OPM revamps online pay tables, spearheads AI adoption across federal workforce 

The federal government’s human resources agency is revamping one of the most heavily trafficked tools on its website: annual pay tables for federal employees. 

The Office of Personnel Management is planning to launch a new version of the online tables that agencies and employees use to look up federal pay rates each year. 

Adam Starr, the agency's chief information officer, said on Wednesday that the agency’s pay rates website gets about 14 million visits each year, but hasn’t changed much since 2011. 

“I always like to remember that 'OPM' really stands for ‘other peoples’ money.’ And in this case, it is your money. People come to OPM pay tables, asking us to show them the money, and for years these have been legacy, clunky sites,” Starr said Wednesday at the SAP Public Sector Summit sponsored by GovExec. “It’s not the experience that a federal employee deserves.” 

Starr said the revamped OPM pay tables will launch “later this calendar year,” in the first quarter of fiscal 2027. 

“We’re launching it in beta. This will be the default, but people can always fall back to the old version if they don’t like this new version. We’ll get feedback from the agencies, from the employees. We can iterate, relaunch, and get this in people’s hands. Because that’s how everyone’s doing it in industry, and government should be no different,” he said. 

Starr said OPM tested the pay table redesign with an accessibility expert who uses a screen-reader. He said that individual “had absolutely no issues using it.” 

“For too long, I think civil servants have really suffered with outdated technology that doesn’t keep at the frontier,” Starr said, adding that OPM is looking to give employees the “latest and greatest tools.” 

OPM’s pay tables are the latest in a series of government website refreshes happening under the Trump administration. The agency last year overhauled its federal workforce data website, and the White House’s Nation Design Studio is on a mission to transform more than 27,000 federal websites. 

These efforts culminated recently in the launch of America.gov, a site that allows users to ask a chatbot questions about everything from qualifying for Medicare to finding a job to renewing a passport. 

Starr described the OPM pay-table refresh as part of a broader plan to “make every part of the federal experience tech-first,” and to get federal employees “the best support that you need in every stage of your career.” 

“This is kind of just an example of many of the modernizations that we’re trying to do across OPM, from consolidating 119 different HR IT systems to answering every phone call in our retirement services contact center,” Starr said. 

OPM is also spearheading some of the Trump administration’s latest efforts to foster greater adoption of AI tools across the federal workforce. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month rebranding AI across the federal government as “super intelligence.” 

Starr said OPM has launched a consulting program called the SuperIntelligence Governance and Adoption Program (SI GAP), focused on helping other agencies adopt AI tools. 

“Every SI transformation industry has HR at the table, and OPM is HR for the government,” Starr said. “Really, it comes down to being able to take measured risk of trusting your employees with these tools, giving them the opportunity to experiment and reinvent their work — because just using it as a better chatbot or a better Google search is not going to reinvent the way that we have the enterprise work.” 

Starr said that agencies – including OPM – have historically been too risk-averse with AI, and haven’t yet seized the “opportunity to reinvent their work” with these tools. 

“I imagine a world where every employee is more empowered to do the impactful work that they need to do — that a lot of the tedium of the day can be automated,” he said. 

Starr said OPM recently launched an AI agent to help process phone calls for the retirement services team. 

“We showed it to the entire agency. People were aghast at how human it sounded, how helpful it was,” Starr said. “Literally today we released a new feature, and we released a new feature on Friday last week. And every day this is getting better.” 

The federal retirement backlog under the second Trump administration has drawn scrutiny from House Democrats. The backlog sat at 55,681 pending cases on March 31, down from a peak of 65,237 the previous month. The backlog fell to 8,814 pending cases in September. 

“We've historically had a large backlog of retirement claims, and it's not because the employees don't want to do good, but there's been processes that are highly optimized on paper that just can't improve until they're digital. They're now digital, and so how can we now optimize those and lead to faster retirements? How can we onboard people quicker?” 

OPM in a recent memo directed agencies to use AI to speed up the hiring process for new employees employees. OPM Director Scott Kupor has also been tapped to serve as vice chairman of the administration’s interagency Super Intelligence Task Force. 

Starr said OPM understands the importance of keeping guardrails around the data it holds. OPM in 2015 was the target of a massive data breach, exposing about 22 million federal records.

“We have a high risk tolerance for delighting our customers and a low-risk tolerance for security breaches,” he said.

OPM, he added, has three basic rules for AI use: employees are responsible for the work they produce with AI, can use only approved tools, and must stay signed in with official accounts. 

“It’s on the CIO team to make sure this is secure, and just constantly thinking about what are the risks and how do we mitigate it. There are concerns about access to the internet via these tools, so we put in a cached version, so nothing hits the internet,” Starr said. “[We’re] just constantly looking at what are the concerns, knocking that down, and iterating and improving.”