N.C. government is still astonishingly low-tech
Two stories out of Raleigh suggest we may be further behind on basic technology than I realized.
I’ve spent my whole career in the private sector, and one thing I probably take for granted is how much freedom I’ve had to experiment.
Over the past few years, I’ve used AI tools, data, and basic automation to speed up my work in ways that would have sounded absurd not long ago. That may give me a skewed view of the real world.
It almost certainly gives me a skewed view of state government. Even so, North Carolina’s public sector might be even more low-tech than I realized.
To that point, two stories caught my eye last week.
The first was State Treasurer Brad Briner’s announcement that his department is rolling out artificial intelligence tools across the agency.
The office said a 12-week pilot using ChatGPT showed productivity gains of up to 10% in certain divisions, and now it is moving into broader training and implementation.
The use cases are the ones you’d expect: research, drafting, summarizing, plain-English rewrites, document comparison. I love to see it, but none of this exactly sounds cutting-edge in 2026.
The second was Attorney General Jeff Jackson’s testimony about Medicaid fraud.
Jackson told lawmakers that better data-mining technology could help the state catch more fraud. The division has done some of that work since 2017, but it has no positions dedicated solely to data mining.
As WRAL described it, he told lawmakers that only a few other states have started using this kind of technology for Medicaid fraud detection, and that he sees it as the way of the future. What he’s talking about is combing through billing data, spotting outliers, and identifying patterns.
Again, that’s great that he’s focused on it. But I guess I had it in my head that our state law enforcement was already doing this sort of work — not some Criminal Minds fantasy, exactly, but at least basic data analysis at scale.
I don’t say any of this to diminish what Briner or Jackson are doing. Far from it. Focusing on this stuff at all is a huge step forward. In government, where the temptation is always to preserve the process instead of improving it, even basic modernization takes real leadership.
What these stories suggest, though, is just how low the baseline may still be.
A while back, I read the book Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, who served as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. Her argument, in simple terms, is that government tech usually falls behind not because people are dumb or resources are lacking, but because bureaucracy rewards process and self-protection more than results.
That certainly fits with what I think I’m seeing here.
North Carolina does not seem to have a shortage of smart people in public office. What it may have is a shortage of urgency. Or maybe a system that makes urgency hard.
I’m not suggesting state government should go full “move fast and break things.” But I would like to see a bit more impatience. A bit more willingness to test tools, rethink workflows, and challenge the assumption that the current way of doing things is the safe way simply because it is the old way. To their credit, Briner and Jackson seem to understand that.
Because in a lot of cases, the bigger risk is not moving too fast. It is moving too slowly while the world changes around you.
At a premium
In the newspaper
Charlotte is making a huge bet on public transit just as CATS admits roughly half of riders aren’t paying fares. In my latest column, I argue that this is not mainly a revenue problem. It is a safety and order problem, and a city whose buses now rank among the most dangerous in the country cannot afford to treat fare enforcement as optional.
Read it free with gift link: No fares, no safety, no transit future for Charlotte
Question of the week
I love your optimism. Last week, 83% of you agreed that towns like Mayberry are still possible and are a worthy goal.
I’m a retired surgeon. It baffles me how blatant cases of Medicare and Medicaid fraud—clear outliers— are not immediately audited.
In 2023 an ENT surgeon, Anita Jackson, who practiced at my hospital, a 100-bed facility in a rural NC county, billed Medicare $46 million between 2014 and 2018 for a balloon sinus procedure. In fact she was the nation’s top biller for this procedure! In little Richmond County. When finally audited, they found fraudulent medical records used to justify unnecessary procedures. Worse yet, they found she was rewashing these single use disposable devices. They weren’t sterilized. 36 catheters were used on 1,555 patients!
You would think every year that clear outliers would be audited. No AI needed here. It would have saved these patients from being exposed to unnecessarily and dangerous, in this case, procedures.
She is currently serving 25 years in prison.
Spot on correct. This is why DOGE and Elon found so much thru simple data mining. This does not need to be gov employee staff, this needs to be delivered thru small incubator companies paid thru commission to find waste fraud and abuse