3 reasons why the US government should lean on data and AI efficiency

Elon Musk revolutionized products in the auto industry. No one brand since the Model T and Henry Ford has had such a profound impact on design thinking, efficiency, and innovation all running in parallel. Tesla cars can be updated 40 times more frequently than the giants in the industry. He’s done the same in space. Who thought commercial and national space programs could be brought together in such a way?

Innovation and efficiency go hand in hand going forward, and it marks a critical moment for government agencies to take stock around three core principles.

1. The idea of the digital citizen is now

Citizens are consumers and consumers are citizens. People now expect an Amazon-like experience from every brand and organization, including their government, in terms of how fluid, personalized, secure, and efficient it is. Considering how ubiquitous the Amazon model is, we should expect that same vision for our agencies as they look to deliver to the digital citizen.

AI-powered co-pilots, both within agencies and in customer-facing roles, could optimize processes and personalize interactions, raising citizen satisfaction as much as enterprises that see revenue lifts of 5 to 25% through personalization. Like a Tesla, these become intelligent systems that learn, adapt and deliver extraordinary value.

2. No avoiding the open-source future

Open-source platforms represent a powerful solution for government organizations as they securely and efficiently unify disparate data sources. Tesla’s approach — leveraging its vehicle data for dozens of annual upgrades — is an example of this in action. Governments sit on vast amounts of underutilized, unstructured data, but with open-source technologies and collaborative data architectures, agencies can maximize data utility, achieving sovereign data and AI while tapping into vast resources. The result? A government that’s as responsive as any leading-edge private organization.

3. Change: the only constant

In The Digital Helix, the best-selling book on digital transformation, one of the key DNA indicators for success is the idea that change is a constant. AI, open source, and an increasingly complex world means we have to abandon legacy ideas and infrastructure in order to deliver more citizen centric solutions. Organizations executing like this are five times more likely to be optimistic about their futures and three times more profitable because of it.

Adaptability isn’t just a mantra, it’s a way of life for governments going forward, and this melding of open source, AI and data sovereignty, and delivery to the citizen as consumer will drive a new efficiency agenda. It could be really exciting. “Citizens and consumers are the same,” says the book’s author Michael Gale. “They expect governments to be efficient and as innovative as the brands they love and work with every day.”

Putting the efficiency and innovation agenda into action

With disruption now the norm rather than the exception, governments need to rethink business as usual and prepare for business as disrupted. Government leaders should plan for continuous disruption and for how their agencies and departments will operate under continuous turbulence and change.

In my book, The Adaptive Government: Preparing for Disruption in the Age of AI, Pandemics and Climate Change, I define an adaptive government as able to rapidly respond to change with intrinsic agility across both digital and physical aspects of its mission and operating model to continuously maximize benefits for stakeholders.

Traditional business continuity and disaster recovery playbooks are no longer sufficient. Governments, therefore, need to not only transform their business models, processes, and services, but create an adaptive government, like an adaptive enterprise, at their core, so support for change and intrinsic agility is engineered into current and future operations.

The theory is straight-forward. Rather than being on the digital transformation treadmill and always transforming and reacting to change after the fact, let’s build more adaptability into how government agencies operate today so we can innovate preemptively. Much like the US military’s defense readiness condition (DEFCON) system — which prescribes five levels of readiness in terms of states of alert — this intrinsic ability to change makes it far easier and faster to react to dynamically changing and unpredictable conditions.

The tools to implement this change are here today. They consist of both physical and digital enablers of adaptability, and include items such as modular design and construction, intelligent sensors, robotics and drones, AI/ML, blockchain and smart contracts, intelligent automation and RPA, digital twins, and much more.

As societal goals and corresponding government services evolve over time, intrinsic agility, built into the way governments operate and deliver services to citizens, will enable even faster responses to the changing needs of the population.

We’ve explored how adaptability is key to unlock efficiency for government organizations. It’s equally important on the innovation side to strategize and implement this adaptability with an “adaptive-first” mindset to prepare for the unknowns, exceptions, and moonshots. While innovation is often dismissed or overlooked in terms of cost-cutting, it can actually be the key part of the solution alongside efficiency gains due to having a more adaptive government engineered in.