Unlocking the $100B opportunity in B2B2G
I (Tomas) recently went through a special kind of purgatory: trying to renew my driver’s license. The DMV website was slow, confusing, and glitchy - and it’s one of the better government portals. Out of frustration and curiosity, I asked OpenAI’s Operator agent to help.
It didn’t complete the job, but Operator got surprisingly close. It revealed something powerful: a world where AI agents act as our interface to the state: navigating rules, filling forms, and much more. In this future, two-way agents will transform bureaucracy into a continuous, background process.
For businesses, interacting with the government isn’t optional; it is unavoidable and high-stakes. Every company, regardless of size or sector, runs into complex, manual, often expensive workflows just to stay compliant.
Take FEDRamp, the certification required to sell cloud software to the U.S. government. The process is opaque and time-consuming. It typically requires a full-time employee or pricey consultants 1-2 years to manage documentation and security reviews.
Or consider hiring a world-class AI researcher from abroad. Sponsoring a visa requires assembling evidence, coordinating filings with USCIS, responding to RFEs, and navigating timelines across teams. Legal fees alone can run from $4K to $40K per employee. The process can take many months.
The rules shift constantly, and finding the right form or deadline often feels like playing a game without instructions.
That’s why entire industries (legal, compliance, HR tech, and accounting) have evolved to bridge the public-private divide. Together, U.S. businesses now spend well over $100 billion each year on services and software just to stay compliant.
Most people acknowledge that, long term, regulations and enforcement processes need a redesign. But we don’t need to wait. Agents are capable of making government interaction cheaper, seamless, and eventually real-time.
Here are six categories where AI can dramatically reduce cost, time, and risk for businesses:
These are processes that require companies to invest huge amounts of time and labor, knowing that if they get it wrong the penalty can be steep.
AI is reshaping how work gets done. LLMs can parse regulations, generate compliant responses, and fill out structured forms. Agents can now take action on behalf of users by submitting filings, responding to portals, and maintaining ongoing compliance.
Technologies like RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) allow agents to search government guidance and regulation databases in real-time. With a structured interface to back-office systems, AI can automate tasks that once required entire teams.
This means that compliance will become a background process, with humans in charge of supervising their work. Startups that build these tools will reduce timelines, lower costs, and increase accuracy across some of the most expensive and high-friction workflows in the economy.
We're already seeing early examples of what's possible:
This isn’t just back-office automation - it’s societal infrastructure.
Soon, government agents will interact directly with business agents. An IRS auditor might query a company's tax assistant. A licensing body might ingest machine-readable updates from an AI filing agent. We're not there yet, but it's within sight.
In the meantime, we need to build tools that serve companies but transform how they transact with the public sector. These startups won’t sell to the government, but rather will help businesses navigate these administrative apparatuses better (B2B2G).
We need strong governmental institutions that function effectively, whether that is administering justice or helping a farmer quickly access a subsidy. We believe that startups that enable this new public-private paradigm powered by AI will unlock new markets, mitigate risk, and turn compliance into a competitive edge.
If you're building in this space, or looking for tools to help navigate it, we want to meet you.
