GSA Says the Government Is Behind on AI, The Numbers Say Otherwise

General Services Administration (GSA) Administrator Edward Forst told a room of federal contractors last month that his government is still chasing yesterday on artificial intelligence. His own government’s survey numbers tell a different story.

Research published this year found 82% of public sector organizations already run autonomous AI agents, and most government technology leaders say they believe they are ahead of private industry, not behind it. Federal auditors, meanwhile, have found the guardrails have not caught up to the deployment pace.

The Catch-Up Story Doesn’t Match the Adoption Numbers

Forst delivered his now-quoted line at the IBM Think Gov 2026 conference in Washington, according to FedScoop, which first reported his remarks. He said the goal now is what he called instant gratification from early wins and measurable targets.

“We have stricken, although not to perfection yet, the word ‘monetization’ from our vocabulary,” Forst said. “I view it in our context as just catching up to yesterday.”

That framing undersells what is already underway. Research by IDC for Salesforce found 82% of government organizations already run AI agents that reason and act with minimal human sign-off. Sixty percent of the leaders surveyed said they believe they are significantly or somewhat ahead of the private sector on the technology.

That claim tracks with separate data. A Census Bureau survey found only about 17% to 20% of all U.S. businesses reported using AI this spring, a fraction of what government leaders claim for themselves. The same IDC research found 71% of government organizations plan to expand their use of agentic AI within a year.

The Ballpark Pitch

The conference where Forst spoke was staged inside a Major League Baseball stadium in Washington, with IBM and government officials trading pitches on modernization instead of pennant races. Forst, a former Goldman Sachs executive who later served as president and CEO of Cushman and Wakefield before the Senate confirmed him in a 53 to 43 vote in December, used the stage to describe an administration he called outcome driven.

“We’re not going to leave our jobs without making a lot more of this happen, where it makes sense,” Forst said of federal procurement. “If we stumble in the early days of doing more of this, it’s going to disable us to get to where they do want us to be.”

He described a workload that dwarfs anything from his banking career. “I’ve never had more stakeholders in my life since it’s the entire American population, and I’ve never had more bosses than I have right now,” he said. “Every congressman, senator, everybody’s my boss. I have a real boss who sits in the White House, too.”

One concrete goal is building out Login.gov so citizens need a single credential for federal services, “which is going to be so good for the American citizen to be able to find one way into all the stuff we do,” Forst said. Login.gov has already grown to more than 700 participating government applications, including new identity verification on Medicare.gov.

• Login.gov – the single sign-on system now linked to more than 700 federal applications
• USAi.gov – a secure evaluation suite where agencies test generative AI tools before wider rollout
• OneGov – discount software agreements struck with more than a dozen vendors since last spring
• A NIST partnership – built to improve how agencies test and evaluate AI models before deployment

OneGov alone has produced more than $60 billion in contract savings since January 2025, GSA says, with discounts on tools from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic reaching as high as 90%.

Use Cases Triple While Oversight Lags Behind

The scale of the shift shows up in the paperwork. Federal agencies reported 3,611 AI use cases in 2025, an increase of nearly 70% from 2024 and more than six times the count from 2023, according to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. NASA, the Department of Health and Human Services, the VA, and the Justice and Energy departments logged the largest jumps.

Civilian agencies spent more than $3 billion on AI in the latest budget cycle. None of that spending guarantees the systems work as advertised. The Government Accountability Office’s own science and technology arm found the best AI agents complete only about 30% of complex tasks autonomously without error, and a separate GAO review of how the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, GSA and the VA acquire AI capabilities found a pattern: agencies learning hard lessons in isolation, then failing to share them.

How Fast Is Too Fast for Federal AI?

Federal officials insist the pace is deliberate rather than slow for its own sake. GSA’s technology arm says government must stay cautious because errors reach real citizens, even as survey after survey shows agencies claiming to outrun private industry on paper. Independent auditors say oversight, data readiness and accountability have not caught up to that pace.

“As the government, we are responsible to the public to be conservative with what we do,” said Jennifer Rostami, assistant commissioner of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, in a session about agentic AI. “We can’t introduce something that then makes mistakes, and then somebody in the public is suffering because of that. That’s not our job.”

Rostami said government innovation is inherently a bit slow, so agencies have relied on industry for always injecting innovation and to push them toward using it. Forst put it more plainly: GSA is at the doorstep with AI.

A March survey of more than 200 federal technology executives found 53% are exploring or piloting agentic AI, with another 15% already implementing it and just 6% not yet considering it. The same survey flagged inadequate oversight policies as the biggest barrier to scaling the technology. A separate Ernst and Young survey found 88% of federal decisionmakers call AI a critical tool for modernization, yet half of all AI initiatives remain stuck in pilot or planning stages.

That gap between appetite and oversight has already produced friction. Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the Homeland Security committee’s ranking Democrat, pressed Forst during his confirmation hearing to pause a GSA contract with Elon Musk’s xAI after its Grok chatbot produced racist and antisemitic content, and to document whether the agency had run a real risk assessment before signing the deal.

Where the experts disagree:

• GSA leadership – Forst and Rostami say government must move conservatively because mistakes reach real people, and the agency is still only at the doorstep with AI.
• Industry survey data – IDC’s research for Salesforce found 60% of government leaders believe they are already ahead of the private sector on agentic AI.
• Federal auditors – GAO’s science and technology arm found the best AI agents complete only about 30% of complex tasks autonomously without error, with agencies learning lessons in isolation instead of sharing them.

Veterans Affairs Turns Days Into Hours

Richelle Gibson, deputy director at the Department of Veterans Affairs, offered the clearest example of what fast adoption looks like when it works. The agency is leaning forward with AI automation, she said on a panel, especially for repetitive tasks like issuing health benefits.

“We make decisions on simple things within hours,” Gibson said. “That’s a massively different experience for veterans.”

The change matters for an agency that has spent years fielding complaints about backlogs. It also captures the trade-off running through the rest of the conference: speed helps veterans get answers faster, but the same automation worries the employees processing their claims.

The Workforce Fear Behind the Rollout

Gibson said hesitancy among government workers remains a real barrier to AI adoption, driven largely by fear the technology will replace their jobs. She said the fix is not more mandates but more listening.

Don’t forget the people, even though we’re dealing with technology, because their use of the technology is what determines if it’s successful or not.

Gibson made the point near the end of a panel that had spent most of its time on deployment speed rather than the workforce absorbing it.

The fear has numbers behind it. Through 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency’s attrition targets, layoffs, hiring freeze and contract cancellations pushed 348,219 people out of federal employment, while only 116,912 started, a 55.6% drop in new hires from the year before. The net loss, per the Pew Research Center, was nearly 238,000 workers.

Researchers at the Brookings Institution have argued the effort backfired: employees who watched colleagues get cut increasingly perceived AI tools as an existential threat to their own jobs, and slowed pilots instead of embracing them.

The resentment shows up beyond policy circles too. At a federal medical center in Maryland, a union says its own leadership tore down a memorial for laid-off staff, a sign of how raw the workforce reductions still feel inside agencies now being asked to do more with fewer people. The anxiety is not unique to government, either. Similar fears are rattling Hollywood, where new AI video tools are threatening visual effects jobs far beyond the studios that commissioned them.

Login.gov’s Next Rebuild Runs on the Same Clock

Even as the workforce debate simmers, GSA is pushing ahead on the citizen-facing side. Login.gov, the identity system underpinning Forst’s one-door vision, is now working with the National Design Studio to redesign its sign-up and verification flow, according to an internal email obtained by Nextgov and FCW.

More than 100 million Americans hold accounts through Login.gov already, using it for Social Security, unemployment insurance and passport services across every state, per that reporting. Greg Hogan, the platform’s acting assistant commissioner, told staff his team remains responsible for every change made to the service, even as outside designers pitch improvements.

Forst says the goal is catching up to yesterday. By the time Login.gov’s redesign ships, the rest of government will have moved again.