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Government agencies have long aimed to offer services tailored to individuals—requiring minimal effort, anticipating needs, and delivered proactively. Services such as the United Kingdom’s Tell Us Once, Texas by Texas in the United States, and Singapore’s LifeSG have advanced that vision. But truly customized services at scale have remained difficult because they run against the siloed structure of most organizations. Today, smart technology—especially agentic AI—makes individuated services at scale increasingly achievable.

Over the past decade, agencies have built digital foundations—cloud infrastructure, data exchanges, and digital identity. Layering agentic AI on top of these foundations can transform service delivery into customized platforms: systems that match individual needs to the right services, securely access data across agencies, and guide users through end-to-end journeys.

For individuals, the promise is simpler experiences—clearer eligibility, real-time status updates, and fewer touchpoints. For governments, the payoff is more targeted services delivered more efficiently, improving outcomes while reducing costs.

Signals: Customized for constituents

  • According to the United Nations, 94 countries reported explicit AI references in their national e-government strategies between 2022 and 2024.1 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s AI repository catalogs roughly 200 government AI use cases worldwide.2
  • Many governments have already built the digital infrastructure required for customized service platforms. As of December 2025, at least 64 countries have adopted digital identity systems aligned with digital public infrastructure (DPI) principles. Digital payments with DPI characteristics exist in 97 countries, and more than 100 countries operate DPI-style data exchange platforms.3
  • Early examples of customized services are emerging. After the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, AI tools in Japan analyzed social media and environmental data to deliver verified, real-time insights.4 In 2025, Portugal’s Gov.pt portal launched a gen AI-powered assistant covering more than 2,300 services, enabling multilingual guidance, process tracking, and appointment scheduling.5

Trend in action

Now: The data foundations are already laid

Customized services depend on high-quality, connected data—often spread across multiple agencies. Anticipating needs requires systems that can securely access and combine data without centralizing it in one vulnerable repository.

Data exchanges play a pivotal role. Through application programming interfaces, agencies can access the information required to deliver requested services while preserving control and consent.

In the United States, a 2025 executive order accelerated intra- and inter-agency data-sharing, increasing demand for cross-agency integration platforms.6 Similar shifts are underway globally.7

The European Union’s Once-Only Technical System enables agencies to request verified records across borders—such as diplomas or licenses—after secure identity verification and consent.8 Data moves directly between authorities, reducing duplication and error.9 With this system, cross-border services—such as studying, working, registering a car, or claiming a pension—may be faster and less error-prone within the EU single market.10

Singapore’s APEX national data exchange and Estonia’s X-Road demonstrate how national data exchange platforms can enable secure, real-time information-sharing while maintaining agency control. These platforms ensure that data is encrypted, digitally signed, time-stamped, and logged; authentication happens at the organization and system levels.11 The X-Road data exchange has been deployed in more than 20 countries.12

New: AI and super apps are improving experiences

Building on these foundations, governments are using AI and super apps to redesign public interactions.

Ireland’s MyWelfare platform integrates cross-agency data to support benefit applications, personal updates, and automated decisions for straightforward cases. By late 2024, more than 83% of illness benefit claims and 98% of treatment benefit claims were auto-awarded—significantly accelerating processing times for citizens.13

Spain’s My Citizen Folder provides a unified interface across multiple agencies, allowing users to track applications, receive personalized notifications, and access official documents through web, chat, and mobile channels.14

AI is not simply digitizing paper processes—it enables new service designs. As Ukraine’s former minister of digital transformation has noted, the goal is not to replicate bureaucracy digitally, but to create new services that improve outcomes.15 In other words, the focus should be on improving citizen outcomes, not just on streamlining processes.

Yet, customized services still challenge traditional structures. Agencies are organized by function and domain, while individuals’ needs often cut across boundaries. Enter AI agents, built around workflows and outcomes rather than departments or functions. They don’t need to cut across silos—they operate outside them—thereby helping to overcome structural constraints (figure 1).

Next: AI agents help reorient service delivery

Many digital leaders are already exploring how AI agents can make services more customized, composable, and proactive.

Imagine incorporating a business. Instead of navigating multiple sites, an AI agent gathers required information, auto-completes forms, and submits filings through a single interaction. Similar coordination can extend to tax filings, licensing, or benefits access.

Platforms such as India’s UMANG, Ukraine’s Diia, and Ireland’s MyWelfare already provide multichannel access to services. What changes with AI agents is the ability to coordinate tasks autonomously across organizational boundaries.

Estonia’s Bürokratt illustrates this shift. It connects a network of virtual assistants across government sites, allowing users to ask questions and complete tasks through secure, supervised AI workflows.16 Built on Estonia’s digital identity and data exchange infrastructure, these agents collaborate to retrieve verified data and execute actions within defined guardrails.17

Enablers and accelerators

Despite the promise of personalized delivery, significant adoption hurdles remain. Four foundations are key:

  • Leadership and governance
    Senior leaders should champion modernization, reduce tech debt, and align cross-agency priorities to enable coordinated delivery. By prioritizing technology upgrades, agencies can free themselves from tech debt and create an environment where innovative solutions, including AI, can thrive.
  • A flexible technology stack
    Customized services depend on interoperable layers: identity, payments, data exchange, orchestration APIs, and user interfaces. Each layer of this stack should be extensive enough to grow with demand but also open enough to operate across layers and agencies.
  • Flexible acquisition
    Keeping the tech flexible also means keeping procurement flexible. Procurement approaches should accommodate software-driven services and evolving technologies while encouraging market awareness and ecosystem participation.
  • Operational redesign
    Workflows should be redesigned to support cross-agency coordination, data protection, and rapid onboarding of new tools without vendor lock-in.

Toward 2030: The future this trend could unlock

AI agents are a tool, not the goal. The deeper shift is toward outcome-focused service delivery that connects individuals to the right services at the right time—regardless of where the services originate.

Integrated public-private delivery: Customized service platforms can extend beyond government, allowing trusted partners such as universities, hospitals, or nonprofits to deliver services through shared APIs and verified data exchanges.

Abu Dhabi’s TAMM platform offers a glimpse of this model. TAMM deploys several AI agents on a data exchange layer to map users’ life events to more than 1,000 services from over 90 public and private service providers through a unified workflow.18 Vehicle owners can renew licenses, pay traffic fines, and compare and buy motor insurance from private companies in one place. Entrepreneurs can apply for licenses specific to their industry and geography, open new business accounts, and link existing ones within one workflow.19

Agent-to-agent delivery: Agent-to-agent communication allows agents to exchange data and trigger actions without the need for manual handoffs, reducing processing time. The MIT Media Lab’s Project NANDA is developing protocols that allow agent-to-agent coordination.20 Over time, this could allow every individual to have a personal agent that could work with government agents to execute common tasks simply by asking, for example, “register my business” or “pay my tax bill.”

The result is not simply faster services, but fewer touchpoints, clearer journeys, and broader access across public and private providers.

by

Jaimie Boyd

Deloitte Canada

Yousef Barkawie

Deloitte Middle East

Rajiv Gupta

Deloitte United States

Joe Mariani

Deloitte United States

Sushumna Agarwal

Deloitte India

Endnotes

  1. Junho Lee, “Addendum on AI and digital government,” 2024 E-Government Survey (New York: United Nations, 2024), pp. 159–171.

  2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “Governing with artificial intelligence,” Sept. 18, 2025. 

  3. Jordyn Fetter, Krisstina Rao, and David Eaves, “2025 state of digital public infrastructure report: A look at measurement and prevalence as DPI transitions from experiment to scale,” UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, October 2025.

  4. JR DeLaney, “AI for good: Revolutionizing disaster response & community resilience,” Medium, June 14, 2025; Japanese humanitarian organizations have used Spectee Pro to tap crowdsourced intelligence during natural disasters; see University College London School of Management, “School of Management and Tohoku University launch DOTS research initiative,” July 23, 2025.

  5. OECD, “Governing with artificial intelligence.”

  6. The White House, “Stopping waste, fraud, and abuse by eliminating information silos,” March 20, 2025.

  7. Australian Government Office of the National Data Commissioner, “Introducing the DATA Scheme,” last modified on Aug. 7, 2025.

  8. European Commission, “EU member states celebrate go-live of the Once-Only Technical System,” Dec. 12, 2023.

  9. European Commission, “The Once-Only Technical System is creating a cross-sector data space,” accessed Dec. 8, 2025.

  10. European Commission, “Once-Only Technical System (OOTS),” Feb. 13, 2024.

  11. GovTech Singapore, “Fact sheet: APEX: A centralised data sharing portal for Singapore’s public sector,” November 2022; Taavi Kotka, “X-Road: The backbone of Estonia’s digital society,” accessed Dec. 8, 2025.

  12. European Commission, “X-Road data exchange layer,” accessed Dec. 8, 2025.

  13. Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, “Better public services article: Department of Social Protection Delivering Digital Public Services,” Government of Ireland, March 19, 2025. 

  14. La Moncloa, “Mi Carpeta Ciudadana launches a message center to receive personalized notices such as scholarships, subsidies or document expiration,” Aug. 4, 2025. 

  15. Joe Mariani et al., “The building blocks of monumental government service delivery,” Deloitte Insights, Feb. 29, 2024.

  16. Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs of Estonia, “Virtual assistant Bürokratt,” accessed Dec. 8, 2025.

  17. Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs of Estonia, “Reusable AI components,” accessed Dec. 8, 2025.

  18. Department of Government Enablement of Abu Dhabi, “Abu Dhabi unveils world’s first AI public servant at GITEX Global 2025.” Oct. 14, 2025.

  19. Tamm - Abu Dhabi Government, “Abu Dhabi government services,” accessed Dec. 8, 2025.

  20. Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Networked Agents and Decentralized AI, “NANDA: The internet of AI agents,” accessed Dec. 8, 2025.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank William D. Eggers and Adithi Pandit for their thoughtful feedback on the draft. The authors would also like to thank Nick Holmes, director of sustainable infrastructure and transportation, ServiceNow, for his valuable input in the “My take” section.

Editorial (including production and copyediting): Kavita Majumdar, Rupesh Bhat, Aparna Prusty, Shyamili M., Anu Augustine, Cintia Cheong, and Pubali Dey

Design: Molly Piersol

Cover image by: Meena Sonar and Sonya Vasilieff

Knowledge Services: Rishitha Bichapogu

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