Under Jared Kushner, the office's purpose was to be the liaison between the White House and the American tech industry as part of an effort to reform the federal bureaucracy by applying pragmatic business principles.

"[1] The office was to draw on the lessons of the private sector to bring "new thinking and real change" to the country's problems, including the federal government's IT spend, economic activity, and the opioid crisis.

[10][11] After its founding in May 2017, OAI convened a summit of more than a dozen tech CEOs, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook of Apple, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Ginni Rometty of IBM.

The office was also involved in the Department of Veterans Affairs' purchase of a multi-billion dollar computer system and the administration's executive order on apprenticeships.

[12] It also established a Centers of Excellence program within the General Services Administration in December 2017 that encouraged federal agencies to move to the cloud and improve data management.