How the White House’s AI plan could deliver real results for senior citizens
By augmenting government workers, agentic AI allows human staffers to focus on the decision-making and customer service that people do best.
Paul Tatum
October 24, 2025 3:58 pm
3 min read
The “AI Action Plan” the White House recently announced aims to ensure American global leadership in artificial intelligence technology. But some of the most promising benefits could come for U.S. citizens right here at home, like the 68 million seniors enrolled in Medicare or the 74 million drawing Social Security payments.
The text of the 26-page action plan includes a commitment to “increase the use of AI to improve the delivery of services to the public.” The key first use cases where the government can get this right? Medicare and Social Security. With both of those crucial public-service departments, AI agents — autonomous AI systems that can carry out their own tasks — could augment the work of human staff to the benefit of the citizens they serve.
Human staff members and AI agents could collaborate in ways that make Medicare, Social Security and other crucial constituent-oriented federal services easier to navigate, faster to access, and more efficient for government workers.
When a person connects by text with a Social Security help center to ask about their benefits, for instance, an AI agent could queue up that person’s file so the human staffer already has the pertinent information on hand when they respond.
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Or when a Medicare enrollee connects to the website to inquire about whether a medical procedure will be covered, and for what amount, an AI assessment agent could pre-review the request and make a recommendation. A human staffer could then review that recommendation and approve it or otherwise respond.
By augmenting government workers, agentic AI allows human staffers to focus on the decision-making and customer service that people do best.
Digital government employees that learn as they go
AI agents will be able to do far more than the chatbots the government has experimented with before. That’s because, like any capable human worker, AI agents can learn, reason and take action, and get better all the time through experience.
Just as important, AI agents are designed and configured to respect and protect the privacy and security of the sensitive personal information contained in a citizen’s Medicare and Social Security files and inquiries — look for a platform that meets both HIPAA and FedRAMP High requirements. Trust is paramount.
Another virtue of agentic AI is that agents can work autonomously, round the clock, 24/7. Nationwide, Medicare and Social Security offices get hundreds of thousands of inquiries and requests a day from American seniors, who each deserve a prompt, accurate response. For people who phone into the Social Security Administration, the average wait time is more than an hour.
With agentic AI, by the time the staff at Medicare or Social Security start work each morning, the tireless, all-nighter AI agent can have a well-researched and reviewed caseload ready for human action.
In the near future, we can expect conversational voice capabilities to be added to agentic AI. For Medicare and Social Security enrolees who would rather speak to an agent — human or otherwise — than type on a keyboard, this next generation of AI will provide yet another level of greater service.
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Critical help for mission-critical work
Federal workers don’t always get the credit they’re due. But I know from working with federal agencies that government employees are passionate about their mission and intent on helping their constituents. These civil servants deserve the help that the best technology can provide in helping them achieve that mission.
Agentic AI is not going to replace human workers, any more than electronic calculators or Excel spreadsheets did in earlier eras. What AI agents can and will do is relieve Medicare and Social Security teams of the more routine facets of their jobs, and help them cope with a daunting backlog of casework, so that these people can focus on the personal, human touch their jobs require.
After all, isn’t that what these civil servants — and the tens of millions of senior Americans — deserve?
Paul Tatum is executive vice president of global public sector solutions at Salesforce.
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