(L to R) GSA Deputy Administrator Mike Lynch speaks with GSA Senior Advisor Matt Batzel, GSA CIO David Shive and Commerce Department Chief Technology Officer Moksh Jawa at the Federal Emerging Technology Showcase held on July 30 at the Interior Department. Frank Konkel / Government Executive

Edward Graham

Managing Editor, Nextgov/FCW

The General Services Administration’s push to transform how the U.S. government procures new technologies will radically improve the way public servants deliver services at scale, according to the agency’s IT chief. 

The Trump administration has moved to enhance federal adoption of new IT services, including artificial intelligence tools and other products that can automate many of the time-consuming tasks that slow agencies’ citizen-focused operations. GSA has been at the forefront of many of these modernization efforts by helping agencies onboard and experiment with capabilities from leading tech firms in a cost-efficient manner. 

In a recent interview with Nextgov/FCW, GSA Chief Information Officer David Shive said the agency’s push to get new capabilities into the hands of federal workers has “disrupted the longstanding practice of how technology is driven into this government."

The typical process for government procurement, he said, was that “academia would create something, and then standards bodies would assess the thing, and then the White House would send out guidance on how to implement the thing and then agencies would then implement the thing.”

Shive added that this approach could take as long as two to three years, which resulted in “all this lost business value in that timeline.”

“Instead, what we're doing now is we're taking a disruptive technology, we're putting thoughtful, logical controls around that thing, and — just like the private sector — building [minimum viable products], building pilots, assessing value and then sharing that with our standards-setting bodies so that their standards are informed not by academic theory, but instead informed by actual use cases in government,” he said. 

By shifting the typical procurement approach to speed up tech adoption, Shive said the White House’s governmentwide guidance on large-scale IT implementation efforts is now “based on those actuals rather than theory,” which he added, “has allowed us to drive technology into this government and generate the business value of that enabling technology at a much higher velocity than ever before.”

A new approach to federal tech modernization

Shive framed this as GSA’s digital roadmap for enhancing government services. It’s an approach, he said, that is not just about working to modernize federal systems in a safe and secure manner, but reshaping the entire model for onboarding new technologies downstream so “we buy technology based on these knowings, rather than based on theory.”

One notable example of GSA’s streamlined IT-focused procurement work is the OneGov initiative, which launched in April 2025 with the goal of assisting agencies in their technology modernization efforts by treating the government as one centralized customer. So far, the strategy has led to agreements with more than two dozen tech companies, with many of these deals including temporary discounts of as much as 70% to 90% on relevant products and services, including AI tools.

Shive called the OneGov deals “a perfect example of being able to buy, on a relatively short timescale, AI that allows [agencies] to do exploration and even full-scale implementation, but in a safe contractual model that doesn't lock them into a technology that might not end up being best of class.”

GSA officials previously said that OneGov has led to over $1 billion in cost savings since its launch last year, with the departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Transportation and State among the agencies that have taken advantage of the initiative’s discounted offerings. GSA is also looking at how the current agreements can ultimately lead to longer-term deals and even broader savings beyond the software and tech products that are currently offered.

The agency similarly launched USAi last August as a way for federal employees to experiment with AI capabilities in a trusted sandbox environment. Shive said GSA is able to see how agency personnel are using the platform and its offered AI tools — insights, he added, which “will inform our next round of negotiations” through OneGov.

At the Government Service Delivery conference in June, Shive said during a panel discussion that he believed more AI adoption will allow federal workers to drastically improve customer service delivery. 

“Right now, I say we’re 50% of the way there,” he said at the time. “And by this time next year, I suspect we'll be 90% of the way there.”

Shive told Nextgov/FCW that accomplishing this lofty goal also extends beyond tech adoption to organizational change management, which he noted has often been “the biggest challenge historically.”

GSA released a step-by-step guide in June — the Elimination, Optimization and Automation playbook — to help agencies better adopt emerging capabilities in a way that can maximize their operational benefits. 

While Shive said the playbook’s main goal is “helping agencies kind of think the same way” when it comes to modernizing their IT services, he added that “the secondary value that we're trying to generate there is that organizational change management part, to demonstrate to our agency partners, ‘look, this doesn't have to be a big, bad, scary thing; it does work.’”

One of the efforts that helped inform the playbook is GSA’s “Million Hour Challenge,” which seeks to eliminate one million hours of employee work during the 2027 calendar year by relying on technology. 

Shive noted that this initiative doesn’t solely focus on adopting AI, “but [using] all the tech in the toolbox, including eliminating tools and systems and processes that should no longer be around, optimizing existing processes or automating and augmenting stuff with AI and other things.”