Agentic AI brings unique opportunities for public sector organisations to create value for the citizens they serve. But as leaders embrace these capabilities, it’s vital they also manage the risks. Philippe Rogge, corporate vice president for worldwide public sector at Microsoft, is passionate about the prospects facing this traditionally conservative sector as itemergesinto the AI spotlight.;
You spent 12 years at Microsoft before moving on, then returned in July 2025. What did you learn during your time away and what drew you back?
I’ve learned it is healthy to step out of your bubble from time to time. I've always had a curious mind, and technology is just one of my interests. I originally joined Microsoft at an incredible time of technology and cultural transformation, but after 12 years, my curiosity drew me in a different direction. I had a great timeworking with another company, but I kicked myself when I realised I’d left Microsoft six months before the ChatGPT moment!
Rejoining Microsoft, the company at the forefront of AI transformation, felt amazing. My current role fits perfectly with my interest in the intersection of technology and geopolitics.
How are today’s geopolitical challengesimpactingthe public sector?
We’re facing a technological inflexion point with AI and the evolving cyberthreat. This has caused an awakening in a sector that is traditionally conservative about technology adoption. Governments are grappling with demographic challenges, fiscal deficits and increasing budget pressures. AI – and especially agentic AI – can help them to significantly improve the way they deliver public services. That is incredibly valuable to them and they’re really embracing this new wave of technology.
At the same time, the cyberthreat has never been bigger and the attack surfaces have moved. As targets like energy companies become better equipped to combat threats, attackers are looking at schools, hospitals, libraries and local and regional governments.
Geopolitical changes are intertwined with these influences. Concepts of sovereignty have always existed, but the tectonic plates have shifted since the fall of the Berlin Wall and we’re now in a multi-polar world. I think the world is resetting and coming to terms with that, and every government will need to adjust and adapt.
Microsoft is well placed to support public sector organisations as they navigate the changing landscape. We’ve invested in sovereign clouds and the European Union data boundary since 2023 and we have an incredible capacity to anticipate the shifts affecting our customers. A lot of the world runs on our technology, so we are committed to continue providing that understanding and agility.
What does cyber resilience mean in practice for public sector leaders, and where should they prioritise their investment?
Cyberthreats and sovereignty are often seen as separate issues, but in today’s world they intersect and it’s important we keep them both on the same spectrum. Cybersecurity exposures like ransomware attacks or data exfiltration are the most worrying way of losing the sovereignty of your systems.
Nobody likes to publicise a cybersecurity issue more than necessary and that’s why, as a society, we have grossly underestimated the prevalence and impact of cyberthreats. In addition, agentic AI presents new threats and needs that will significantly reshuffle the cards. Every company and government will need to reflect on their cybersecurity position.
That’s where Microsoft can help. We process more than 100 trillion signals daily andwe’rehelping with Ukraine’s cybersecurity. We learn about the latest nation state attacks, identify and assess patterns, build patches and deploy them in real time. Security is core to everything we do and as such,we’rein an incredibly strong position to share threat intelligence and benefit our customers around the world.
Ultimately, tosafeguard sovereignty, organisations must find a balance between the innovation they want to drive prosperity, and the cybersecurity they need for business continuity. At Microsoft, we’re guiding customers through an objective assessment of what their exposures are and where they want to take risks. We’re helping them to identify the layers they can add that will give them the best trade-offs and, when they define that architecture, we have the technical, contractual and policy portfolio to respond to any changes they need.
Thisisn’tabout locking everything away in a private cloud. Organisations understand the protection a public cloud with sovereign controls can bring – especially the Microsoft public cloud, supported by a broad set of security capabilities.
What gains are Microsoft AI tools delivering for public sector organisations today?
One beautiful thing about the public sector is thatit’spretty much theperfect environment for agentic AI. There’s a high volume of reasonably low-complexity tasks and decisions that are incredibly well documented in terms of laws, policies, principles and procedures. AI makes it possible to execute these tasks at huge scale, which brings an incredible productivity gain and measurable citizen benefits.
A good first step is to equip your people to reason against your own documents. That will typically yield productivity gains across the board. Microsoft Copilot plays a role here, and it’s been fascinating to see the traction it’s gained in the public sector.
After that, organisations can move to the agentic space, where they can decompose and recompose business processes. The city of Burlington in Ontario, Canada and the metropolitan government in Tokyo have developed exciting agentic AI business cases – including one that has yielded a 70 per cent reduction in permit processing time.
Another example is the way people are imagining complex services. Think about the process of coordinating repairs to street damage reported by citizens, for instance. The citizen uploads a photo of the issue to an app, and then multiple AI agents interact to identify the actions and equipment needed, check inventory, order parts, schedule the repair team, approve the work and notify the citizen that it’s done.
It’sincredible to see our public sector customers’ openness to these new scenarios. They’re not just thinking about productivity gains, but also about citizen interaction, better decision-making and traceability. They’re making course corrections and adding new interfaces to deliver real value to citizens.
Smart City Expo World Congress isa great placeto explore these new opportunities. What will you be discussing there in November 2026?
Things are moving so fast and we see new use cases every day, so it’s too early to go into detail. We will showcase some specific public sector scenarios and we’ll focus on a couple of areas.
One key topic is customer demand for a cybersecure, hybrid sovereign architecture.We’vebuilt a position of trust over the past few decades and IDC positions us as the leader in infrastructure and platform in this space. We will continue to earn that trust as we evolve our platforms and toolkits.
Another subject is the incredible opportunity to do AI for local, regional and national governments, defence and education. Leading frontier models are available through Azure AI Foundry, which helps to increase reliability by grounding responses in organisational data and applying governance and evaluation. It will be great to explore the solutions and agentic scenarios that can be built on top of that.
Customers have a lot of native information in existing investments like Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. They need the ability to extract this information and reason against it using their model of choice, with the freedom to shift when they want. That’s the tooling we’re building: a scaffolding that can be used across many different domains.
How are Microsoft’s partners adding to that picture?
I’mproud we have created a marketplace environment where our partners can thrive. Microsoft is effectively a tool builder and platform operator, and AI leaves so much space for industry-specific and cross-industry innovation on top of our platform.
One customer, the Abu Dhabi Digital Authority, has built a platform with around 1,300 citizen services – in effect rewriting the operating system of an entire city. We’re excited that we can bring components of this to any city that is thinking of re-platforming.
Our classic software development partners are also creating point solutions based on everything from geolocation to public safety and security. Examples include algorithms around bodycams, city cameras and traffic management and monitoring.
Sovereignty offers another big opportunity for our partners, many of whom are local players that are deeply trusted by government agencies as well as commercial customers. We are working to onboard those partners at scale so they can build and run hybrid, cybersecure cloud systems for customers, combining public cloud and Azure local private cloud components. We have the tooling for local players to build an Azure-compatible stack that allows them to develop solutions and lift and shift between public and private cloud, depending on what the client wants.
Looking ahead, where do you see AI solutions having the greatest impact?
No one can predict the future, but I expect cybersecurity and productivity to be the dominant forces.
In terms of cybersecurity, we’re coming out of a period where we’ve often struggled to contain most human-initiated threats. Now we’ll see more focus on AI-initiated and AI-defended threats. Microsoft will play an important role in reminding people of the cybersecurity realities in a world where threats are harder to hide.
We’ll also see an unlocking of business processes that operate at massive scale. There’s an opportunity for countries to focus on the diffusion of technology, to train people of all ages and transform their business processes.I’malready seeing the first proof points of productivity gainsand I think agentic workflows and transformation will lead to much more efficient, effective, citizen-oriented decision-making at every level of government.
Unlocking these opportunities quickly will involve a balance between risk and innovation. What excites me most about the public sector is that, for the large part, none of these organisations are competitors. That means we can share best practices quite freely. The more of these experiments we get, the more we can share, and if the tooling is easy to do, the solutions will be adopted. I think this will snowball because the barrier to entry is so low. That gives me a lot of hope for the future.
Discover more interviews like this in the Summer 2026 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox.