Virginia’s agentic AI tool that checks whether regulations match the statutes behind them

While a growing number of states are working on streamlining operations to use tax dollars more efficiently, Virginia is the first to announce it is utilizing agentic AI to promote efficiency in the regulatory space. On July 11, 2025, Virginia's Governor Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order launching a pilot program for a first-of-its-kind agentic artificial intelligence regulatory reduction tool, which will help reduce regulatory burdens and keep regulations and guidance documents both streamlined and up to date.

According to the IBM Center for The Business of Government, "Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision. It consists of AI agents—machine learning models that mimic human decision-making to solve problems in real time." In a system using multiple AI agents, each performs a specific task to reach the goal, with "AI orchestration" coordinating these efforts.

This new tool has a variety of potential uses, including doing cost benefit analyses on state regulations. Another potential utility allows the virtual agent to break a statute down into its individual pieces to determine if an individual regulation is actually mandated by the statute.

As Reeve Bull, director of Virginia's Office of Regulatory Management, explained: If the statute says there will be a $100 fee for a service and the regulation calls for that, "there'd be a 100 percent match. But if the statute says to charge a $100 fee and the agency is charging a $200 fee, then they're violating the statute."

The agentic AI system in the commonwealth enables this kind of independent analysis, point by point, going through hundreds of thousands of separate provisions within the overall code, and making determinations in each case.

Then, of course, said Bull, "there always has to be a human in the loop. We've been explicit on that, from the outset, that the AI is merely a really robust research assistant that's doing, in a matter of minutes, what it would take a human being hundreds of hours to do. But it's not, itself, changing regulations. It's just giving recommendations for possible changes."

The agentic AI initiative in Virginia has the capacity to go still further in streamlining than just making certain that statutes line up with regulations. It can also compare Virginia to other states to see if its regulations are out of line with what's done elsewhere.

"Virginia had long required 1,500 hours to become a cosmetologist, which was then cut to 1,000," Bull said. "This prompted the Governor's office to consider whether there were similar opportunities for reductions in that or other professions. To see if that's the case, "the AI tool can go in and ask, 'Okay, what do the surrounding states require? What does Tennessee require? What does West Virginia require? What does Kentucky require?' And then it can quickly produce a report and say here's where the surrounding states are, and you're either low or high compared to those."

Attribution: Case study provided to the AI Navigator courtesy of the IBM Centre for The Business of Government, Apolitical's content partner. “AI in State Government: Balancing Innovation, Efficiency, and Risk”, https://www.businessofgovernment.org/reports/ai-in-state-government, IBM Centre for The Business of Government.