Advancing diplomacy through agentic AI

Challenge: State’s workforce, stationed at posts in more than 270 locations worldwide alongside staff from more than 40 partner federal agencies, relies on more than 450 separate technology systems that serve 80,000 users across the agency. Completing a routine task, such as checking a visa status or submitting a travel request, often requires navigating 15 or more of those applications. An officer preparing a routine cable, the formal messages State uses to send official information across the department, might pull data from one system, reformat it in another, log the request in a third and wait on a help desk ticket in a fourth. That sequence consumes valuable time before the diplomatic work even begins. A prior $18.2 million TMF investment brought generative AI tools to State’s networks, but employees still lack a way to connect the systems that stand between them and their work.

Approach: With TMF support, State is introducing agentic AI, technology that completes complex tasks involving several steps, adjusts as conditions change and stays under human oversight, to:

• Replace scattered help desk processes with one streamlined entry point
• Give foreign policy staff a tool that assists with research and scenario planning
• Establish a secure environment where trained employees can build their own automated agents

A person will review every automated decision and minimum risk management practices will be followed, as federal rules on oversight require.

State expects this investment to:

• Save help desk staff and policy teams more than 100,000 hours a year once the tools run across all the agency’s help desks
• Deliver an estimated value of nearly $15 million in time savings in the first year, rising to roughly $20 million the following year
• Give diplomats more time for the work that protects Americans and their interests abroad