Let me bust my favorite myth about AI: this might be the biggest story of our time, but the hidden story really isn’t about frontier models or multi-billion-dollar investments. It’s a story about how mission operators are starting to build the tools they once had to wait for.
Over the past year, I’ve watched this shift take hold across government.
People without formal software development backgrounds are using AI to build applications, automate workflows, and solve mission problems in remarkably short order. With access to approved AI capabilities and practical guardrails, an operator’s idea can become a working solution.
Work that once required specialized technical teams, months of development, and lengthy procurement cycles are increasingly being tackled by the people closest to the mission.
For the first time, the distance between identifying a mission problem and solving it is collapsing. Operators can increasingly build workflows, automate repetitive work, create agents, and solve mission challenges themselves instead of waiting months, sometimes years, for someone else to do it.
The result is the ascendancy of a new class of workers: the builders.
The Best Builders Were Already There
Organizations often talk about innovation as though it needs to be brought in from outside. In reality, the best ideas have always been sitting closest to the mission. Operators know which reports take too long to produce. They know which approvals create bottlenecks. They know which manual processes steal time from the work that actually matters.
Operators could identify the problem; building the solution was the hard part. That wall is disappearing. Increasingly, the best software will come from the operators closest to the mission, people who understand exactly what success looks like on a Tuesday afternoon when the mission can’t wait.
At BigBear.ai, we talk about technology built “by operators, for operators”, and this is exactly what that idea means.
Government Might Move First
Conventional wisdom says the government is always years behind the private sector in adopting emerging technology. I think that’s the wrong assumption. Mission organizations have something many commercial enterprises don’t: extraordinary clarity of purpose.
Mission operators wake up thinking about the mission. AI simply gives them a faster way to solve the problems they already own. That clarity of purpose may ultimately let government move faster than many people expect. Mission operators are natural builders once barriers are removed, even if the procurement process remains slow.
The agencies that gain the greatest advantage will give operators safe environments where they can turn ideas into operational capability.
The Organization Hasn’t Caught Up
Technology has moved faster than most organizations have. Many are still built around centralized procurement and technical teams, rigid approval chains, and operating models designed for a world where only specialists could build.
Meanwhile, operators are already experimenting. Some of the best innovations are probably happening through shadow AI. Employees are often trying to solve problems before approved tools and channels have caught up.
Organizations haven’t yet created a safe place for builders to build. They should channel that behavior into trusted environments where builders can experiment safely, share what works, and scale successful ideas across the enterprise.
That requires practical guardrails that let good ideas move.
The Builder Changes Leadership
The builder workforce also changes leadership. A manager may soon oversee a team of people working alongside a growing number of specialized AI agents. The leadership question becomes, “How do I help my people manage an expanding digital workforce?” That requires judgment, oversight, and accountability. Well-designed agents increase the importance of leadership. The shift also changes how organizations measure success.
If you reward AI usage, people will optimize for AI usage. If you reward token consumption, they’ll consume more tokens. We’ve seen this movie before. The organizations that win will look past activity.
They’ll measure mission outcomes.
Build the Environment
Organizations can modernize governance without abandoning it. Find your builders. Give them trusted environments where they can experiment safely. Measure the problems they solve instead of the prompts they write.
If your operators can build capability faster than ever before, so can everyone else. Used well, AI can expose weak assumptions and help the organization adapt faster.
The builder workforce is already here. Most organizations just haven’t recognized it yet.
The author, Jason Layman, is Executive Vice President GenAI Platforms & Products at BigBear.ai.