The Office of Personnel Management is rolling out ChatGPT to its employees this week, its director told employees Tuesday.
“This is part of our broader effort to equip you with AI tools that help you work faster, think bigger, and collaborate better,” the agency’s director, Scott Kupor, told staff in an email shared with Nextgov/FCW by the agency.
Employees already can access Microsoft 365 Copilot chat, the email says, but now they’ll have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5, too.
“AI is a great assistant, but you’re still the expert. I know some of you are excited, some are curious, and some are wary. In the coming weeks, [the Office of the Chief Information Officer] will host brown bag sessions to help clarify and ensure you get the most out of these tools,” the email reads. “Let’s lead the way in using AI thoughtfully and effectively — starting now.”
Kupor, a longtime Silicon Valley executive who joined the Trump administration from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, told Nextgov/FCW in an interview Thursday that the government’s HR agency doesn’t currently use much AI.
“We’re barely doing anything,” Kupor said when asked about his favorite AI use case at OPM.
He hopes to change that.
“My goal is everybody should have it on their laptops, everybody should do the free trainings that are online and everybody should just play with it,” he said. “The fact that I don’t have to now, use my personal phone to go to ChatGPT, because my government computer doesn’t have it, you know, that’s a big upgrade.”
The “obvious” use case for the government’s HR agency moving forward is using AI in the regulatory processes for notice and comment, said Kupor.
“We’re not going to have an AI bot that will replace people,” he said. “But we do not need to hand read 40,000 comments that come in on a new rule that we’re proposing.”
Using AI to help employees make sense of their options in the Federal Health Benefits Program or to handle questions coming through the call center are other potential areas for AI investment, said Kupor, who stressed the pace of technological change.
“I don’t want to boil the ocean and say, ‘Let’s go build an AI strategy,’” he said. “I want us to actually do it from the bottoms up [sic], which is organization by organization, what matters most.”
In August, OpenAI signed a new agreement with the General Services Administration to offer ChatGPT Enterprise to federal agencies for $1 per agency for the next year as part of GSA’s ongoing OneGov push to centralize procurement and strike deals for discounts with technology companies. OPM has an enterprise agreement based on that OneGov partnership, according to a spokesperson.
OpenAI unveiled a government-specific version of its chatbot at the beginning of the year.
GSA also launched a centralized generative AI suite, called USAi, in August with models from Anthropic, Google and Meta, in addition to OpenAI. It’s meant to give federal agencies one place to learn about and evaluate AI models in a secure environment, and OPM is planning to enable access to USAi in the future, the spokesperson said.