The State Department is undertaking a comprehensive modernization plan to streamline operations, advance artificial intelligence (AI) integration, and update core technology systems in 2026, the department’s chief information officer, Kelly Fletcher, said Thursday.
Speaking at a GDIT event in Washington, Fletcher said the strategy will center on consolidating commodity IT services, expanding agentic AI deployment, modernizing ID systems, and aligning classified networks with more advanced unclassified capabilities.
“We’re trying to consolidate and standardize and simplify around commodities,” Fletcher said. “If something is a commodity, let’s just make it simple and standard.”
The department’s efforts span end-user devices, help desks, and other enterprise services. Fletcher said the goal is to reduce administrative friction for State Department employees operating in 190 countries. “The more you can make it easy for people to do their job, to reduce administrative friction, the better off they’re going to be,” she said.
Key to that effort is the deployment of AI agents layered on top of legacy systems. Instead of immediately replacing every aging platform, Fletcher said the department plans to use AI tools to improve the user experience while prioritizing high-cost or low-resilience systems for replacement.
“My vision is that we’re going to slap AI agents on top of older systems to buy us some time,” Fletcher said. “We’re going to prioritize those systems that are … really expensive to maintain [and] lack resilience. We’re going to fix those first.”
Beyond AI, Fletcher identified consular application modernization as a 2026 priority. “We’re going to modernize the consular applications, so visas, passports. The underlying system needs [something] similar, and we’re going to tackle that this year,” she said.
Fletcher also pointed to disparities between the department’s classified and unclassified environments. While unclassified systems reflect more modern capabilities, she said the classified side has fallen behind.
“It became clear to me that our classified environment was not at parity with the unclassified environment,” Fletcher said. “The unclassified environment, we’re living in 2025 … the classified environment, we were living in, you know, 2014.”
Fletcher said the State Department is working to provide greater consistency across both environments, including better-aligned desktop experiences and application availability.