Sarah Soto-Taylor

Sarah Soto-Taylor is deputy secretary of strategic development at the California Government Operations Agency (GovOps), where her brief is modernizing how the state does business — from bringing generative AI into government operations to rethinking how services are delivered for the future. In nearly three decades of public service she has worked across program, policy and delivery, consistently at the seam where an ambitious idea has to survive contact with implementation.

That work sits inside the agency at the center of California’s public AI infrastructure effort. SB 53 places the CalCompute consortium within GovOps and directs it to develop a framework for a public cloud computing cluster, with a report due to the Legislature by January 1, 2027. Soto-Taylor’s portfolio is the agency’s own AI and service-delivery modernization rather than the consortium itself — but it is the same institutional question at a different scale: what it takes for state government to adopt AI in a way that actually serves the public.

Before her current role she helped lead California’s Census 2020 outreach effort, the state’s campaign to count residents in communities that federal counts have historically missed. She has held leadership roles at the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board, the Department of Health Care Services and Covered California, where her portfolio spanned health policy, systems integration and community engagement — the combination of coverage policy and the systems that deliver it that characterizes her approach to technology in government.

Sarah Soto-Taylor holds a Bachelor of Science in community health education and a Master of Public Health from San Diego State University, and is an alum of the HOPE Leadership Institute.