State Department Chief Information Officer (CIO) Kelly Fletcher said Wednesday that the agency is preparing to “aggressively deploy” artificial intelligence (AI) agents across the enterprise, using them to improve employee experience while buying time for broader IT modernization.
Speaking at Atlassian’s Team on Tour: Government event in Washington, Fletcher said that with funding in place for fiscal year 2026, the State Department has a window of opportunity to expand generative AI capabilities across mission systems.
“My vision for this is for those systems where customers are having a bad experience, which we measure sort of quarterly, I want to shove agents on top of [the legacy systems] so that you don’t have to engage with them,” Fletcher said.
“Then that buys me some time to modernize those systems,” she explained. “If they’re secure, if they’re stable, if we can operate them, you know, I maybe don’t need to prioritize those. I need to prioritize those systems where I can’t put an agent on top of them, or where there’s a problem with resilience.”
One early target for AI agents is administrative support. Fletcher said she envisions an “administrative assistant agent bot” that employees could query for information such as leave balances, rather than navigating legacy human resources (HR) systems.
In Fletcher’s vision, AI agents would retrieve information from HR, financial, or logistics platforms and allow employees to take action through a conversational interface. For example, capabilities would include submitting leave requests.
Beyond administrative workflows, Fletcher said the department is looking to embed into mission systems that are “good but not great,” including its cable platform. The department produces a vast number of diplomatic cables, and Fletcher said search has historically been difficult.
“Just using some generative AI in there, folks are better able to search. They’re getting summaries that are AI generated,” she said.
“We’re going to shove agents on top of things that are hard to use, whether they’re hard to use because the system is bad, or they’re hard to use because people don’t use them often – and that includes financial systems,” Fletcher said, adding, “AI is made for this.”
Finally, Fletcher said the State Department is looking to utilize GenAI for real-time translation, saying, “I think it’s going to actually change the game for us.”
With a full budget for this year, Fletcher signaled big plans, saying, “We’re gonna run a marathon. We’re putting on our shoes. … We have a chance this year, I think, right now, with a ton of space to really drive and get some big stuff done.”