For agencies attempting to integrate artificial intelligence into their day-to-day operations, the conversation often focuses on technology. Justin Fulcher, a technology entrepreneur who has worked inside both private and public institutions, says that framing misses the real obstacle. The barrier is not the tools. It is the accumulated weight of outdated processes that govern how those tools would be adopted.
Fulcher co-founded RingMD, a digital health platform that served patients in Asia, and later served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense. His time working on IT modernization and acquisition reform gave him a concrete understanding of how institutional structures shape technology outcomes regardless of the tools available.
Siloed Data and Analog-Era Compliance
Among the specific problems Fulcher has identified are siloed data systems that prevent information from flowing between departments, and compliance frameworks that were designed for paper-based workflows. In combination, these create compound inefficiencies. An AI tool capable of accelerating a given process may still fail to gain traction if it requires data that exists in an incompatible format in a separate system, or if its outputs cannot be documented in ways that satisfy existing audit requirements.
“Our core systems operate as if it were 1975,” Justin Fulcher wrote, describing a performance gap that is institutional rather than technological. The United States retains extraordinary capacity for innovation. The challenge is connecting that capacity to the systems that translate it into actual government output.
Justin Fulcher has said that technology adoption in regulated environments succeeds when it reduces friction rather than introducing new complexity. That is the test he applies to AI: not whether a given system is technically impressive, but whether it fits into how an agency already operates well enough to become part of routine practice. Tools that pass that test build institutional momentum; tools that fail it get abandoned after initial pilots. Refer to this page to learn more.
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