Federal agencies exploring artificial intelligence often struggle with where to begin. Justin Fulcher, a technology founder and former government advisor, has offered a simple starting point: look for the tasks that already frustrate staff and slow down service, then ask whether AI can remove that specific friction before considering anything more ambitious.
Start Small, Stay Grounded
Fulcher’s own background gives weight to that advice. He co-founded RingMD, a telemedicine company operating across Asia, and later served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, focusing on acquisition reform and technology modernization. Both experiences exposed him to institutions that were skeptical of new technology until it proved itself in narrow, well defined use cases.
Justin Fulcher has pointed to document processing, scheduling, routine correspondence, and compliance checking as reasonable starting points for agencies. These tasks are repetitive, well understood, and low stakes enough that mistakes are unlikely to cause serious harm while a tool is still being evaluated. Success in these areas can build the internal trust needed to expand AI use into more consequential work later.
Avoiding the Trap of Overpromising
Fulcher has cautioned against treating AI as a transformative fix capable of solving deep institutional problems on its own. Agencies that market a new tool as a total solution may disappoint employees and the public when the technology inevitably falls short of that framing. A narrower pitch, focused on removing friction from specific tasks, sets expectations that AI can actually meet.
Justin Fulcher has also stressed that any AI deployment inside government needs to be auditable, explainable, and built to fail safely, standards that matter more as agencies expand from small pilots into wider use. Getting those fundamentals right early, he argues, makes it far easier to scale a program later without running into the trust problems that derail so many technology initiatives inside large public institutions. His guidance amounts to a call for discipline over speed at every stage of adoption. See related link for additional information.
Learn more about Justin Fulcher on https://x.com/JustinFulcher