What the federal workforce could look like with AI government employees

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.” 

“AI agents aren’t only technical tools, they represent a new way of doing business. A model where software systems can take action, not just advise,” she said in an email. “That shift raises real questions around oversight, accountability and how we support the federal workforce through change. And it’s leadership who answers those questions.” 

Nadia Hansen, a Salesforce digital transformation executive and former chief information officer for Clark County, Nevada, said at the company’s conference that agency leaders should begin training their employees on how to use the technology and setting up guardrails for such utilization. 

“Most of the time, I think a lot of agencies struggle with ‘This is an IT problem or this is an IT opportunity.’ But I think [AI agents are] way beyond IT,” Hansen said. “This is actually an enterprise strategy that needs to be encompassed as to what problem are we trying to solve [with the technology], and then reverse engineer back to here's all the steps we need to take to solve this problem.” 

Ramaswamy stressed that it’s necessary to determine ahead of time where to put AI agents in agency workflows. 

“This stuff is not easy to figure out. It's easy to just say ‘Hey, all of you people go use this [AI] agent to do something…[B]ut one of the reasons why so many organizations adopt digital tools and don't see efficiencies or productivity improvements is because [they’re] just kind of throwing the tools into the organization,” he said. 

Ives warned that a lot of the data AI agents need to operate is in legacy government IT systems or spread across departments.

“Until we modernize the underlying systems and infrastructure, we’ll continue to bump up against limitations and keep hitting friction points,” she said. 

Nasi Jazayeri, the executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Public Sector, during an interview at the company’s conference, urged agencies to start small when using AI agents. 

“Don't go after moonshots,” he said. “Go after stuff that are low hanging fruit, can be implemented quickly, that you get the biggest bang out of it, that it's highly repetitive, high volume, that you can quickly [say] ‘Oh my God. Look our productivity just went up the roof because these tasks that we used to do a lot of leg work, a lot all day, now it’s getting automated.” 

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump repealed former President Joe Biden’s executive order that set policy for AI use by federal agencies, arguing it stifled private AI innovation. Shortly thereafter, Trump called for his administration to develop its own AI action plan, which is due in July. 

The General Services Administration recently introduced an AI bot for its employees with plans to offer it to other agencies.