Artificial intelligence is moving faster than most public institutions can adapt. State governments are under pressure to modernize old systems, speed up permitting and rulemaking, and keep pace with private companies already using advanced tools to make decisions faster.
Tanner Jones, CEO of Vulcan Technologies, and Chris Minge, the company’s CTO, say that the government needs access to frontier AI if it wants to continue serving the public well.
Jones and Minge co-founded Vulcan Technologies less than a year ago and have deployed AI tools in state governments and some federal agencies.
Jones says the company grew out of a gap between the private sector and public institutions. “The pace of development we’re seeing in the private sector, and the adoption of AI, has been unbelievable,” he says. “What starts to become worrisome in that world is one where the private sector far outpaces the government and the institutions in their adoption and understanding of AI.” He says that “our republic starts to break down because the government is so behind on the technology.”
Minge says that concern is becoming more urgent as the technology improves. He says it “is a really important mission to be getting governors or government agencies to actually be using the technology.”
Jones argues that the public feels the effects of outdated government technology. “Every time we have to log into a government portal to submit an application or apply for a license or do something of this sort, it’s a terrible experience,” he says. He blames a system that often rewards firms that “are not actually technology companies,” but instead “consulting firms and in many cases accounting firms masquerading as technology companies.”
That problem matters because government workers, according to him, are not the obstacle. Jones says he was “pleasantly surprised” by the quality of the public servants he encountered. “The people working in government are super earnest public servants who care about doing a good job,” he says. “But they’re just trapped in this system where they’re often kind of saying, ‘Oh, I wish I could use this technology, but we just don’t see a clear path to being able to adopt it and procure it.’”
Minge says the danger is larger than inefficiency. “The world will change so much,” he says, and if government is slow-moving, “it’ll basically just get ignored.” He describes a future where “all the decisions are being made by private industry leaders who have access to the AI technology that can help them navigate a rapidly changing world.”
Their company tries to prevent that by building systems grounded in legal and policy data rather than relying on generic consumer AI tools. Jones says Vulcan assembled a database that can “navigate the entire corpus of American law” and combine it with fiscal and budget information. Minge says standard models can miss key legal material and return bad answers. “They’re going to get answers with hallucinations and inaccurate information,” he says, because up-to-date legal databases are not built into those tools.
Jones says the work behind that system is painstaking. He describes regulatory codes they are able to process from “scans of scans of scans,” with handwritten edits in the margins that still carry legal force.
Jones describes one agency where workers were stuck manually deduplicating a 22,000-row spreadsheet tied to permit decisions. “These are really hardworking people trying to do a good job,” he says, “and they just didn’t have any tools to do the job effectively.”
He says an agency survey found a “90% average time reduction in basically non-intellectual tasks,” with average task time falling from three hours to 17 minutes. That shift, he says, frees longtime experts to focus on “the intellectual and conceptual policy work that they actually want to be doing.”
Texas stands out to them as a promising state. Jones points to work underway through the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office and says the state could become “a new gold standard nationally.” Minge says states that adopt AI well will gain an economic edge. “The states that adopt it well and keep policy up to speed,” he says, “will start to really pull ahead in economic growth and opportunity.”