When Justin Fulcher talks about AI in government, he doesn’t start with the technology. He starts with the operational problem that technology is supposed to solve. That sequence, he argues, is what separates implementations that take hold from ones that don’t.
Fulcher co-founded RingMD, a telemedicine company that served patients across Asia, before entering public service as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense. Both experiences gave him close exposure to how organizations adopt technology under pressure and under constraint. Those lessons inform his current thinking about AI in federal agencies.
Starting with Friction, Not Features
The argument Fulcher makes is deceptively simple. Government agencies are not slow because they lack access to good technology. They are slow because their underlying processes, data systems, and compliance requirements were designed for a different era. AI that addresses those root causes automating repetitive workflows, connecting siloed data, reducing the manual steps in compliance review can meaningfully improve how agencies function.
AI that ignores those root causes and simply layers new capabilities on top of old structures tends to add complexity rather than subtract it. Justin Fulcher has been clear that tools requiring extensive retraining or generating new compliance concerns will face serious resistance in government settings.
What the Defense Department Work Demonstrated
Fulcher’s time at the Department of Defense gave him the chance to test these ideas in practice. He worked on acquisition reform efforts that reduced software procurement timelines from years to months. That experience illustrated a key principle: technology adoption in regulated environments succeeds when it works with institutional constraints rather than against them.
For agencies now exploring AI applications, Justin Fulcher’s framework offers useful guidance. The question is not whether a tool is technically capable. The question is whether it reduces the friction that slows the agency’s core mission and whether it can be implemented in a way that holds up under real operating conditions over time. Read this article for additional information.
More about Justin Fulcher on https://www.crunchbase.com/person/justin-fulcher