Casey Coleman, the former chief information officer at the US General Services Administration, believes AI can significantly simplify the complex web of federal bureaucracy. Speaking with Business Insider, Coleman said that giving government employees access to AI tools will enable them to shift from managing tedious workflows to focusing on higher-value, more creative tasks. Coleman, who served as CIO at the GSA from 2007 to 2014, recalled how difficult it was to navigate inter-agency coordination. "Everything is done in concert with multiple stakeholders," she said. "Workflows involve approvals from different groups, and sometimes I didn't even know who could approve a particular course of action." She believes AI can help by automating these processes, connecting the dots across departments, and ultimately freeing up time for federal workers. Now leading the public sector division at ServiceNow since 2025, Coleman argues that AI won’t lead to job cuts but will instead boost productivity and the quality of work. "People go into public service to serve and to give back. They don’t go to manage bureaucratic workflows," she said. "In my own experience, we always had so much more work to do than we could possibly get to." She pointed out that advancements in technology have already unlocked new capabilities that weren’t possible before. "It’s not that we are going to need fewer people," she said. "It’s that we are doing better, more creative, higher-value work." The federal government is increasingly embracing AI. In August, OpenAI and Anthropic announced they would provide federal agencies with a year of free access to their AI models—OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise and Anthropic’s Claude for Enterprise and Claude for Government. Google followed suit with its Gemini for Government program, offering agencies access to its AI tools for just $0.47 per year in 2026. Experts like Darrell M. West of the Brookings Institution suggest these offers are not just goodwill gestures. "There are a lot of AI companies now, but that is probably going to narrow in the future," West said. "If you get government employees using your products, it increases the odds that you’ll be one of the survivors." By building relationships with federal users early, tech companies aim to secure long-term influence in a sector that’s expected to become a major AI adopter.