HHSC is responsible for providing oversight and administrative support for Health and Human Services, which also includes the Department of State Health Services.
Industry Navigator* estimates HHSC's budget at $46 billion, with a $2 billion IT budget.
According to Huang, who is also the agency’s deputy chief information officer of AI, HHSC maintains 488 client-critical applications, 128 of which are legacy. For Huang, the challenge his new role brings is finding the right partners to help revamp the agency’s technology.
“If you guys have been following the [Committee on Delivery of Government Efficiency], there's been a lot of talk about legacy modernization,” said Huang. “We have all these plans in place. It's, again, working through the government hurdles and the challenges and finding the right resources and the right partners to make that happen. Twenty-five percent of our applications need legacy modernization, and by the time we get funded in September, that number might grow to 30 percent, right? [We’re] always playing catch up.”
Huang cited the following areas as HHSC’s key AI modernization priorities:
- Cloud adoption
- Cybersecurity
- AI-assisted coding
- Agentic AI
- Automated app development
- Training
- Quality assurance
- Finding skilled AI talent
- Ensuring regulatory compliance
- Managing data loss prevention
- Scaling AI solutions across 53,000 employees
- Integrating AI governance with existing IT processes
“As you're talking to us, it would be great if you can show demos of what you [vendors] have done in particular, what you guys have done in maybe other state agencies that have kind of a similar type of regulatory compliance requirement environment,” said Huang. “Those would be great because then we’ll know whether this product or this feature is something that could be replicated here.”
*Industry Navigator is part of e.Republic, Industry Insider — Texas' parent company.
