AI in regulated environments
Putting AI into production under real regulatory constraints.
Adam Starr
He brought AI into threat detection at Proofpoint. Now he's bringing it into the digital services over 2 million federal employees depend on.
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management
- Proofpoint
- Stanford GSB
- Pomona College
The same problem, twice.
The job is always the same: turn hard technical problems into systems people can rely on. Adam has done it in two very different worlds.
Workforce & policy
Rebuilding the technology behind federal workforce policy — at the government's own HR agency.
Cultural transformation
Leading the human and organizational change that makes new technology stick.
Strategic advisor
Beyond running the technology function, Adam advises the OPM Director — and other federal agencies — on adopting AI.
Experience
Currently
Chief Information Officer & Senior Advisor to the Director
OPM is the federal government's human capital agency — responsible for the entire workforce lifecycle of 2 million employees, in one of the most heavily regulated environments in government. Adam is rebuilding the digital infrastructure that serves that workforce from first job application through retirement: leading enterprise AI adoption, alongside a ground-up rethink of service delivery — from the retirement system to the contact center. As Senior Advisor to the Director, Adam also advises on strategy at OPM and helps other federal agencies adopt AI.
His organization runs USAJOBS, the government's official job site (900M+ annual visits, 6M+ active profiles), and the Federal Retirement System, which serves 3 million annuitants.
Board & Advisory
Board Director
An industrial business spanning food processing, packaging, and labeling. Adam focuses on governance, executive succession, and long-range strategy, including technology modernization.
Previously
Entrepreneur in Residence
Built a code-generation product grounded in formal methods — for modernizing systems where correctness can't be optional.
Head of AI/ML, Security Products Group
Proofpoint protects 90% of the Fortune 100. Adam architected and led the company's AI/ML organization, creating the models behind threat detection across the product line — production systems that processed billions of emails daily. He built an MLOps platform with AWS that cut the time to launch a new model from over a year to under a month (12×), which Amazon featured at re:Invent as the model customer build; drove generative AI across the portfolio; and established the data-labeling and release practices behind a 20× improvement in model quality.
Education
MBA
Chair of Campus Life and President of the Adam Smith Society.
B.A., Pure Mathematics
Magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a minor in Computer Science and distinction in his thesis.
Outside the office
Adam is usually with the people closest to him — around a board game table with family, planning the next trip with friends, or chasing some new way to explore: a cold plunge, an open-water dive, or a hike. Travel has always been an excuse to find the local food, music, and art. On his own, he's just as happy turning something over in his head — a crossword, a math proof, the structure of a legal argument (a habit left over from his high school debate days).
Mathematics
Co-authored a paper on p-adic quotient sets. Erdős number: 2 (A. Starr ↔ F. Luca ↔ P. Erdős).
The Erdős number is the Bacon number of math — your collaborative distance to Paul Erdős through co-authored papers.
Art
A lover of art who curated an exhibition of Andy Warhol screen prints.