"Federal agencies face a paradox: they are spending nearly 80% of IT budgets maintaining legacy systems while simultaneously being mandated to adopt transformational technologies like artificial intelligence. This is not simply a resource allocation challenge - it is a strategic readiness deficit that compounds daily. Every day modernization is deferred, agencies accrue digital readiness debt, which widens the gap between current infrastructure and the foundational capabilities required to deploy AI responsibly and at scale."
"This debt is measured not in code, but in mission throughput, cyber risk exposure and the integrity of the data underpinning critical decisions. As AI becomes mission-essential, this debt now represents a mounting threat to national security, public health and citizen trust. AI without mission discipline The rapid push to "do something with AI" has triggered a wave of pilots across the government."
"Yet many efforts are not anchored to defined mission outcomes, performance measures or scaling pathways. When experimentation occurs without governance, modernization risks becoming a disconnected portfolio of proofs-of-concept. The warnings are visible. The VA's Electronic Health Record modernization reset and the Army's cancellation of Future Combat Systems illustrate what happens when ambition moves faster than operational readiness. Moreover, empirical evidence shows that AI's productivity impact remains context-specific."
"In a large-scale field experiment, Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues at MIT found roughly 14% average productivity gains - but concentrated among less-experienced workers - and that experts often benefit less from current AI tools. A 2024 Upwork Research Institute survey further observed that nearly half of employees using AI were unsure how to achieve expected productivity gains and over three-quarters reported increased workload."
Federal agencies spend nearly 80% of IT budgets maintaining legacy systems while being required to adopt transformational technologies such as artificial intelligence. Deferred modernization produces digital readiness debt that widens gaps between current infrastructure and capabilities needed to deploy AI responsibly and at scale. That debt reduces mission throughput, increases cyber risk exposure, and undermines data integrity for critical decisions, posing threats to national security, public health, and citizen trust. A rapid wave of pilots lacks mission discipline, performance measures, and scaling pathways, risking disconnected proofs-of-concept. Empirical studies show AI productivity gains are context-specific and governance and operational readiness are essential.
Read at Nextgov.com
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