Mississippi CIO Craig Orgeron comes off an optimist about artificial intelligence, a leader with a can-do attitude about a technology that sparks nearly utopian hopes and dystopian fears that range from lost jobs to software-induced bias.
Such optimism is hardly uncommon in the government technology industry as AI takes on more work and becomes familiar.
Part of it, no doubt, is just “lead, follow or get out of the way” pragmatism, as it seems increasingly unlikely to gov tech leaders that AI is some hyped-up, over-marketed trend destined to fade out.
Even as state and local agency tech leaders spent much of 2025 worried about the impact of federal budget cuts, AI development and deployment charged ahead. A National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) survey, for instance, found that 82 percent of state CIOs reported that their employees are using generative AI tools in daily work, with 90 percent crafting pilot projects with AI.
AI “is democratizing tech in a generational way we’ve never seen,” Orgeron told Government Technology recently.
