Virginia looks to AI to ‘supercharge’ streamlining regulatory requirements
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By
Chris Teale
The commonwealth’s Office of Regulatory Management has already streamlined more than a quarter of regulations. Now, it will turn to agentic AI to accelerate that mission.
Virginia will turn to agentic artificial intelligence to further streamline its regulations, according to an executive order Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed last week.
This announcement comes on the heels of the state’s Office of Regulatory Management announcing it had achieved Youngkin’s goal of reducing or streamlining a quarter of the commonwealth’s regulatory requirements, with agencies having streamlined 26.8% of such requirements in a move it said would save Virginians over $1.2 billion a year.
And it comes three years after Youngkin created the Office of Regulatory Management, a new agency tasked with streamlining the regulatory process, reviewing any further regulations and reducing their burden on their public. The effort with agentic AI, where systems are designed to act autonomously with minimal human intervention, will “supercharge” Virginia’s efforts to streamline regulations, officials said. The effort will begin as a pilot project.
“We have made tremendous strides towards streamlining regulations and the regulatory process in the Commonwealth,” Youngkin said in a statement. “Using emergent artificial intelligence tools, we will push this effort further in order to continue our mission of unleashing Virginia’s economy in a way that benefits all of its citizens.”
At an event hosted by George Washington University in Washington, D.C. last week, ORM Director Reeve Bull said the tool goes into Virginia law, scans a regulation and its authorizing statute and identifies any potential disconnect between the two.
Bull did not give details on the name of the tool or the company providing it. Officials with ORM did not respond to requests for further comment.
“As other states consider doing something like this, or as the federal government considers doing something like this, I really think it can be a big, big accelerator,” Bull said during the event at GW’s Regulatory Studies Center. “It's taken us three years to get to the 25% and I think if a state started out with this sort of analysis, and did this comparison and looked at where the discretionary requirements are, they could probably accelerate the process quite a bit, and they could probably do it with fewer resources as well.”
The other aspect of the AI tool, which Bull said is its “most revolutionary aspect,” is the ability to compare Virginia’s regulations to other states and then assess what can be streamlined based on those other states’ laws. Bull gave the example of barbers and cosmetologists in Virginia, who are required to complete a 1,000-hour curriculum as part of their licensing process. But, he said, other states may have found a way to make their curricula, say, 800 hours, offering a point of regulatory comparison.
Especially when measuring Virginia against neighboring states who are competing for some of the same talent, it could be a useful exercise that has not been possible until now. It could also shed light on states that are falling short in their training requirements and give Virginia a greater sense of a baseline for curricula requirements, too.
“It’s very time consuming to go and find the relevant regulation, determine the number of hours, then do this comparative analysis,” Bull said. “What we think is this AI can massively accelerate that process for us. It can find where there are any distinctions, and then can produce a heat map, basically, that the agency could use.”
Bull emphasized that humans will make the “final decision” around which regulations to streamline or reduce based on the AI’s recommendations.
“There will absolutely still be a human in the loop,” he said. “It will be the agency staff itself that decides whether to make a change, but at the very least, it can provide a lot more information to the agency so they can have a better sense of where they may want to put through cuts.”
Few states appear to have an agency dedicated to streamlining or otherwise reducing regulatory requirements. But Virginia has been a leader, and Youngkin said it has resulted in tremendous savings in some crucial sectors of the economy. For example, reforms to the building code have resulted in construction costs for new houses dropping by $24,000, state officials said.
The agency has worked on transparency efforts, too. Bull noted that ORM has created an online dashboard where applicants can track their permit and license applications “like you would a FedEx package,” something he said has been ‘a game changer in terms of really speeding things up.”
Other agencies throughout the nation have looked to use AI to streamline various aspects of government work, whether it be the hiring process; finding information internally or from other states; or procurement. But even with the term-limited Youngkin just months away from leaving office, Bull said he is determined to keep up the momentum in Virginia.
“We only have about six months left in the administration, and the governor is always fond of saying, when we hit a goal, then we set another goal,” Bull said. “We're always hitting the accelerator.”
Sean Michael Newhouse contributed reporting.