The Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Office of Information and Technology (OIT) is seeing significant productivity gains from artificial intelligence (AI) tools, with employees saving an average of eight hours per week on software development work, according to a senior VA official.
Speaking at IBM Think Gov 2026 on June 9, Richelle Gibson, deputy director of the VA’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, said the department is increasingly deploying AI and automation across its operations, including software development, benefits processing, and healthcare delivery.
“Our Office of Information Technology is using AI for development,” Gibson said. “It’s saving them, I think, they averaged eight hours a week they’re not spending on coding. They can work on other things. That’s huge for modernizing our agency to move forward to do more and more with it.”
Gibson said the productivity gains are part of a broader effort at VA to use AI and automation to improve services for veterans while helping employees focus on higher-value work.
“At the VA, we’re really leaning forward on AI and automation,” Gibson said. “I’d say it’s a layered approach.”
That approach includes improving data governance and quality, establishing AI policies, and increasing workforce literacy around automation and AI, she said.
“Within our different administrations … we’re looking at work streams to see where do we have massive volumes of repetitive tasks where we can deploy AI or automation to deliver benefits, whether they’re compensation or help to veterans and survivors faster,” Gibson said.
Those efforts are producing results in multiple areas, she said.
For instance, in the Veterans Benefits Administration, she said automated mail processing and AI-enabled data extraction have dramatically shortened processing timelines.
“Imagine you send in your claim information, it was sitting for months in a box, moving from regional office to regional office – now it’s in days,” Gibson said. “We make decisions on simple things within hours. That’s a massively different experience for veterans.”
AI and automation have also cut processing time significantly for pension claims for survivors of veterans, Gibson said.
“We’ve dropped the claim cycle by 100 days,” she said. “You submit a claim, and it takes, I think, we were averaging 160 days for veteran pension … Now we’re doing it under 60 days because of AI and automation.”
Within the Veterans Health Administration, Gibson said more than 9,000 providers are using an ambient scribe, which is an AI-powered note-taking technology for clinicians.
“It takes notes for them when they’re in with the veterans,” she said. “It lets them focus on our real customer, which is the veteran.”
However, Gibson cautioned that agencies looking to replicate those results should focus first on their underlying business processes.
“You can’t just overlay AI into any business and think it’s going to work,” she said. “Every AI project that we’ve worked on, we start with looking at the business process, and often we re-engineer it more so than we do the technology.”