Former Transportation CIO most proud of creating ‘momentum for change’

When Pavan Pidugu was sworn in to his role as the Transportation Department’s chief digital and information officer in February 2025, the agency operated more than a dozen separate grant systems, few of its rank-and-file employees used artificial intelligence in their daily jobs and the agency didn’t have an IT strategy for the modern age.

By the time Pidugu left his role on Sept. 4, he’d engineered eye-opening reversals in the above statistics and more, executing a vision he first laid out in Transportation’s comprehensive “1DOT IT plan” that will dictate IT operations over the next four years.

Consider the post-Pidugu statistics: Transportation is consolidating to a single grant system through its GrantLens program, and more than 90% of its 50,000 employees regularly use AI for everything from engaging with internal chatbots and agentic systems to coding software.

During the same 19-month period, Pidugu led a Transportation-wide transition to Google Workspace, which included a massive email migration to Gmail, achieving both improved collaboration tools for employees and substantial cost savings over its previous legacy environment. The department is pacing toward migrating 90% of its data to the cloud by the year’s end and has adopted a unified cloud management framework called T-cloud.

Beyond any singular achievement, though, Pidugu said he’s most proud of taking decisive action and creating the conditions for sustained momentum in tech modernization.

“We did some things really well. We did some things great. There are some opportunities we could have done better, but we can only make mistakes when we’re doing something,” Pidugu said in a sit-down interview with Nextgov/FCW, shortly after he sent a final farewell email to staff.

Pidugu took Transportation’s top tech job with more than four years of experience at the department, He had also worked as the chief technology officer at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, after holding positions at retail giants Target and Walmart.

Unlike many new CIOs installed in the early days of President Donald Trump’s second administration, Pidugu came in with prior experience in the department, a list of goals and a clear view of changes necessary at Transportation on day one.

“I knew what was required to be done because I was in DOT for four years before becoming the CIO, so for me, it was all about, how can I drive change?” Pidugu said. “And I think probably my biggest accomplishment, I would say, was to create that momentum for change. My biggest hope is that [Transportation] keeps that momentum going.”

An early vision for IT

Early in his tenure, Pidugu faced the same headwinds most of his new CIO peers faced: workforce reductions in line with the administration’s new policies and uncertainty over which staff might take the deferred resignation offer. The uncertainty “slowed down” some things, Pidugu said, but he wasted little time implementing a vision for IT based on processes, people and products.

Pidugu’s authority as CIO increased following a memo from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy banning all shadow IT, disallowing any technology not under the CIO’s purview.

“I want the OCIO within Transportation to be a technology shop where we build technology. That’s the culture we want to create in-house. We're building applications. We're building products, along with being everything else,” Pidugu said during an interview televised on C-Span in June 2025.

In September 2025, Transportation released its 1DOT IT plan, a “transformative” strategy that set forth four strategic goals — eliminate technical debt, become customer-centric, build obsessive products and grow talent — and divided the department’s IT teams into two complimentary domains: “digital factories that deliver mission-focused products and centralized shared services that provide governance, common platforms, standards and enablement.”

“What are the challenges that we face today? While we are in this major transformational journey, there are lots of gaps, and our people, our processes need to change,” Pidugu said in a keynote speech in May at the GITEC 2026 conference. “We're simplifying the way we work. We're simplifying the assets that we have, the technology applications we have, and we are unifying our processes to make the best use of technology that's available today.”

A pivot to Google

Last September, Transportation inked a five-year contract worth up to $89 million to move from Microsoft’s collaboration suite to Google’s cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools, including Gmail, Docs and Meet, and incorporate Google’s popular AI tools, Gemini and NotebookLM. Department staff have fully migrated to Gmail, with a complete migration for component agency FAA expected in the coming months.

The deal was a direct result of discounts on Google and other tech providers’ tools provided through the General Services Administration’s OneGov program, and it has resulted in cost savings of 70%, Pidugu said. Proudly, Transportation achieved discounts on top of those negotiated through OneGov, he added.

Today, all 50,000-plus employees of Transportation and FAA have access to Google Gemini and NotebookLM, and Pidugu said more than 90% of the department’s staff regularly use them.

Pidugu said he’s been impressed by the “recurring incremental efficiency” agency users have gotten through Gemini, noting that it’s common for users to create workflows that shave hours off their workday. Those are hours, he said, that compound weekly and can be better spent on more meaningful tasks.

Transportation’s more advanced AI users have access to more AI models available through GSA’s USAi platform, including Grok.

One grant system to rule them all

Each year, Transportation provides billions of dollars in grant funding through various discretionary and formula programs. Historically, however, it’s a complicated process that involves anywhere from 10 to 14 different systems. The department’s consolidation of those systems is “in progress,” with a goal of condensing them to a single, smart system by mid-next year, according to Pidugu.

Moving to the cloud

Transportation is on pace to move about 90% of its data into the cloud by the end of this calendar year, according to Pidugu, with 40% of the migration already complete. That will free up dollars through efficiency improvements and in expenses to manage internal data centers.

“At the end of the day, [the migration] will avoid a lot of costs,” Pidugu said. “The hardware in our data centers are getting ready to be depreciated, so we have to invest that money. I’m sure some of that money will pay for cloud storage, but we will be freeing up our resources.”

Noteworthy, however, is the T-Cloud framework the agency has leveraged to manage the migration of its applications to the four leading cloud providers: Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft. Transportation aims to be cloud agnostic and use each provider where it makes sense.

“Instead of having four different groups managing the cloud four different ways, T-cloud allows us to have a unified process, practices, tools, everything — and we can also automate a lot of it,” Pidugu said.

The Treasury Department, Pidugu said, implemented essentially the same system through a contract it held with a vendor the agency also happened to have an existing relationship with. So rather than bid out a contract to build it, why not save time and money by using the same source code and adjusting as needed?

The idea stemmed from a conversation Pidugu had with Treasury CIO Sam Corcos, then-federal CIO Greg Barbaccia and Eric Sidle, formerly CIO at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and now at the Interior Department. Pidugu received the source code in a .Zip file.

“Treasury had done the majority of the work, so we were able to borrow their source code — a copy of it — and we implemented it, and we integrated with the tools that we in DOT were using or want to use,” Pidugu said.

Ultimately, the shrewd move — a form of “fed-sourcing,” a term the foursome used — significantly reduced the time and money required to build T-Cloud at Transportation, he added.

Meet DOTi

Transportation’s latest AI agent, DOTi, is agentic AI built using ServiceNow’s EmployeeWorks software, formerly known as the MoveWorks platform. The conversational AI software is available to all agency employees except those in FAA, and it was integrated at launch with Transportation’s IT service management workflow.

Users can engage DOTi through Google Chat. A user experiencing an issue with a laptop charger could, for example, ask DOTi what to do. DOTi will “run through the knowledge” and give the user possible solutions, including whether to order a new charger. DOTi can then execute the task, too. 

“DOTi may come back and say, ‘Hey, looks like you need to order a new battery or charger, do you want to order one?’ If you say, ‘Yes,’ it creates your system workflow, and you don’t have to call in to the help desk” Pidugu said.

Across town, the State Department is also using the EmployeeWorks platform, within its HR system. That system allows State employees to inquire about leave balance, schedule days off and more. In the future, Transportation may take similar action and add additional workflows to DOTi’s purview to further reduce call volumes and help-desk backlog.

“The ultimate goal is to leverage these implementations and minimize the call volumes and save,” Pidugu said. “A lot of organizations are talking about AI, but they only look at creating a chatbot or creating generative AI usage. This is true agentic AI. You are using the AI agent to do 10, 15 different jobs — jobs that would take time.”

Beyond vibe-coding

Transportation is working with two companies that specialize in an end-to-end software development lifecycle, whereby cutting-edge AI tools “would not only build code for engineers, but would actually build an entire application for the organization,” Pidugu said. Specifically, the agency is using Nexgile Nx IDE and NetImpact Strategies’ AI-Forge to “bring the software development life cycle from 18 months to 18 weeks,” or perhaps even shorter spans.

AI’s potential to reduce code developing time is no secret, especially within organizations that have few software coders. At Transportation, Pidugu said the use of AI tools “solved the building-fast-enough problem,” but doesn’t address the full end-to-end lifecycle.

“But we created a brand new problem. We can’t test it fast enough or deploy it fast enough,” Pidugu said, recalling a conversation he had with Jack Albright, now Transportation’s acting CIO. The aforementioned companies were able to leverage AI to demo a product within hours of receiving a business problem from Transportation. The companies further impressed the agency in responding to proof of concepts in a matter of weeks with entire applications and full documentation.

“In general, any vendor that I pick on is usually like, eight to 18 months [to deliver], and a lot of times the documentation never shows up, it’s always incomplete, so these tools being created are really taking it to the next level,” Pidugu said. “I don't have engineers laying around in DOT to take the existing AI models that generate code and use it. So that's why we were looking beyond the traditional vibe-coding methodologies, and these are really good.”

“So what used to take 18 months to write the entire application now is being done in 18 weeks. We could actually bring it down to 18 days,” he added.

What’s next?

Pidugu, who won a Federal 100 award for his work in 2025, has no shortage of opportunities outside government, but said he would like to stay in close connection to public service. He expressed gratitude to Secretary Duffy and Deputy Secretary Steven Bradbury, who — in an interview with Nextgov/FCW, called Pidugu “an amazing leader in terms of IT improvement, development and creating greater efficiencies across the government.”

“It definitely is a great honor to serve the country,” Pidugu said.

In his farewell email to staff, Pidugu fittingly thanked his team.

“Serving alongside this incredible team for the past many years has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career,” he said. “When we set out on this journey together, we shared a bold vision to fundamentally transform how technology serves the Department and the American public. Thanks to your hard work, dedication, and true builder mentality, we didn't just meet those expectations — we exceeded them. Thank you for your unwavering support, your brilliant ideas, and your partnership. It has been a profound privilege to lead this team, and I will always be cheering for your continued success.”