Tony Sauerhoff, the State CIO of Texas, opened the 2026 NASTD Midwest-South Seminar in Austin with a reminder that Texas’s motto is “friendship.” Over the course of three days, that word kept showing up in different forms. Neighbor. Community. Trust. Pride in the work. It was not conference filler. It was the room’s operating culture.
NASTD is worth understanding on its own terms before trying to understand it as a market opportunity. It is a peer community first. State technology directors come here to share what is actually happening inside their organizations, to learn from states that are further along on a particular initiative, and to build the kind of relationships that inform decisions long before any procurement process begins. The vendors who have figured this out show up to listen. The ones who haven’t show up to pitch. The difference is obvious to everyone in the room.
I’m relatively new to attending NASTD events, but have noticed something shifting. The conversations I expected to hear were broad: cloud strategy, AI adoption, modernization roadmaps. What I found instead was something more specific and more urgent.
The Challenges Are Getting More Concrete
States are not just deploying cloud and AI anymore. They are living with the operational and financial consequences of having done so. Cloud migrations are moving more quickly, and the billing complexity that comes with that scale is landing on real people with real reconciliation workloads. AI pilots that were experimental are moving into production, and the question of who pays for the token consumption and how you even calculate that accurately across dozens of agencies is no longer theoretical.
What I heard consistently across state presentations and individual conversations was not panic but an honest acknowledgment that the financial infrastructure supporting these investments has not kept pace with them. The technology is moving. The billing model is catching up slowly, and in some cases not at all.
A few specific dynamics came up repeatedly. States that have built chargeback models are discovering that running them manually at scale is an unsolved problem in its own right. States that have not yet built chargeback models are increasingly aware they will need to, especially as AI consumption becomes a line item that the central IT fund cannot absorb indefinitely. And states that are mid-transformation are trying to figure out the right sequence: do you fix the billing model before the migration is complete, or after?
What Stays True About This Community
None of these conversations happens quickly. That is one of the more important things to understand about NASTD, and about the state government technology market more broadly. The relationship has to exist before the conversation can happen. The conversation has to happen before the problem can be defined. The problem must be defined before any solution is relevant. Trying to skip steps does not work, and experienced state IT leaders can tell immediately when someone is trying.
What does work is consistency. Showing up at the same events and being the kind of presence that adds something to the room rather than extracting from it. States remember who listened to them at the last conference. They remember who followed up and who didn’t. They remember who understood their problem and who was just pattern-matching to a pitch.
Tony Sauerhoff’s opening remarks were about Texas, but they applied to everyone in the room. This community runs on friendship. The technology conversations follow from that, not the other way around.
Looking Ahead
The NASTD National Conference in August brings all of these regional threads together in one place. The states that presented in Austin will be there alongside states from every other region, and the themes that surfaced this week, cloud cost recovery, AI billing complexity, and the gap between where billing infrastructure is and where it needs to be, will continue to develop. It is the right place to gauge where this community is heading.
