New AI center works to bridge government and AI industry

The Commerce Department’s new artificial intelligence outpost near Silicon Valley, set up to facilitate the export of American AI products abroad, is also working to build relationships between the AI industry and federal agencies.

In March, Commerce officially opened the National AI Center in San Francisco. The center was established under the International Trade Administration as part of the Trump administration’s 2025 AI Action Plan, which called on Commerce to create a program that would gather proposals from industry for “full-stack AI export packages.”

The center has now established an AI exports program that focuses on priority export licenses, government advocacy and access to federal financing.

Moksh Jawa, chief technology officer at the Commerce Department, said the center was set up intentionally near the heart of the U.S. AI industry to “best understand their needs, their trajectories, their plans, so that we could best support and partner with them to export American AI.”

Commerce released a call for proposals to participate in the American AI Exports Program consortia in April.

But in addition to the Commerce center’s outward focus on exports, officials there are also working to “make sure that the American government itself is leveraging American AI as significantly as possible,” Jawa said during a Thursday federal technology showcase hosted at the General Service Administration’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“Now we’re hyper focused on also enabling American AI companies to work directly with government,” Jawa said. “And by setting up an outpost in San Francisco, we want that to be kind of a top of funnel or evaluative office that can be used to enable those relationships.”

GSA has been at the center of the Trump administration’s efforts to use AI within government, through initiatives like the USAi test platform.

“Naturally, that brings us very quickly to GSA, which is our [U.S. government] expert in evaluating such technology in all things procurement,” Jawa continued. “And so we’re very excited to partner with GSA on spinning up some of that functionality out of the National AI Center.”

Agencies leaning into AI, automation

Jawa’s comments came at an event where officials from GSA and other agencies convened to share lessons on government-wide technology adoption, with a particular focus on AI and automation.

GSA Deputy Administrator Mike Lynch said his agency’s AI use rate is now above 70% of the workforce, compared to 10-15% at the start of the Trump administration. GSA has aggressively moved to automate its internal work, after losing nearly 40% of its workforce over the past 18 months.

“We’re at a really interesting inflection point,” Lynch said at the outset of the event. “What are the resources that are out there for other parts of the government that want to start embedding these technologies into their workflows.”

Adam Starr, the chief information officer at the Office of Personnel Management, said just giving employees access to cutting edge tools “is not enough” to ensure effective adoption.

“There are many barriers other than just tool access,” Starr said. “In order to drive adoption and help people really rethink their work and get the benefits that they can realize with this technology in freeing up time and delivering better services to our constituents.”

He said OPM has been highlighting use cases and giving bonuses “for people who innovate.” The agency has also set up an AI Catalyst Program to have its top engineers work with business units on “rethinking their work around technology,” Starr continued.

“Maybe it’s a connection to a new data source, but trying to drive down those barriers to tech adoption,” he added.

The Labor Department, which like GSA and OPM has lost a significant number of employees, is also leaning into using AI tools. Aung Htein, director of the directorate for mission support within the Labor CIO’s office, said at any given point, “thousands” of employees at his agency are using AI tools provided through GSA’s OneGov agreements.

“We really did a lot of user engagement and training,” Htein said. “And each of those sessions are joined by 300-400 folks, and that really ramped up the adoption rate, and of course grassroot promotion and campaigning and leadership support.”

At the Commerce Department, Jawa said officials are focused on developing relationships with vendors that account for the fast-evolving nature of AI products and services.

“A big part of AI deployments is the continuously improving nature, and that requires finding interesting ways to expose data from our internal systems that can be fed into their AI technologies in some cases to continuously improve,” he said. “The cutting-edge enterprises of today and in American industry are very much thinking about how can they continuously improve their AI deployments. And I think the [U.S. government] today is at a stage where it just wants to get those AI deployments as effectively as possible across missions. But in order to eventually turn those deployments into continuously improving ones, a lot of the foundation and stepping stones need to be set up today, as opposed to in a few months from today.”

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