Dr. Joe Norton
Chief Information Officer, LMI
This year, Dr. Joe Norton’s team at LMI launched AI Hub, the company’s home base for accessing and using approved AI at work, built on the same secure-by-design principles they bring to federal customers. Every tool on the platform has been vetted, every access pathway is governed, and every employee gets a clear on-ramp.
“Joe has led the build of an infrastructure that frees our people to do what they do best — and does it securely, at scale, in a way that reflects the standards we hold ourselves to as a federal technology company,” said LMI CEO Josh Wilson. “AI Hub is what responsible, growth-oriented AI enablement looks like in practice.”
For a company that helps the federal government make AI operational in secure environments, it matters that LMI holds itself to that same standard internally so it can securely use the tools that bring its mission expertise to life, he said.
Why Watch
AI Hub is the foundation; the real work in 2026 is driving adoption across the business and making AI a baseline capability, not a specialty, he said.
“We counsel our clients to integrate their AI in order to leverage it, rather than slap it on as a layer, and this is us walking the talk,” Norton said. “We’re scaling role-specific agents and pipelines and building the kind of AI infrastructure where we can maximize execution without having to worry about access.”
Norton said shadow IT is the real security risk — because when employees can’t find approved tools, they find their own. AI itself isn’t the competitive edge anymore; the edge is having the architecture, governance and culture to put it to work reliably and securely, because that frees you up to actually create solutions, at speed, he said. AI Hub removes that friction by putting every vetted resource in one place, so people can move fast inside a secure framework rather than around it.
“AI is no longer a future capability — it’s an operational requirement,” Norton said. “Our job isn’t to tell people to wait; it’s to give them secure, trusted tools they can use today. When innovation is easy and governance is built in, adoption becomes an advantage rather than a risk.”
Fun fact: Norton came up through the technical side of IT before moving into leadership. When he pictures AI enablement, he considers not just architecture but access. The question that drives him is: How do you make AI work securely and reliably at scale, not just in a pilot? “That’s the same question our customers are asking, and it’s what AI Hub is built to answer,” he said.
