Episode 4: People, Policy, and Privacy — with Nick Schutt
Most federal organizations aren’t ready for AI, and it’s not the reason you’d guess. Jack Moore talks with Nick Schutt, founder of Artemis Human Capital Management and host of Robots and Red Tape, about why disorganized data — not the AI tool itself — is the real blocker, why the people using the tool matter more than the tool, and why “the AI you use today is the worst it’s going to be for the rest of your life.”
Host
Jack Moore hosts Progress Over Perfection, Evans’ podcast for federal leaders navigating modernization, workforce change, and the realities of moving programs forward without perfect information.
Guest
Nick Schutt is a serial entrepreneur with a track record spanning government contracting, events, operational technology, and technology innovation. He’s the founder and president of Artemis Human Capital Management and hosts the Robots and Red Tape podcast, where he’s spent over two years talking with AI practitioners about what’s real and what’s hype.
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About this episode
Federal agencies are handing employees AI tools — Perplexity for Government, Copilot, homegrown chatbots — faster than they’re preparing people to use them. The tools range in quality, and even the good ones run on data that’s often disorganized, untagged, and hard to trust.
Jack and Nick dig into what actually determines whether an AI rollout works: not the model, but the users. Nick lays out why prompting is a skill worth training, why AI output should never be trusted blindly, and what separates the pilots that fizzle from the ones that produce real results — planning cycles cut from weeks to minutes, compliance work cut from days to an hour.
What Jack and Nick cover
- Why aren’t federal agencies ready for AI, even with good tools?
Because the data behind the tools is disorganized — not tagged, not centralized, and often unclear even to the people who own it. Fix the data problem before blaming the model. - What’s the biggest mistake leaders make rolling out AI?
Skipping the people. Nick’s rule: it doesn’t matter how good the hammer is if the person using it was never trained to swing it. - Why does prompting matter more than the tool you pick?
Because every model will give you an answer whether it actually knows one or not. Teaching the AI who you are and what you bring — through context and custom instructions — determines whether you get something usable. - Where is AI actually delivering measurable results?
Military planning cycles cut from two weeks to five minutes. Monthly compliance reporting cut from 80 hours to 90 minutes. Analysts doing high-burnout evidence review getting relief from AI-assisted triage. - What’s the one thing a federal leader can do Monday morning?
Start with your people. Sit with them, understand what they actually do, and look for where AI removes friction — before you look for a tool.
Why it matters now
- Federal agencies are standing up FedRAMP-approved AI tools faster than they’re building the internal readiness to use them well.
- Nick’s read on the market: AI adoption today looks like the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s — early, dial-up, and about to move fast.
- The clearest ROI so far isn’t replacing jobs — it’s removing the manual, repetitive work that burns people out.
Federal leaders don’t need to wait for the perfect AI strategy. They need to start with the people already doing the work.
