Welcome to The State of AI

A blog about what it actually takes to bring artificial intelligence into state government, written by someone who’s spent years sitting across the table from the people doing it. Most coverage of this topic swings between breathless hype and easy cynicism about bureaucracy. Neither matches what’s really happening. State CIOs have made AI their top priority for the first time in over a decade, and they’re doing it while managing tight budgets, sensitive data, and decisions that affect real people’s benefits, healthcare, and livelihoods. This blog is for anyone who wants to understand that work honestly — the genuine barriers, the smart people navigating them, and the states quietly figuring out how to move from pilot to production without cutting corners on the public’s trust.

  • Too Many Good Choices: A Framework for Selecting an AI Platform in State Government

    Open any state CIO’s inbox and you’ll find the same story: a steady stream of outreach from OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and a growing list of smaller, sharper startups — each with a genuinely capable GenAI offering, each with public-sector case studies, each confident theirs is the right fit. None of them are wrong to make that case. This is one of the most competitive, fastest-moving markets in technology history, and the competition is producing real, meaningful improvements every few months. Which is exactly the problem. When every option on the table is credible, “which AI platform should…

  • Why State Government AI Pilots Stall Before They Scale

    Every state has an AI pilot running somewhere right now. A chatbot answering resident questions. A tool summarizing casework notes. A model flagging anomalies in claims data. Ask around, and you’ll find dozens of these projects — quietly running in a sandbox, presented at a conference, maybe even written up in a press release. Ask a different question — how many of those pilots became part of how the agency actually operates? — and the number drops fast. Recent research backs this up: nearly every state has piloted AI in some form, but adoption stalls well short of scaled, trusted…