24 Federal IT Influencers Worth Following in 2025

Adam Meyers is the senior vice president and head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. Having spent more than 20 years in the security space, he conducts trainings on threat intelligence, reverse engineering and data breach investigations. Meyers has warned social engineering attacks and China’s cyberactivity are on the rise, so agencies need to invest in endpoint detection and response tools and then focus on securing identities and establishing cross-domain visibility.

Lt. Artem Sherbinin is CTO of Task Force Hopper, the Naval Surface Forces Command’s digital innovation team, having cofounded its data analytics and AI development team. The Navy isn’t “buying AI,” he says, but rather operational outcomes, and it needs to be smarter about the commercial off-the-shelf AI it procures for sailors, thinking about speed and how capabilities will be used.

Barry Tanner, deputy CIO of the Navy, specializes in cloud computing, DevSecOps and network defense. One of his priorities is pivoting the service from a compliance mindset to one of cyber readiness by managing the capability as a shared portfolio across programs. The first step, he says, is understanding the roles, processes, data and systems that cyber operators need.

Daniel Chenok is executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, where he oversees connecting research to practice for the public sector’s benefit. He’s also knowledgeable in cybersecurity, privacy, budgeting and acquisition. Chenok recommends that agencies rife with legacy technologies introduce AI carefully, workload by workload, to avoid suboptimization, and that they work with vendors with robust cyber platforms around the technology.

David Shive has been the General Services Administration CIO since 2015 and makes a return appearance on this list for his involvement in the launch of USAi. The GSA initiative functions as a secure, generative AI evaluation suite that allows agencies to experiment with and adopt the technology at their own pace and at no cost. Shive thinks of USAi as infrastructure for the nation’s AI future and considers it essential to delivering better government services.

Hansang Bae, public sector CTO at Zscaler, is an outspoken critic of AI training itself on the growing volume of AI-generated online content, which perpetuates the generation of common errors over time (such as images with six-fingered hands). He recommends creating a tagging taxonomy that differentiates organic, human-generated data from AI-generated data and suggests the government use that exclusively for training.

Jason Payne has spent eight years at Microsoft, most recently as federal CTO, and specializes in government transformation, including with AI. Payne wants more agencies to embrace collaboration platforms that allow employees to work both internally with their teams and externally with citizens.

Jill Reilly is acting chief innovation officer at the National Archives and Records Administration and is a key player in the effort to digitize as many of its 13 billion paper documents as possible. Under her leadership, the agency has begun using AI to power intelligent document processing and create structured, actionable data. NARA uses Amazon Textract and had about 390 million digital objects in the catalog as of June. Reilly’s ambitious goal is to have 500 million digitized pages by October 2026.

Jonathan Alboum is federal CTO at ServiceNow and a former CIO of the Department of Agriculture. He returns to this list for his work helping agencies cut costs and boost services through digital transformation, increasingly leveraging AI. ServiceNow uses AI agents internally to save hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and plans to build more and incorporate them into its Government Community Cloud.

Joseph Welch is deputy to the commanding general of Army Futures Command and works to instill a general understanding of AI across the service through the Army Intelligence Integration Center and Army Software Factory. He wants to see the AI knowledge these units provide specialized for certain Army echelons and ultimately imparted down to rifle squads, where soldiers will be able to experiment with next-generation data platforms in the field for real-time intelligence.

Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, spent time at several investment firms that specialize in restructurings, corporate turnarounds and governance. His appointment aligned with the Trump administration’s emphasis on government efficiency, and he’s had a hand in the GSA’s OneGov agreements with major tech providers — simplifying agencies’ access to emerging capabilities such as AI while saving taxpayer dollars. Gruenbaum believes widespread access to advanced AI models is key to the U.S. winning the global tech race.

Judith Conklin is the CIO of the Library of Congress and oversees the safe storage of its 175-petabyte digital collection of historic materials. Accessing adequate storage for the library’s growing collection remains a challenge, which is why it is switching to a new IT solution: the Library Collections Access Platform. LCAP enables better search and discovery of collections and is being rolled out to users this year.

Lakshmi Raman is director of AI innovation at the CIA. Under her tenure, the agency is exploring how human-machine teaming can improve its security and is hiring analysts who are familiar with and curious about AI. Raman has also expressed interest in leveraging agentic AI, as long as it’s not a black box.

Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett is the head of Army Cyber Command, which is collecting data from the service’s network to serve as “ammunition” for about a dozen AI pilots to make insights more actionable. Among them are GHOSTCREW, a tool supplying red team operatives with AI simulations to inform their decision-making; and Panoptic Junction, an AI-driven, continuous monitoring platform with an 87% success rate at detecting malicious activity. Long term, Barrett wants the Army to use AI to build code libraries and for autonomous defensive cyber operations.

Mike Witzman has 25 years under his belt at Cisco, where he is currently the vice president of solutions engineering for the U.S. public sector, focused on challenges facing government agencies. He recently praised FedRAMP 20x for returning the program to its roots, enabling agencies to adopt cloud services faster and more securely. Witzman also helps agencies target their cyber investments, recommending they focus on the basics of zero-trust security while also implementing automation and AI to respond to increasingly sophisticated attacks at scale.

Mitchell Thornbrugh, CIO at the Indian Health Service, makes a return to this list for his leadership in deploying Patients at the Heart, the government’s first cloud-based electronic health record. A PATH EHR pilot with Oracle Health is slated at the Lawton Indian Hospital in Oklahoma in the summer of 2026, and Thornbrugh says it will “chisel away at the disparities” in healthcare outcomes that American Indians experience.

Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton is commanding general of the Defense Department’s Cyber Defense Command, which is close to being able to provide secure, real-time decision support to allied soldiers in a warfight. A Mission Partner Environments proof of concept supported by zero-trust security was successfully demonstrated at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in July.

Paula Starr is the CIO of the Cherokee Nation, which is working to take advantage of AI while protecting its data sovereignty and cultural values. That led to the creation of an AI governance committee and the development of a Microsoft Copilot–based legal agent for navigating the complexities of tribal law.

Sam Navarro is the strategic account executive for health IT at Microsoft and former director of client experiences at Technology Transformation Services. He’s skilled at delivering innovative technology solutions to complex IT landscapes and understands how agencies struggle to scope industry AI use cases into easily adopted contracts. His advice: Start with a small AI use case, such as a cloud solution with an AI tool, and see what works. It’s also important, he says, for agencies to assemble a “second team” of trusted industry and academic AI experts for advice on how to proceed with a solution.

Scott Stephens is the chief solutions architect at Sandia National Laboratories, specializing in requirements analysis, enterprise software and network security. Under Stephens, SNL transitioned from traditional, on-premises identity management systems to cloud management and began leveraging conditional access — a more holistic approach to zero-trust security that makes compliance easier for agencies because controls and capabilities are inherited.

Stephen Schmidt is chief security officer at Amazon, and one need only look at the company’s success in applying AI to its application security review process to understand his impact. Amazon trained its large language models on prior security reviews conducted by senior engineers to increase overall organizational security. Schmidt also has the company addressing the cyber talent gap by having AI use incident response tooling previously operated by employees — improving job satisfaction in the process.

Susan Davenport is the chief data and AI officer for the Air Force. She’s involved not only in the development of an AI Center of Excellence — which will shift the service’s posture from readiness to competitiveness in the space — but also in the creation of both an AI policy directive and AI risk management manual, the latter expected in early 2026.

Travis Rosiek is public sector CTO at Rubrik, a security and AI operations company, where he advises agencies on modernizing their data and adopting a zero-trust architecture to be more resilient. He warns that an increase in wiper attacks aimed at destroying agencies’ data and systems requires a move to backup and recovery systems based on zero-trust principles.

Vu Nguyen, CISO at the Department of Justice, has spent more than two decades in government cyber leadership roles. He oversees DOJ’s ongoing march to a zero-trust security architecture, which includes secure access service edge for a more proactive, continuous monitoring posture.