Missouri ITSD outlines AI pilots, cybersecurity gains and budget gap in appropriations briefing

John Loren, chief information officer for the state's Information Technology Services Division, told the House appropriations subcommittee at an informational hearing that ITSD has used recent investments to modernize data-centers, consolidate Microsoft platforms and bolster layered cybersecurity protections.

Loren, who opened the presentation by naming ITSD's leadership team, credited a $127 million ARPA-era infusion in fiscal 2023 for accelerating work that the agency said had been deferred for years. "We're getting ready to release an AI chatbot for the citizen portal that's going out here in just a couple of weeks' time," Loren said, adding the portal is paired with a call center to help citizens who need human support.

Deputy CIO Tara Dam walked the committee through ITSD's scope and finances, saying ITSD now supports about 15 of 17 executive agencies and manages roughly 1,200 solutions in production. Dam described the agency's spending baseline as roughly $287 million to "keep the lights on" and outlined a modernization target in the mid-$300 millions of ongoing spend; she also cited Gartner analysis that, on a national apples-to-apples comparison, would imply a higher investment of roughly $447 million and about 1,500 IT staff to match peer-state averages.

Tim Marchevsky, ITSD's director of AI and innovation, laid out an incremental approach to deploying generative AI tools: pilot Copilot, Gemini and similar assistants among developers and agency staff; pair models with strict governance and human-in-the-loop checks; and catalog pilot outcomes so successes can be scaled. Marchevsky cited an internal HR chatbot prototype that reduced the average time to answer complex HR questions from about 45 minutes to roughly 2 minutes during testing. "We put these tools in the hands of people to see how they affect workflow, and we keep humans in the loop for QA," he said.

Committee members pressed ITSD on procurement and legacy-mainframe risk. Dam credited a recently appointed director of purchasing with accelerating procurement timelines and acknowledged COBOL/mainframe skills remain a limited resource, though teams and vendor partners (including IBM) continue to sustain mainframe operations pending retirements. The agency also described monthly cyber activity measured in the tens of billions of automated probes and attacks, and said investments focus on continuous monitoring and defensive evolution.

Why it matters: the committee is responsible for appropriations. ITSD officials told lawmakers that the state has made substantial progress since consolidation and ARPA funding, but that national benchmarks and the move to subscription software will likely require sustained, multi-year funding decisions. The agency recommended more detailed, fiscal-year-by-fiscal-year spending profiles for major modernization initiatives during upcoming budget cycles.

What comes next: ITSD said it will share more detailed spending profiles and pilot outcomes with the committee and expects to continue rolling out pilots and governance work under the governor's AI executive order. The department also said it will supply follow-ups on procurement timelines and legacy-system retirement schedules.

Sources and attribution: Direct quotes and attributions in this article come from John Loren (CIO, ITSD), Tara Dam (Deputy CIO, ITSD) and Tim Marchevsky (Director, AI and Innovation, ITSD), as recorded in the subcommittee hearing transcript.