Justin Fulcher Government AI Must Reduce Friction to Succeed
Artificial intelligence has generated significant interest in Washington, with agencies across the federal government exploring potential applications. But interest and implementation are different things. Technology entrepreneur Justin Fulcher, who served as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense before that, has developed a specific framework for thinking about what makes AI deployment in government succeed or fail.
The Friction Test
Fulcher’s central argument is that AI’s value in the public sector is not primarily about what it can do in ideal conditions. It is about what it can do within the constraints that actually govern federal operations. Those constraints include strict data security requirements, civil service protections, procurement regulations, and public accountability standards that have no private-sector equivalent.
Given those constraints, Fulcher applies what might be called a friction test. Does a given AI tool reduce the operational burden on staff and agencies, or does it create new categories of complexity to manage? Tools that require extensive retraining, generate compliance concerns, or depend on infrastructure that agencies do not have will struggle. Tools that integrate cleanly into existing workflows and deliver measurable time savings will earn adoption and stick.
Justin Fulcher has pointed to specific areas where this test tends to yield positive results: document processing, data synthesis, routine compliance checking, and scheduling coordination. These are high-volume, time-consuming tasks where AI can reduce manual effort without requiring deep organizational change or raising significant accountability questions.
From RingMD to the Pentagon
Fulcher developed this framework not in theory but through two decades of building technology inside regulated environments. At RingMD, the telemedicine company he co-founded, the challenge was deploying healthcare technology in markets across Asia where infrastructure was unreliable and regulatory environments were demanding. The technology that earned adoption was the technology that reduced friction for providers and patients, not the technology with the longest feature list.
That same principle governed his approach at the Department of Defense. Working on acquisition reform and IT modernization, Fulcher contributed to initiatives that cut software procurement timelines from years to months. The reforms succeeded because they targeted specific operational bottlenecks rather than attempting wholesale redesign of how the department worked.
“The issue is not national decline; it’s institutional drag,” Justin Fulcher has written, arguing that core government systems continue to operate on processes designed for a different era. AI, applied with discipline and institutional awareness, offers a practical path to upgrading those systems. Whether that potential is realized depends on whether agencies prioritize durability over novelty when they choose what to deploy. Check out this page for related information.
Find more information about Justin Fulcher on https://x.com/JustinFulcher
