As co-chair of Gov. Phil Murphy’s AI Task Force, Rein helped deliver a report of recommendations in November 2024 concerning AI policies, strategies and data governance. His office and other agencies are also at work on a handful of AI-assisted tools for call centers, research and drafting applications, and he’s encouraging staff to learn how to use the technology. But Rein’s approach to AI, like any new technology, is not to push any particular tool or application, but to see how it might support other state offices.
“One of my priorities is making sure we provide efficient and flexible infrastructure to our agencies,” he said. “We have changed the Office of Information Technology to absolutely adopt — and I mean really embody — a services-first enterprise. Our only reason for being is serving those agencies. If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t exist.”
Yet for all the novel AI leadership, Rein said his proudest recent achievement might be getting the funding for, and beginning, a decidedly unflashy but long-delayed critical project: a yearslong upgrade of electrical infrastructure that serves all state agencies.
That prudent sensibility should serve the state well in the months to come.
“This is going to be a challenging budget year ...,” he said. “So we want to make sure that we’re leveraging our assets optimally, and anything that we do is done with sustainability in mind. We know we have to modernize a lot of these old systems and deliver better services, but let’s … make sure we’re not doing anything that’s going to be great for this one year, or the next two years, but then have challenges sustaining it in [later] years.”
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Government Technology magazine. Click here to view the full digital edition online.
