Government trends 2025: 5 priorities reshaping the public sector
The top government trends for 2025 include growing citizen expectations, adoption of AI, and advancing equity in the public sector.
Known as “the crossroads of the nation” for its proximity to some of the country’s busiest transportation routes, the small Missouri city of Wentzville could just as easily have earned that nickname for staking out new territory at the intersection of artificial intelligence technology and the citizen experience.
Wentzville, a town of about 47,000, is using generative AI tools to streamline communications with its citizens, according to reports. It’s in a small minority of municipalities that are actively using genAI, and a good example of AI use cases in government.
AI gives cities and other government entities a powerful new set of tools to fulfill what has been a longstanding goal for many in public services: to enrich the citizen experience.
5 AI uses cases in the government
Public agencies must explore how AI can benefit their constituents, says Anthony A. Fisher, head of data governance and artificial intelligence with Colorado’s Department of Revenue.
“AI holds the key to unlocking a plethora of services that otherwise may be impossible to implement within government,” he says.
The challenge is identifying use cases that are likeliest to deliver value, without exposing the agency or its constituents to undue risk.
Based on my experience supporting public agencies in their AI journeys, here are five of the most compelling government use cases for the technology today:
- Creating a single, 360-degree profile of citizens to better understand their preferences and needs
- Predicting citizen needs to provide personalized services
- Simplifying, accelerating and automating services with a mobile-enabled platform
- Handling mass requests, during a crisis and otherwise
- Listening + taking action to improve the citizen experience
1. Modernizing government with AI-supported citizen profiles
As part of an effort to modernize how it interacts with citizens, the city of Christchurch, New Zealand centralized customer data to create a single, unified identity and view of each of its citizens.
To do so, it began shifting away from the siloed legacy systems on which it had been relying in favor of a centralized, AI-supported system for managing data.
Now citizens will enjoy the convenience of using a single digital identity to access city offices and services whether interacting as a citizen or a business. This kind of comprehensive profile is one of the top AI use cases in government.
2. AI use case in government: Personalization
With a 360-degree view of its citizens, Christchurch can offer highly personalized service recommendations generated by AI models, like how AI generates tailored suggestions for retail customers.
Using AI tools, public agencies can automate delivery of personalized recommendations and communications, such as providing parents with information about school registration, parks and recreation programs, and summer camps for their kids. While interacting with citizens, gen AI can feed service reps relevant, real-time information, along with suggested best next actions, to help resolve issues.
Intelligent assistants also can translate agency communications into multiple languages and know exactly whom among their citizenry to send those communications, and in which language.
3. Automating services with mobile-enabled tech
Giving citizens access to a mobile-enabled, gen AI-supported digital platform can make interactions with agencies painless and is another top AI use case in government.
This works by gathering information from citizens (with the help of document information extraction using optical character recognition), recording it in a form and database, then processing it to trigger an outcome, such as renewing a vehicle registration or a driver’s license.
Natural language processing can streamline application and service requests, enable self-service for basic inquiries, and point users toward the right agency resources, regardless of the communications channel they use.
Service teams are relieved of tedious, time-consuming processes because AI automatically categorizes, routes and responds to various types of inquiries and issues, with templates to ensure consistency of responses to simple inquiries. It also identifies and routes cases that require human intervention.
Mobile, multichannel access is critical to the usability of platforms like this. In San Diego, residents can use the city’s “Get It Done” app to report non-emergency issues like potholes or graffiti, with the ability to upload a photo in real time to document the issue. As one reviewer described it, the app is “much better than filling a form out on some obscure city website, drafting an email or god forbid, having to call someone.”
Citizens want a connected public sector, especially in times of crisis
A connected public sector is critical, especially during a crisis. Organizations need tools to get employees and constituents the resources required to respond quickly and work toward recovery.
4. Using AI for crisis handling
When COVID hit, the city of Hamburg, Germany, volunteered its services to the German finance ministry, offering to quickly develop and launch a platform for processing aid applications from artists across the entire country who were struggling financially because of the pandemic.
Three weeks later, the platform, driven by AI-based decision support and automation, was live, rapidly, securely and accurately evaluating and classifying some 2.7 million documents from a wide range of sources and trafficking applications from initial filing to payout.
All told, those AI capabilities saved an estimated 13,000 to 33,000 hours of manual work. The platform performed so well, in fact, that it’s being adapted to other use cases in Hamburg and across Germany.
5. With AI, get better at listening to citizens
One of AI’s strengths is conducting sentiment analysis of opinion data from structured and unstructured sources such as surveys and social media, then sharing insights that agencies can act upon to improve the citizen experience. By understanding citizen concerns and priorities, government agencies can build trust with the community.
As promising as AI use cases like this are, their success depends largely on solid preparation. That includes ensuring your AI software meets strict cybersecurity standards and is being fed relevant, high-quality data, and taking a measured approach by piloting AI in targeted use cases before integrating it more broadly.
You’ll also need to enact a clear set of AI ethics and governance policies and provide training to employees on how to use the AI tools at hand. And finally, seek out support from your peers. Groups like the GovAI Coalition are giving representatives from local, county and state governments across the country a forum to help one another succeed with AI.
