Agentic AI Fuels Next Phase of Federal Modernization

Agentic AI is growing in the public sector as government agencies fast-track IT transformation to boost efficiency and counter global threats, experts said during the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

The capability comes as organizations are increasing their focus in IT modernization to bolster cybersecurity, cut costs and create operational efficiency.

“There’s this level of flexibility and choice [needed] that’s really going to work well, and now that we’re bringing it on, we’ll have the opportunity to bring it up more and more use cases,” said Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product marketing at Nutanix, at the event.

Part of this effort includes reusing existing server investments, while adding more flexibility in deployment to meet different workload and cost management needs, said Ketan Shah, vice president of products at Nutanix, on a panel.

This is where agentic AI becomes critical. It can autonomously perceive, decide and act toward goals without needing human intervention. Unlike traditional AI that responds to specific inputs, agentic AI is proactive, capable of planning, reasoning, adapting and learning over time.

“We’re truly building an agentic platform with shared services for AI,” said Luke Congdon, senior director of product management at Nutanix. “We’re seeing a much more robust motion where people are saying, ‘I need to enable my entire organization [with AI].’”

Agentic AI in Government

The Department of Veterans Affairs is eyeing agentic AI to augment its health care workforce and achieve new efficiency gains, Shane McNamee, health solution architect at the agency, told GovCIO Media & Research at HIMSS earlier this year in Las Vegas.

“60 to 80% of clinical, population health teams is spent working for the computers and connecting all the programs together and connecting all the data together, and we need massive efficiency gains associated with health care delivery. That leads us to agentic AI,” McNamee said.

Agencies are also building out cloud environments to provide greater scalability, cost efficiency and improved service delivery. Nutanix created a solution to better manage environments to boost efficiency, said Phillip Jennings, hybrid multi-cloud leader for Nutanix’s North America Public Sector.

“We created a common control plane prism that you can use to manage all these different environments. And so there’s not going to be a new way to handle security. There’s not going to be a new way that you would backup. It really uses the same integration and the same API calls that you’re using in your on-premise environment. I think that’s huge, because then your team gets more time to concentrate on the applications,” Jennings said.