Modern service delivery relies on trustworthy, responsible government, leaders say

The past year has brought sweeping AI innovations across state and local governments in the U.S. From benefits administration to filling prescriptions, governments are finding new ways to implement the technology to serve residents. 

Speaking during a Future Nation webcast hosted by Route Fifty and Google Public Sector last week, Stephen Miller, chief technology officer for Washington, D.C. said a responsible, comprehensive approach to AI in government service delivery is crucial to build staff capacity and residents’ trust in their leaders. 

“Because it's their taxpayer money, we want to make sure we're putting the investments where [residents] want to see improvements,” he said, adding that doing so “helps people to find government services that are [and] that could be very important to them.” 

When government fails to deliver adequate and effective service, “that’s going to break [AI] adoption” when people lose faith in its capabilities, Miller said. 

DC looks to AI guidance, training to steer service delivery

In February 2024, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser released an order that established the city’s AI Values and AI Strategic Plan, which remains the “foundation of how we approach every decision that we're making” for AI in government, said Miller. 

The plan directs city agencies to adhere to six core values when using AI: clear benefit to residents; safety and equity; accountability; transparency; sustainability; and privacy and cybersecurity. With those values, the D.C. government this year is prioritizing the “fundamentals” of AI, such as governance, data soundness and workforce readiness, Miller said. 

The city became the first U.S. municipality to mandate AI training for staff in February 2026, a core part of which was ensuring city workers “understood the AI values that we’re looking to align to,” he explained. 

The city partnered with InnovateUS to administer the self-paced training program. Approximately 26,650 people — or 75% of the D.C. government — went through the training, including several of the city’s vendors, and shared positive feedback with leadership, according to Miller. 

Staff have since focused on enhancing the city’s 311 service app, a self-service tool that residents can use to search for government resources and request assistance, he said. The city is using AI to track and monitor customer satisfaction, such as identifying top service requests and call times, to inform future improvements. 

Indiana’s customer experience a foundation 

Since Robert Fulk became state chief information officer for Indiana in 2023, he said service delivery improvement began with modernizing internal state systems, moving them from a “monolithic approach to state data centers into the cloud.” 

Doing so has positioned Indiana to leverage cloud technology to enable the use and deployment of artificial intelligence in resident-facing services and staff tools. Indiana leaders, Fulk explained, view AI as a force multiplier to “reduce costs, improve customer experience and drive innovation and efficiency.”  

Those leaders initially took a “top-down” approach to service delivery modernization, but Fulk underscored that state officials should first let “customers tell us what they need and want out of our services, how they want to interact with us, what they expect from us — and that drove our innovation … and our modernization.” 

As an example, he pointed to a statewide business portal that debuted this summer in Indiana. Prior to its launch, state officials dedicated a year and a half to customer experience research to determine what resources residents in the state needed most when starting a business. 

Officials learned that people struggled to find things like funding resources, state employee or organization contact details and licensing information, Fulk explained. Those findings helped Fulk and his organization develop an AI-enabled virtual agent that guides users to specific resources, state agencies and other services that support their business development and growth efforts. 

What’s in store for service delivery’s future

Looking ahead, Indiana is prioritizing “embedding more AI because we’re on a fast track to modernization,” Fulk said. Like several other states, Indiana sees call center operations as an ideal testing ground for more modern solutions like AI-enabled response tools.

More broadly, with a modernized cloud infrastructure, “it’s much quicker [and] cheaper for us to deploy more agents,” he explained, adding that Indiana will also be exploring how to connect such agents across state agencies. 

To support sustainable and efficient innovation, the AI models will “need to talk to each other, just like human beings across the state need to talk to each other,” Fulk said. 

In D.C., “our mandatory training cohort ended right in July, but that doesn't mean training stopped,” Miller said.

“New tools are coming online every day, and we want to make sure that we're continuously training our employees and our workforce on an ongoing basis because that [AI] landscape is going to change in the blink of an eye and the snap of a finger … These tools can be more impactful, and as long as we keep that continuous cycle going with training, we know we're going to see better outcomes,” he explained. 

The city, for instance, recently launched a beta version of D.C.’s redesigned website, which includes Google’s AI technology to enhance search responsiveness for residents using the webpage, Miller said. 

Building service delivery for sustainable, scalable success

State and local governments should not try “boiling the ocean” when it comes to service delivery and modernization, Fulk said. “You really got to find particular use cases, small successes and wins, and build from those.” 

Indiana is seeing gains in staff productivity with AI tools that assist with licensing processes, Fulk said. Indeed, the technology has helped reduce staff review times of licensing applications and documents by 50% to 70%, he said. 

D.C. officials are also turning to performance data based on tracking metrics that monitor, for example, residents’ interactions and time spent using city services, Miller said. Staff have also reported that tools like Copilot and Claude are helping save two to three hours during their work week. 

Fulk recognized that state tech leaders face common roadblocks to modernization and innovation, like developing governance, guardrails and security protocols, but “that takes you a week or two to put together,” he said, asking, “What are you doing the other 50 weeks of the year?”