DOJ CIO Touts New Digital Customer Experience Team, AI Efforts

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is leaning on a year-old digital and customer experience team to sharpen accountability for federal IT spending, and separately, it is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) use cases aimed at improving service delivery and workforce efficiency.

Speaking on May 13 at Apptio’s 2026 Public Sector Summit, DOJ CIO Shantrell “Nikki” Collier said that in order to connect dollars to outcomes in a way that resonates with stakeholders, outcomes must be measurable.

“The bottom line is going to be measurable outcomes, whether that’s cost savings, whether there’s funding that can be repurposed because we have been able to have that cost savings, [or] whether we are meeting targets,” Collier said.

DOJ stands up digital customer experience team

Collier said the department’s digital and customer experience team is overhauling the department’s IT service catalog and building in measurable performance targets to improve accountability and clarify service delivery expectations for customers.

“It’s a first for the department,” she said of the team. “With the priorities of the administration on just overall service delivery, this was the opportunity for me to hold myself accountable and hold the department accountable in the delivery of our technology and cybersecurity services.”

Collier framed the new organization as part of a broader effort to improve oversight and standardization across DOJ’s IT landscape, which includes 40 business units.

She said that DOJ had 19 CIOs across those business units, which made it difficult to have insight into their plans or hold them accountable for results.

“So, what I am doing to address that is to focus more on standardizing and leveraging more enterprise and shared services,” to support the department’s 150,000 end users, Collier said.

“Volume purchasing has been something that we’ve been leaning on to address some of the challenges across the department as far as accountability,” she said.

AI use cases focus on service desk, HR

Collier also highlighted several AI use cases underway at DOJ that are designed to improve operational efficiencies and deliver measurable outcomes.

The CIO said she’s targeting use cases that can deliver quick wins.

“What we’re doing is looking at deploying AI, you know, to even just put a bot on the service desk to be able to answer those common, standard questions, so that our team can focus more on the complex issues that require a human to go desk-side or to engage directly,” Collier said.

“Just being able to put a bot on the service desk, I think, would be able to save so much time,” she said.

Deploying AI to assist human resources (HR) with writing position descriptions is another promising use case, she noted.

“We’d spend weeks and weeks writing and working with HR specialists to write a position description for a new hire, or just to update position descriptions. It could save, I would say, probably days or weeks to be able to have AI to do that for us,” Collier said.