiveness of services they provide to the public, but they also could expedite removals of government workers and experience a host of implementation problems, experts recently told Government Executive.

What is an AI agent and could they replace federal employees? 

AI agents are trained to perform tasks and can act as virtual personal assistants. 

For example, Paul Tatum, executive vice president for Global Public Sector at Salesforce, said at the customer service technology contractor’s Washington, D.C., conference on March 19 that he created a draft agent that could advise on implementing the U.S. International Trade Commission’s harmonized tariff schedule — a dense, frequently updated document that specifies tariff rates for imports. 

“Here comes my import package of avocados. [I ask the agent] ‘Hey, help me out. I haven’t read last month’s harmonized trade document. I don’t know what’s going on. Should I approve this?’” he said. “When you can start to bring frictionless trade [and] speed the process of inspections, of reviews, of approvals, of compliance, against the recent policies that may have changed, you can start to really change the economic velocity of countries.”

Tatum predicted during a press roundtable at the conference that human government workers will serve alongside digital ones. 

“Fundamentally, we do not anticipate or envision that digital labor replaces human labor. We do think there will be a blended workforce,” he said. “I’ve run into a lot of [government customers] that say ‘I don’t have the budget to get more help, to hire more people, to train them, to keep them, etc.’ So this is actually a welcome conversation.” 

Likewise, Sree Ramaswamy, chief innovation officer at the government technology-focused NobleReach Foundation who served as senior advisor to former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, said that AI agents could augment employees performing tasks like advising on policy and developing contracts. He does, however, expect that AI could change customer service jobs by having agents handle more routine questions.

“Instead of having one poor person there whose job it is to say the same thing over and over again to 100 different people during a day, you put an [AI] agent in there,” Ramaswamy said. “What happens to that person becomes the other interesting question. Does that mean that person loses their job? More likely, what it means is now you've taken that person and instead of answering the same question 100 times, you can give that person the chance to add more value doing something else.” 

Andrew Huddleston, communications director for the American Federation of Government Employees, said that the union does not have a “blanket opposition” to AI. But he does not expect that the Trump administration will implement the technology in a way that will improve government services or protect federal jobs, as agencies are slashing their workforces. 

​​”There's a world that exists in which you implement these AI client service models, and you take the workers that you have and move them to other higher-skill tasks that are still involved in customer service or assign them to work on backlog [or] stuff like that. That's a world that exists in which I think we would welcome,” he said. “There's another world that exists, which appears to be the world that we're living in, in which they want to slash huge numbers of federal workers and replace them with AI. I think that's the more likely scenario given the evidence that we see in front of our eyes.”

How can agencies prepare for AI agents? 

Jennifer Ives, the vice president of AI at the Partnership for Public Service, argued that “[l]eadership is make-or-break when it comes to AI adoption in government.”