Agencies Turn to Industry to Scale AI, Develop Federal Workforce

Industry is playing a growing role in federal AI innovation and workforce development as agencies look to scale solutions, officials said last week at GovCIO Media & Research’s AI Summit in Tysons, Virginia.

The Labor Department’s Office of Apprenticeship Acting Administrator Megan Baird highlighted how the Registered Apprenticeship Program — which recently expanded to include AI and IT jobs in response to a presidential directive to garner one million active apprentices and grow the AI workforce — can better prepare the workforce for industry skills requirements and result in immediate job placement to fill the growing number of open AI positions.

“This is really a great pathway, because you get somebody immediately into that position, they are being trained to industry standards, and then they’re also being trained to the employer-specific standards,” said Baird.

Baird added that the future workforce, regardless of whether the position is inherently technical, will require some form of AI literacy. She applauded industry partners for their commitment to making AI trainings and courses available for free to help current federal employees enhance AI literacy skills.

“We’re again leaning on industry to inform us, because we are fully recognizing that the federal government may not be the expert in certain areas,” said Baird. “We have finite resources in the federal government, so it is really critical that we are leveraging everything that’s already out there and making sure that we’re using it.”

Leveraging Existing Relationships, Infrastructure to Accelerate AI Adoption

Pure Storage Senior Director of Strategic Federal Programs Doyle Choi said industry’s relationship with government is changing to embrace the ‘as a service’ model. Choi said this method helps agencies assess the effectiveness of solutions and investments.

“It’s just as important to acknowledge an investment’s success as it is to say ‘let’s take a step back,’ to shift those limited dollars to more meaningful investments,” said Choi.

In 2025, DOT became the first cabinet-level agency to adopt an AI industry solution through the General Services Administration’s (GSA) OneGov strategy. Justin Ubert, Federal Transit Administration’s Cybersecurity and Operations division chief, said leveraging DOT’s existing investment in secure infrastructure was critical for the enterprise-wide adoption of Google Gemini.

“We already had an environment, and we identified it quickly and leveraged those security controls in place to go from pilot to production quickly,” said Ubert.

NASA Deputy Chief AI Officer Krista Kinnard emphasized that industry expertise is essential to help agencies balance risk and innovation. As agencies and industry partners share data, they can identify potential problems with the dataset and avoid roadblocks to implementing AI tools, she added.

“When we talk about responsible AI adoption and responsible AI implementation, it has roots in the data component,” said Kinnard. “That partnership really is so crucial from the onset and really having that transparency.”