29 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. This isn’t about 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 that it’s pretty much the perfect 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’s incredible 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 is a great place to 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.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=