Suzette Kent, the fourth federal Chief Information Officer, joins Kristen Pearson to talk about delivering in government in 2026. Her argument is that the speed of technology change now forces technology, security, policy, and people onto the field at the same time, and that the hardest part is redesigning the workflow rather than deploying the tool. She cites a federal survey where 91% of IT leaders said workflow change was the hardest part, and returns to a number that has not moved: under $500 per person spent on reskilling. Audience questions cover government-owned data centers and how to move compliance from a periodic manual checklist to something that runs continuously.

Suzette Kent:

I like the rabbit.

Kristen Pearson:

Hello everyone. I'm Kristen Pearson, Rise8's Vice President of Customer Success, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be here today with Ms. Suzette Kent. Before we get into it, although I have to say Josh left big shoes to fill, we don't have any pumping bunny stories, but let's see what we can do. Before we get into our section today, I just wanted to note that we are aiming to have time for Q&A at the end. So if anything pops into your head as we're talking, hold onto that thought and you might have a chance to ask Suzette directly before we wrap up here. So we have so much to cover today, but Suzette, you have such a fascinating background. I was hoping that you would be able to share some of the highlights with us.

Suzette Kent:

Yeah. Well, and first of all, thank you all for being here. It's an exciting time and we've heard that from lots of different speakers. It's especially exciting... I think about my own history. I started as a consultant at Accenture working across multiple industries, had the chance to build lots of really interesting things. Spent some time then at JP Morgan with a pretty exciting leader who wanted to do things that had never been done before. So building products, expanding globally, working in new countries, leading the US's largest financial institution through some pretty perilous waters. I am a military spouse, a Special Operations spouse, so that also means I am a problem solver at home as well. And working around the globe, both as a consultant, a builder, a technology deployer at scale led to a really interesting opportunity to serve as the fourth federal chief information officer for the United States.

And that's a really interesting phone call to get when you're working in industry doing lots of things to be asked to serve. So as a civilian, that was a really different thing and it was an interesting time. My job was to update, when I came into federal government, update technology policy that in many cases hadn't been touched between eight to 10 years. To update the federal cyber strategy that hadn't been updated in a decade in partnership with many others, but the federal component of that to create a federal data strategy, we'd never had one before, that was preparing us for this moment. And that's just a little bit of the history of all those things are about problem solving and using technology to serve mission better, whether it's in public sector or private sector. And I am so excited about the time and our discussion today.

And Josh kind of set us up really well because he talked a lot about the speed, the speed of the implementation in the Department of War, and that's a core part of what we're going to talk about today. So thanks for the opportunity to talk to you today and hopefully we'll have time for questions.

Kristen Pearson:

Yes. Well, we're clearly in good hands with a former federal CIO, I feel like, to tackle our very simple topic of delivering in government, the reality in 2026. So... simple topic. Obviously that can include an awful lot of progress that's happened, but it also can include a lot of challenges that still exist today. So with that lead in, Suzette, where would you like to focus our time today?

Suzette Kent:

Yeah, well, you're going to hear lots of different perspectives today. And it was funny as we started last night and as I sat in the audience and listened to the speakers today, some of what I want to talk about is part of the themes that you've heard. What we're doing is you always hear, "Oh, it's unprecedented times, unprecedented times. This is truly unprecedented times." But I want to talk today about speed and the fact that the speed at which the technology is changing is so significantly different. We have to come at how we do this differently. And I joked as federal CIO, very often, a big part of my job, not the fun part, was going to Congress and asking for funding for certain things and explaining big, hairy technology things that we were doing to people who probably didn't want to hear any technology words or had no background.

So I use analogies a lot. Often they were military analogies, sometimes they were music or home remodeling or sports. And this is the analogy that I will use because of the speed at which we are operating to deliver mission outcomes, what this is about, shipping outcomes, you have to have all the players on the field at the same time. What is different now in government is that means the technology, we have to have security, we have to have policy, and we have to have people not only embedded in how we deploy AI, but changing the entire workflow. I was sharing before, when we were planning for this, a study across the federal government just came out on Monday of this week, surveyed a thousand IT leaders. 91% of them said the thing that was the hardest was changing the workflow in the right way to make use of the powerful tools that they had.

And whether that was bringing models into current activities that were happening or actually deploying agents, the hardest thing was to move at speed to get the whole team on the field. And so I want to pick apart some of the things also, it's great that we're following Josh because many, and you see these names around the room, many of the technology providers, the technology's ready to go. The technology's ready to be on the field, but we have to have the team that knows what to do with it in the right way. And those are different kinds of discussions and that, especially in many of our government spaces that have very defined protocols and disciplines, my acquisition people are over here, my mission people are over here, my technology people are here. If we don't connect those in a much more robust, continuous way, we will be very slow and we won't hit the kind of speed that we talked about in deploying what we have and getting the whole power of what we can bring to bear for mission.

Kristen Pearson:

Yeah, great points. And I had to laugh when the obvious analogy to go with as we're in Nashville is a music analogy, but when you said, "I want to talk about a football analogy," I know you went to LSU and when I was stationed in Louisiana, I got to know some LSU people and I was like, "Is this just an elaborate place so that you can talk about your favorite football teams on stage here?" So I love the football analogy and we had kind of talked about the technology is ready. It's kind of like the football is laying there, but I really like how you talk about the people come first. In my role, I'm privileged to get to work with all of our customers. And at the end of the day, we talk about technology and the challenges and the decisions to make, but they always come back to where are the people in the loop?

And so in your experience, anything else you'd want to talk about, really talking about the people as the foundational part of the team that you bring onto the field. How in the past have you gotten people aligned in order to make the organization move forward?

Suzette Kent:

Yeah. I'm going to answer kind of two pieces. One in the past, and then we're going to talk about one in the present. One of the things when I served as federal CIO, we had significant open positions across cybersecurity, 8,000 at that point in time. I think the numbers are actually higher now. And one of the discussions, there's been this ongoing debate. Some of you in this room may have been involved in it, you may have lived it, where our discussion was, can you re-skill? How do you re-skill? How quickly can you do that? And can we turn around and deploy people? Can we take people who are already doing something else and know something about mission, know something about the business of what is going on, give them the skills and then redeploy them. A thing that was astounding to me coming in from private sector, in most cases, the federal government spent less than $500 per person in the technology space on any type of re-skilling and upskilling.

If we think about that right now, we can't do what we have to do if we are not re-skilling not only the technology workforce, but all of the people that we talked about being involved. And in that particular case, we were actually able to successfully demonstrate that concurrently while working, people who knew mission could learn to be cyber defense analysts and we can turn around and redeploy them. That was an example in the past. Ramp that up a thousand times now when we are talking about AI, and especially at this point in time, the balance between it is not just a technology set of skills. It is a significant risk approach, understanding where the risks are. It takes knowledge about data, appropriate use of data, access to data. It takes different insights to service providers and partners that you're working with. That workflow thing that I already talked about, that is the combination of, I'll say both mission and operations.

How do I do my job? How does this person do the job? How does the entire thing work? That has to go together for us to be able to bring AI capability inside any piece of mission. So the people part, ensuring not only are at the table, you've heard human in the loop a couple of times, as we begin to adopt certain aspects of what AI can do, it has to have oversight. We have to develop new policies. It makes me a little bit crazy when people say, "You know what we need to do? We need to stop and we need to study it." We can't do that. That's not something that we can do. And no one knows that better than those who serve the warfighters. So the people aspect is different now than it has ever been. And so everything that we are doing has to include... what are we learning?

What are we learning? Who are we teaching? How are we bringing people along so that they can, whether they're deploying the technology, whether they are using it or whether they're giving feedback to improve it, the people and the involvement of the people is different now than it has ever been. And I think we have a challenge across all of government in how we invest in the incumbent workforce and how partners are engaged. I sat in the budget rooms way too many times where I saw that training component. We're trying to get to a lower number. I saw that investment fall off. Or somebody did a thing. They were talking about doing a thing. Someone did the thing and then they went away. And the workforce that now had this new thing did not know how to sustain it and to continue to get that value out that they were supposed to receive from that particular capability.

So the stakes are higher now than they've ever been.

Kristen Pearson:

And yet the budget is staying at 500 bucks a person for training and enablement. I think so many points of what you just said probably resonates a lot with folks in this room. When we were talking previously, I really liked how you'd said the whole conversation is around AI. Is it driving more jobs or is it driving less jobs? And yet that's not really even the question. It's well, of the people that exist, how do we make sure that they are ready to face this future? And I think there's an example even just with Prodacity that's pretty relevant. We had a lot of challenges this year getting attendance, even in the same way we have in the past between training budgets, organizational decisions, the travel restrictions. And at the very last minute, just because we had such demand, but folks were not able to be here in the room and so we ended up opening a virtual option and the registrations picked up right away.

And so the interest is there, the interest and the desire to learn, it's just our organizational structure isn't really set up to allow for that right now. And so that training enablement is so...more important than ever.

Suzette Kent:

Well, what's so interesting, again, this is not like some of the traditional, I'll say at scale technology. When you think about big platforms and some of those types of things in the past, it was hardwired into a certain environment and you could only kind of touch that at work, in secure environments. And you only had all those assets in a closed environment. Well, every one of you could go home right now and use an AI tool. You've heard many of the speakers already say, "Oh, I'm teaching myself. I'm doing this thing. I'm applying it in this way." The opportunity to learn is also very, very different. I was working with a particular technology team and a client. Their entire challenge was identifying where AI was now shadow IT. How many out there are like fear, especially in information leakage or mission space. But that was their challenge because we were at a point in time where it's ubiquitous across different parts of our lives.

So again, when we get down to what are we doing with mission, the opportunity to learn is everywhere. The opportunity to apply it and to do something important, impactful, especially in government spaces, has to be more well defined, a little bit more structured, and it has to move at the speed of the technology.

Kristen Pearson:

Yeah. Great points. We're kind of talking around the explicit topic of policy. So let's get into policy and the analogy. I'm guessing that folks in this room, so many dutiful government servants probably mostly feel buried by policy, but policy can actually help innovation, can help move us forward. So any examples from your past where you've seen where the policy needs to evolve and can actually really, really be helpful in advancing the ball down the field?

Suzette Kent:

Yeah, advancing the ball down the field. Right. The policy is the playbook. When we say words like guardrails, when we say words like risk assessments, when we talk about what does good look like, that's actually where our entire federal government started on this journey was some of the first things around AI was defining what good looks like and how would use of a powerful technology reflect American values. So there are concepts of north stars that are out there, but the policy now where we are today has not moved as fast. The technology is ahead of the policy. And if there's anyone in this room who doesn't feel like that, I'd love to talk to you afterwards and dig into that a little bit more. But where we are, and the reason I think there's fear is because we have not defined exactly how in many cases we manage risk, how we understand and use data.

And we're seeing lots of interesting places where we have opportunity to better refine identity and access and what those protocols mean. Nowhere better than the military understands information classification. And some of the things that you've seen in the media recently that are creating fear is where those guardrails were not appropriately established. And it's more than cyber, right? It's not just inappropriate access. It's that we didn't define the rules for access or in some cases we didn't think about what could happen.

Just in the last month, there've been multiple things that have been in public media, whether it was an agent gone wild or gone rogue or a particular high profile hack that actually wasn't a hack. It was an agent that got access to libraries because they were not appropriately closed off out of a test environment. We have to rethink the policy, not just around what we use it for, but deeper into the how. From a risk management framework, not like some of the... you know, in the past, some of the rules were, I'll say a little bit harder wired to the exact technology itself. We have to think about risk protocols and the what if, and we have to marry that with appropriate use of data and oversight of that data as we were preparing. I was sharing another piece of work that was going on with the USDA around food scarcity and improving the data that we use to understand if federal programs were working and then to bring in other information to predict areas where we may have risks.

So if anybody has insomnia at night, the article's in nature, but because we were using AI for certain things, we accepted the responsibility that continuing to improve the quality of that data and protect the data and ensure that that data was not manipulated, ensuring the longevity, all those things came with the responsibility of using and deploying AI. So for us to trust the outcomes, we had to believe in all the ingredients. We had to believe in the playbook. We had to believe in the players that were on the field. And to use that sports analogy, we all had to be heading towards the same goal. So again, faster, but a bigger team on the field and they all have to be there. They all have to be there or we're not necessarily delivering trusted outcomes.

Kristen Pearson:

Yeah. And to that point, I think that can get us into. So we have the people, we have the policy, we have the technology, and then there's also the speed component. And so as we're hurling down this field, it feels like faster than ever. It also feels like the stakes are pretty darn high, right? So anything you want to elaborate on, on just the imperative of speed these days and how do we navigate that?

Suzette Kent:

Yeah. Again, we use the analogy of playbooks and transparency. Transparency is a very, I'll say federal civilian word around a lot of things. It's different when you're talking about the intelligence community and Department of War, or even our research areas, some of our energy areas that have currently been under attack, whether you say water or our power grid. But as we think about deploying at speed, we are rebuilding the engine and our overall approach. So many of the people in this room, and what I mean by that is we're not just changing things for a project. We're not just doing something cool for one project. We're changing the overall approach that we use to deploy outcomes and services to the American people. So as we go through these learnings, it is also our responsibility to ensure that we're creating something that's sustainable. Getting a Hail Mary pass and scoring once is not sufficient.

Knowing how to do that repeatably and paying it forward for who is coming afterwards, identifying areas where we need new sets of skills and fighting to change those job profiles. I'm not joking when I was federal CIO, we did not have a job title for a data scientist inside the federal government. Doesn't that sound kind of astounding? That was just a few years ago.

Kristen Pearson:

I was going to say,

This wasn't like 40 years ago? Wow.

Suzette Kent:

We had a law that passed that said there has to be a chief data officer at agencies and we didn't have a formal, whether you call it LCAT job role, whatever. We had no job profiles.

We had to do better, right? We have to do better about identifying what people we need, what those skills are and how we begin to move at speed. That is not just the employees inside the federal government, that is the vendor partners that we work with. Taking that opportunity to say, "Wait, how are you getting this done? How are you approaching this? How can we bring those protocols in and make that the way that we approach doing work going forward and demonstrate the speed?" Again, I'm going back to the points, full disclosure, lucky to work with Josh and team on lots of things. What we are learning to be able to continue to deploy and move at scale has to come into not only the mission area, but the vendor partners and the rest of the ecosystem so that we can continue to move that quickly.

Kristen Pearson:

Yeah. And that's pulling in what Shannon had talked about earlier as well. So we're definitely getting a theme here. Okay. I'm looking at the clock. We have about 10 minutes left. So if folks do have questions, I think we should have time. We do have folks with microphones, so just raise your hand. But just to tie it together before we do jump into Q&A, and I know Suzette has stories for days, so I kind of want to be like, "Okay, give us more examples," but let's see if there's any particular interest in the crowd today. But just to wrap it up, so we talked about the people, the policy, the technology, and finally the speed. And you had framed it in a good way. You had talked about DevSecOps, policy talent. Right.

Suzette Kent:

Yeah, keep adding. We're adding more, not less, and it becomes more important.

Kristen Pearson:

Yeah. I love how you kind of laid that out in that sort of framework, because this isn't just Suzette's own analogy that's related. It definitely ties in with the language we have been using. It was less than a decade ago, I think, where the big debate was, do we squeeze Sec in the middle with Dev and Ops? How crazy. Now we've just moved so far past that simplicity and now we're just... it is not getting simpler. We are just continuing to add the complexity. And in this community that we're building here, we need to be the ones thinking about how do we influence the policy? How do we navigate in this new age?

Suzette Kent:

Right. And very often I would interact with folks say, "Well, that's not my space. It is your space now. It is your space." I'll use one kind of hard example while maybe if anybody has questions to ask. We were also talking about what is going on right now with many agencies, like specifically one of the examples as we are learning more about the capabilities of certain large language models and applying that to mission, what we are learning is that some are better for some things versus other things. And that is an ongoing fluid. Every time a new release comes out, there's new pros and cons. So many of the agencies, the way that they were bringing in certain tools was very specific and required the whole new ATO process or approval process. It felt like a new product, needs to not feel like a new product.

So the conversations have been about re-architecting the backend so that I can pull multiple models, different models in and out as they fit for purpose for the particular thing that I'm trying to do. But when I do that, I have to move the policy to a different place. I have to change people's jobs for how that is approved. I have to change where people are in the loop for oversight and that changes the job that they do every single day. And that's something that's going on at many of the agencies right now. That gives me a lot of the hope and it's the right thing. We just have to keep doing it faster. all right. We have a brave question.

Kristen Pearson:

all right. We'll bring the mic to you and hopefully everyone can hear. Otherwise, we'll repeat the question.

Audience Member:

Hi. I was wondering if the government planned to own more data centers in the next 10, 15 years or if it's part of what the government would like to do instead of commercial.

Suzette Kent:

Okay. You may have to repeat the question because it was...

Kristen Pearson:

I think the question is does the government plan to own more data centers themselves in the next 10 to 15 years? Yes.

Suzette Kent:

I would have to have a crystal ball to answer that question. I do know that.. I will... If we think about our history and we think about the history of use of technology inside the federal government, and it's kind of crazy when I looked myself at the history of legislation and I said I was the fourth federal CIO. Isn't that kind of crazy? Like four. The amount of time where technology has had a specific focus in place and legislation has only been short in the terms of our history. We grew up with a physical protection concept and in many cases there are people who are making policy decisions who protected the fortress in those ways. And those are the protocols that they're comfortable with. We could have late night cocktail debates many times about how we protect information and data. Different decisions are going to be made based on mission.

And I had the joy of testifying to Congress many times. One of the biggest debates that I had with a certain set of congressmen and women was about how we actually count federal data center, what data, where we have on-prem and use of cloud. So the only answer that I can give is I hope that the decision will continue to be made based on what's appropriate for the mission.

Kristen Pearson:

Thanks Suzette. Looks like another question in the back. And by the way, I have to say the fact that you're talking about outcomes, you're talking about focusing on the mission, thank you for being here. It's so great to have your perspective. all right, what's our question?

Audience Member:

Hello. Thank you. In the policy conversation, much of the compliance activities in the space are currently manual. As we transition to things that are more automated and there's going to be inherent just changes that companies, people, all of the people who contribute to the manual processes of today, as we transition to that more automated future, how do you have a healthy conversation in the policy change space to be able to reflect some of that churn and change and uncertainty while also trying to accomplish the goals that we're looking to accomplish and recognizing that's going to have severe impacts to potentially people, companies as they adapt to that change as well?

Suzette Kent:

That's a great question. And one thing I didn't say, I actually work across government financial services and the energy sector. So I see this compliance thing in lots of different ways. The purpose of the compliance discussion is to make sure that we're getting things right. Those may look how they operate in different environments may look a little bit different. Compliance as a checklist is not generally helpful to the mission. Compliance as an examination process of are we getting this right, is. Again, I get excited about the advance of technology because instead of somebody coming in once or twice a year and looking at something that I'm doing and saying, "Are you meeting this?" I can take those same rules and apply them every day. I can apply them every minute. I can understand where I'm doing something that's not meeting policy or I have a gap in policy and escalate that now using the technology tools that are available.

Sometimes when I'm looking at those are in compliance organizations, they need new tools too. And think about across some of those industries I mentioned, our concept of compliance is periodic and as you said, manual. If it were not periodic and manual, we might have done... Because it's manual, maybe it's like 10% sample set or 30% to be statistically relevant sample set. Why not all of it? Why not all of it? So when I look at the role of individuals who are in compliance functions, I hope for them, the great tools that the mission teams have and that they are actually acting as a support to getting it right and not a nuisance and a drag because they're looking at stuff that happened in the past. So I hope that you had a couple of other things in there, but I hope that answered what you wanted.

Kristen Pearson:

all right. Well, I appreciate y'all asking questions. We are just about at time. I do want to keep us moving on. So Suzette, I'll just give you the last word. Is there any final thoughts that you would want to wrap up with?

Suzette Kent:

Yeah. The final thoughts again, thank you for being here. Because you are here, you're making a statement that you want to learn, you want to understand not only what others are doing, but how to do it better. That also means you're in the room where these discussions are going on. So I always like to leave with the challenge and asking that question of what can you do better? You have to have the whole team on the field. If you're driving a mission outcome and you're missing some players, you have the opportunity to get them on the field. And when you learn something that whether you got it outstandingly right, whether it was wrong, take that and build that into what happens next because we are learning and moving at a pace that we've never seen before and we're only going to get it right if the whole team is contributing.

So thanks for listening and thank you very much.

Kristen Pearson:

Yeah. Thank you so much, Suzette. I'm very excited. We'll see what the talk is next year. Delivering in government the reality in 2027. All bets are off for how fast we will have gone in the next year and what the conversation will be then.

Suzette Kent:

I look forward to it.

Kristen Pearson:

But thank you all for joining us today, and I think we have lunch coming up next after a quick dispatch stage. So thank you for your attention and thank you so much, Suzette. We really appreciate you.

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