Axios Publisher Nicholas Johnston sat down with Ron Ash, Accenture Federal Services CEO, and Mike Gallagher, former U.S. Congressman and Palantir Technologies' Head of Defense. The conversation unpacked how the federal government can move faster to adopt AI to solve their problems — and why the human element may be the key to unlocking AI's full potential.

First things first: We just heard how important AI is. Give us a sense of the stakes here, and how important it is for AI and government.

Gallagher:

There's a geopolitical lens, political lens and a personal lens on it.

• The geopolitical is most obvious. We're in the early stages of a new Cold War.
• We have to reckon with the debt crisis that we find ourselves in. You just can't continue to spend this much money and spend more on servicing the interest on the debt than you're spending on defense without there eventually being. One way to transcend that sort of iron triangle is to leverage cutting-edge technology and AI to deliver better services, lower costs without compromising quality and coverage, particularly in a healthcare context.
• On a personal level, maybe all the problems we face in America are downstream from this one big problem, which is a collapse in trust in government.

Ash: I look at it as an existential opportunity. We don't have a choice but to support the mission that our government has. We are ready and we have partners that can allow us to support that. We need to accept the opportunity in front of us to give our country, nation and warfighters what they need to deliver on the mission that they have.

Next steps: How do you capitalize on that opportunity? How do you empower federal leaders to move?

Ash: We have to show them.

• Just a couple weeks ago, we had 120 people at our Forge with Palantir and Accenture showing them how technology can completely transform an agency.
• We need to move from pilots to actual enterprise-wide implementations and help the government find ways to procure complete reinventions versus spot solutions. The hardest thing is fixing government forever--it requires procurement policy all the way down to buying single solutions with single integrators and holding them accountable for results.

Gallagher: At the end of the day, it all comes down to human relationships.

• Ultimately, why does it seem like the Accenture-Palantir partnership is poised to be real and take off? It's because I would say you and I developed an actual mutual respect and trust over many months.
• The congressional version of that is I always felt the companies I could trust the most were the ones where, at all levels of the organization, they were willing to engage with me without fear. A lot of times, sitting between the CEO of a company and an elected member of Congress, House, or Senate lies an army of handlers.

Okay, but: We can't have a conversation with the federal government without talking about inertia. How do you fight against that?

Gallagher: You just have to know everybody in the building and track down whose responsibility it is to make the decision and be willing to go bottom up to top down.

• Most people in Congress are patriotic, they want to serve their country — they're smart and talented. They then find themselves thrust into a process that's pretty difficult to get anything done. By and large, they are hungry for wins and action, and if you can develop relationships and offer them ideas, then you can call on them for help.

Ash: It all comes down to every human that we interact with needs to understand what they're getting out of the relationship. It's super important that we're able to let them see the value of everything we're doing. The beauty of Palantir and our partnership is we can do that in days, literally. All our government agencies are used to taking years or decades—and now we can do that over the weekend or a month or six months.

• Look, we are willing to go to any agency and say pay us based on the value we deliver. Let me show you the savings and then pay us. That's where the government needs to go.

Worth a mention: We've been talking about how great AI is for the government and for America. How do you use it in your own life?

Ash: I built an AI advisory board on ChatGPT where I have six advisors, Satya Nadella, Jensen Huang, Steve Jobs, a couple others. Now I'm asking questions of that and pulling in their perspectives, and they have differing views from where they're at. I added an orchestrator agent that's summarizing and pulling together their answers. It's been super powerful. It's early days, but I'm really into it.

Gallagher: My only life hack is I have this discipline that I started in the Marine Corps that I've continued to this day, which is the first hour of my day I devote to undistracted writing, because I did a lot of writing in Congress. I asked the Palantir engineers how I could leverage technology for something that I fundamentally view as an analog thing. They built a Palantir AI tool that does deep research that I prompt right before I go to bed. I then filter it through a library that's built on everything I've written over the last 15 years, and it uses the research to rewrite something in my voice. And then, I rewrite and write based on that prompt.

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