107 PUBLIC SECTOR Providing reliable citizen services requires huge administrative effort at every level of government. Citizens want more flexibility, accessibility and visibility from public services, while the departments delivering them face constant pressure to do more with less. Many organisations are turning to AI to help – Gartner predicts at least 80 per cent of governments will be using AI agents to automate routine decisionmaking by 2028. But disparate AI projects tend not to deliver the desired results. “Many governments don’t struggle to start AI projects; the challenge is turning early wins into something the institution can run on,” says John Doyle, senior director of worldwide government, defence and intelligence at Microsoft. “Typically, one department launches a pilot, another picks different tooling, a third sets up its own governance, and in many cases projects can become isolated. That can create enterprise-level complexity with only departmental-level impact, leaving citizens with multiple front doors to get one answer.” And the workforce sees AI as something IT is experimenting with, not something the organisation runs on.” In addition, many governments tend to focus on AI as a tool to rapidly surface risks, recommendations and operational signals. But when those insights are left languishing in dashboards or disconnected systems, they can’t drive effective actions. Instead, they emphasise another challenge lurking in the cracks – decision latency. “Insight alone doesn’t improve outcomes – decisions do,” says Doyle. “Decision latency occurs when there is a gap between knowing and acting. AI didn’t create it. AI exposed it and it shows up everywhere: emergency response, cybersecurity, permitting, benefits administration and infrastructure resilience. Often the problem isn’t whether someone had the right information. It’s whether the institution could move on it fast enough. Delays between insight and action erode trust, especially when people see the institution knows something but isn’t acting.” There is an alternative. When governments take an organisation-wide view of AI strategy, they have the potential to transform citizen experiences, empower workers and support reliable and compliant operations at scale. “Governments that are advancing in this area often treat AI less like a portfolio of experiments and more like shared infrastructure: shared identity, governance and security and a consistent way for data and decisions The City of Burlington in Canada has rebuilt its permitting experience around residents instead of departments Photo: AdobeStock/salil
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