Most government leaders say they outpace private sector on AI adoption, survey says

More than half of government leaders believe they are ahead of the private sector when it comes to adopting artificial intelligence and agentic AI tools, according to a recent survey.

Research by IDC for Salesforce released last week found that 82% of government organizations surveyed have already adopted AI agents, which can reason and act without human intervention. Sixty percent of those government leaders believe they are significantly or somewhat ahead of the private sector in adopting agentic AI.

And it would appear there is more to come, as 83% of those surveyed said AI agents are key to transforming their organizational structure and operations.

“Government leaders no longer see AI as a back-office experiment,” Paul Tatum, Salesforce’s executive vice president of public sector solutions, said in a statement. “They see it as a critical pillar of national competitiveness and service delivery. In today’s landscape, integrating agentic AI is now mission critical.”

Agentic AI has been seen for some time as a new frontier for technology companies and their public-sector clients, who say they want to augment their employees’ capabilities and change their workflows away from menial tasks towards more meaningful work. And while some government leaders appear to have approached this new phase of AI with some caution, adoption looks likely to accelerate.

The IDC survey found that 71% of government organizations plan to increase their use of agentic AI in the next year, and they believe it will be transformational. More than half said AI will have a greater impact than the internet and cloud computing, 51% said it will have a greater impact than the PC and 46% said it will be more transformative than the smartphone.

The vast majority — 94% —said they believe AI agents will fundamentally transform the nature of work, while 83% believe agentic AI will transform service delivery and operating models.

Some governments are already leaning in hard, like the city of Kyle, Texas, which launched its “Agent Kyle” last year to help with 311 customer service calls. AI agents are already deployed in other governments supporting caseworkers with on public benefits and helping them spend less time on menial administrative tasks, with other leaders promising there is more to come after they spent time readying themselves for the technology.

“I definitely think one of the things that's driving public sector innovation here is a combination of things that came before,” James McClain, acting chief technology officer for the All of Us program at the National Institutes of Health, said during a press briefing at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in Washington, D.C. last week. “We put a lot of energy into technology readiness, technology enablement, cloud adoption, things that were getting us positioned for being able to take the next step and use tools like this.”

McClain said it may be easier for government agencies at all levels to use AI and adopt agents as they have a more limited amount of uses for the technology and can share them across agencies and departments. Doing that, he said, cuts across agency portfolios and missions.

“The private sector has got a million different things they have to deliver on,” he said. “There's a critical mass of concentration of common use cases [in government]. What you end up seeing is we can gain some acceleration, because we're all working on a suite of commonalities of use cases, whether they be around data automation, process automation, customer support, those things are a place where there's tremendous opportunity, and it goes across sectors.”

And there is evidence that adoption and continued use of technology will dramatically shape the future of government work. The IDC survey found that 89% of government leaders believe that, by 2030, humans will work side-by-side with AI agents, while 74% said they expect most human employees to have an AI agent reporting to them within five years.

Majorities said they believe agentic AI will transform their organizational structure (83%), and spur the creation of entirely new teams and departments (74%). More than half (59%) also said they believe the technology will increase the size of certain teams and departments, while 57% believe AI will increase the need for people in leadership positions. Most (91%) said they think around three-quarters of their workforce will step into brand new roles, while 92% expect a similar number of jobs to be fundamentally transformed.

If government agencies are to be successful in using AI to its full potential and realizing some of those ambitions, it needs buy-in from leaders who must see its use as a “core competency,” said Mia Jordan, Salesforce’s global go-to market AI executive and industry advisor.

“Contrast that with how government has typically operated when some new technology becomes available, and it's based on a very small use case, or maybe a large use case in an agency, but only the people directly involved with that grant program or that loan program or that benefit program actually get to use and touch that technology,” Jordan said during the media briefing. “Everyone else in the government or in that department is excluded from ever leveraging that technology.”