Leadership

Leapfrogging: Why Modernizing Now Is the Best Time

Phillip Jo, COO · · 3 min read

The Latecomer Advantage: Rails vs. Bullet Trains

In the late 1800s, America laid roughly 200,000 miles of railroad track across a continent, on a 4-foot-8.5-inch gauge that became the world standard. It was the largest infrastructure project of its century, and the country reaped the first-mover advantage for nearly a hundred years — continental commerce and industrial dominance,

A century later, Japan opened the Shinkansen. South Korea followed with the KTX. Then China. None of them tried to upgrade the old American architecture. They didn’t retrofit freight corridors with passenger overlays. They built dedicated, electrified, grade-separated, computer-signaled corridors from scratch — and skipped the entire diesel-on-mixed-track era that defined American rail.

Today, a passenger train in Tokyo runs at 200 mph on track that did not exist forty years ago. A passenger train from Washington to New York averages around 80 mph, sharing track that was first laid in the 1830s.

This is latecomer advantage. The country that didn’t have the infrastructure wasn’t behind. It was positioned to skip a generation.

The pattern repeats

Every infrastructure transition follows this shape.

Africa skipped landline telephony and went straight to mobile — and then straight to mobile money. Kenya’s M-Pesa moved digital banking through phones to a degree most G7 economies still haven’t matched. Developing nations are skipping centralized grid build-outs in favor of distributed solar. China skipped the credit-card era and built a payments stack natively on QR codes.

The conventional wisdom is that early movers win. The actual record is that early movers build, late movers leap.

Where this leaves federal modernization

Many federal programs are sitting on systems that haven’t been substantially modernized in twenty years. Mainframes still running COBOL. On-prem data centers nearing end of life. Paper workflows that were never digitized. Workforces trained on legacy stacks.

The conventional reading is that those agencies are behind — that they should have moved a decade ago, and that their modernization bill is now insurmountable.

We think the opposite is true. The agencies that didn’t modernize in 2015 are in the strongest position to lead the next leap.

Here is why. The agencies that did modernize between 2014 and 2022 paid for an entire generation of intermediate technology. These investments were still critical and revolutionary paving the way for setting how technology can be delivered with compliance, to quality, while maintaining the high standards of government agencies. Those starting now are also in a position to take what was learned and leapfrog:

  • Lift-and-shift cloud migrations that now require re-architecture to handle AI workloads.
  • Manual CI/CD pipelines that agentic delivery systems are beginning to replace.
  • Ticket-driven IT operations that have to be retrofitted around AI-assisted workflows.
  • Data lakes optimized for human BI tools, not for retrieval-augmented agents.
  • Workforces trained around all of the above.

A program starting modernization in 2026 does not have to pay any of those bills. It can go directly to:

  • Cloud-native architectures designed around AI workloads from day one
  • Agentic delivery and operations as the baseline, not an afterthought
  • Data architectures built for both human analysts and AI agents
  • A workforce that learns the current stack, not three legacy stacks plus the current one
  • Procurement vehicles built for software that updates weekly, not annually

The result is a smaller program, delivered faster, on a stack that will scale into the next decade rather than fight it.

The window is now

We think federal technology is at a 1955 and .com moment.

The right move in 2026 is not a three-year cloud migration designed before AI became a first-class workload. It is to plan the modernization around where the work is going: agentic operations, AI-augmented delivery, and infrastructure that treats AI as a primary citizen rather than a bolt-on.

That window is open right now because the underlying technology has finally matured. Agentic frameworks shipped this year. Foundation models are stable enough for serious federal evaluation. Cloud-native primitives have settled. The cost of building this way has dropped to the point where small programs can do it credibly.

In two years, the early-late distinction closes. The agencies that leap now will set the pattern for everyone else helping others do the same. This cycle of first movers helping others leapfrog and they themselves becoming first movers for others is the ecosystemtic growth that makes America great.