Pavan Pidugu stepped down as chief information officer of the Transportation Department on Sept. 4, ending a 19-month tenure that began with a February 2025 swearing-in.
When Pidugu took the helm, the agency ran more than a dozen distinct grant-management systems, fewer than 10% of its roughly 50,000 staff regularly used artificial-intelligence tools, and it lacked a modern IT strategy.
By the time he left, the department was consolidating to a single grant platform under the GrantLens initiative, over 90% of employees routinely used AI-driven chatbots and coding assistants, and a full migration to Google Workspace had cut legacy costs sharply.
AI integration reshapes daily work
Transportation also launched DOTi, an agentic AI built on ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks, allowing staff to resolve hardware issues through Google Chat without contacting the help desk, streamlining support requests.
Advanced users tap additional models via the GSA’s USAi platform, such as Grok, expanding the department’s AI repertoire beyond the standard suite.
Cloud and platform consolidation
A memo from Secretary Sean Duffy that banned shadow IT gave Pidugu clear authority to centralize services, prompting the creation of a unified cloud-management framework dubbed T-Cloud.
T-Cloud coordinates workloads across Oracle, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft, letting the agency apply a single set of processes and automate many migration tasks.
The department’s cloud migration is already 40% complete and on track to reach roughly 90% of data moved by year-end, a move expected to retire aging data-center hardware and free up budget for other priorities.
In September 2025, Transportation signed a five-year contract worth up to $89 million to replace Microsoft’s suite with Google Workspace, achieving cost savings of about 70% after leveraging GSA’s OneGov discounts.
Parallel to the cloud effort, the 1DOT IT plan released in September outlines four strategic goals, eliminate technical debt, become customer-centric, build obsessive products, and grow talent, while dividing IT teams into digital factories and shared services.
At a May 2026 GITEC keynote, Pidugu warned, “While we are in this major transformational journey, there are lots of gaps, and our people, our processes need to change.”
Pidugu noted, “You are using the AI agent to do 10, 15 different jobs, jobs that would take time.”
Accelerating software development
Specifically, the agency uses Nexgile Nx IDE and NetImpact Strategies’ AI-Forge. These tools can reduce the software development life cycle from 18 months to 18 weeks, or even shorter periods.
