We live in dread of the robot brains, haunted as we are by our exchanges with chatbots that are smarter than any actual person we’ve ever known. More perfect AI is likely to make obsolete jobs by the millions. (On the upside, that will include lots of dreary jobs that talented and ambitious people don’t want to do; I for one look forward to a day when AI can do the job of county board members.) And if AI systems can replace teachers and doctors they can certainly replace low to mid-level white-collar types that are the bedrock of Springfield’s government economy.
But will they? Not in Illinois, at least not any time soon. Our Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2018 was eager to reduce headcount and thus starve off members of public employee unions he decried. His doomed Medicaid Redetermination Project, which relied on AI’s predecessor, high-tech info systems, to add up two and two better than state employees, proved that those employees are harder to replace than he thought.
JB Pritzker’s people seem to be animated by a vision that is more do-able – to use advanced information technologies to serve the bureaucrats themselves. The experienced and conscientious career state worker will probably insist that he already knows how to do his job if the existing system would only let him. If robot brains are made available, their role ought to be to give him the means and autonomy to (quoting Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell) “do things that are obviously the right things to do.”
We will ignore for the moment whether the right things to do are all that obvious. AI’s effects on jobs also are not obvious. Just installing, training and shepherding these systems will create more jobs, at least for a while. And the more that AI agents act like people the less reliable they get, so line workers might end up acting a lot like middle managers whose job is to monitor the digital workforce.
Letting the machines do the dumb stuff so people do the smart stuff doesn’t mean just making work easier. It will change the work, which means that some workers will have to master new skills to do it, which will keep her viable in a changing workplace. Tasks will be replaced, but jobs won’t.
State employees are using AI chatbots now, via their desktops, each one devising their own AI system, in effect. This probably improves individual performance (the benefits of which accrue to the worker) but the larger goal of changing how work is done across whole divisions or departments requires that government’s right hand knows what its left is doing.
Doing that requires as many of your people as possible to use tools that are compatible with other parts of the system, human and digital. The Medicaid redetermination fiasco was a reminder to not install a complex system before it was tested. (The same mistake the voters made when they elected the unknown Bruce Rauner.) Also, state workers are just one part of a complex system and the system has to work with the workers just as workers must learn to work with the system.
Thus it was that last April the Pritzker administration formalized (rather than just permit) AI use by state workers if they got preapproval and if they did so using Microsoft Copilot. In effect, the state bureaucratized the means of un-bureaucratizing the bureaucracy.
When I read that, I was like, jeez Louise. For well over a century reformers have been trying to fix a state bureaucracy that was poorly trained, rule-bound and cautious. Civil service didn’t fix it. Unionization didn’t fix it., Bruce Rauner didn’t fix it. Is the fix for which Illinoisans have waited for decades really going to be… Microsoft?
This is depressing in its way, but it is not nuts. Copilot was designed to work in the Microsoft 365 environments that every state worker knows as well as they know the way to the snack room. And if you are in charge of making a department like, say, Health and Human Services work, you don’t want cutting edge. You want reliability and learnability.
In short, the Pritzker people have resisted the temptation to which so many panicky corporate types have fallen prey to when they rushed to adopt AI systems and agents before there is a proven use for them. They are also being prudent to rely on off-the-shelf systems; Copilot will be more or less useful according to the imagination with which it will be used. The result will not be a revolution, only improvements at the margins, but that’s fine. Until the new age dawns when robot brains make government and — more likely — humans unnecessary, not doing the wrong thing is a successful policy.
James Krohe has written often about Illinois state government for IT and other publications. Like writing about Lincoln, it is something a Springfield journalist is expected to do, even if he has nothing new to say.
This article appears in September 17-23, 2026.
