Casey Coleman, former chief information officer for the U.S. General Services Agency, says that giving federal workers access to AI will do more valuable work.
Coleman, 60, told Business Insider this month in an interview that when she was in government she often had trouble identifying the right institutions she had to work to get things done.
“The workflow includes approval from different groups because everything is done in coordination with multiple stakeholders. We didn't even know who could approve a particular course of action,” she said.
“So automating these processes so that dots can be connected between organizations will help people give time back,” she added. “It will be in net profit for all society.”
Coleman has worked for the GSA for over 10 years and was Chief Information Officer from 2007 to 2014.
Since leaving the government, she has worked for AT&T, Unisys, and Salesforce. She joined ServiceNow, a California-based cloud and AI company in 2025, overseeing public sector businesses.
“People enter public services to serve and give back. They don't go to manage bureaucratic workflows,” she said.
Coleman said it is unlikely that deploying AI will result in less government work. Instead, she said AI would increase productivity and quality of work.
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“In my own experience, we were doing much more work than we could always do,” she said.
“Think about what we can do now that we couldn't do in the past because we have better technology. That doesn't mean we need fewer people.
In August, Openai and Anthropic said they were providing federal agencies with one year of access to AI models at a nominal cost of $1. Openai said the ChatGpt Enterprise Plan will be available to federal workers next year, but humanity said government agencies can subscribe to Claude for businesses and for government plans.
In the same month, Google said it was offering AI products to federal agencies under Gemini for government programs. Institutions can pay $0.47 for one year access to Google's AI tools in 2026.
Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Centre for Technology Innovation, told business insider Brent D. Griffith earlier this month that tech companies are offering these transactions to “enhance long-term potential.”
“There are a lot of AI companies right now, but that will probably be narrower in the future,” West said.
“Therefore, if you let government officials use your product, you're more likely to become one of the survivors,” he added.
