Recent article in The Economist highlighting an important paradigm shift whereby AI is flooding channels in the public sector. That is, there are various channels which governments provide to it’s citizens - complaints, legal filings, Freedom of Information Requests, etc. Those channels are now starting to flood and saturate.
This phenomenon hit Open Source Software (thenewstack.io) first. The knee jerk response from some projects has been to slam the doors shut to AI contributions. That’s one option but not a great one. Especially not for governments. Closing access to the modern state is not feasible, both politically or practically.
But this does mean the state must prepare and respond using the same AI tooling that is flooding it; It must build it’s own AI arc to survive or risk being swallowed whole by the deluge. Given how critical the state is to our collective lives, it’s arguably one of the most important missions out there and one I’m not sure I’ve seen get enough attention. It’s also a mission that, unfortunately, I have the least confidence in. Call me a cynic. But from where most government services sit, a radical AI adoption feels near hopeless. I hope I’m wrong and would love to contribute to the solution than simply call out the problem.
Bringing this closer to home, we should equally expect all channels in our businesses to begin to flood. Your users are slowly adopting AI capabilities and with that will come the power of AI advocacy. Support channels, sales channels, etc. They will all start to flood as ambient AI systems begin helping users to self-advocate.
The answer feels the same; a radical shift towards agentic capabilities. Whereas most business AI adoption initiatives that I’ve seen are about gaining efficiencies with modest improvements to SLAs, I think the experience of open source and governments points towards the need to not just incrementally improvement, but to outright survive. Put in this light, agentic adoption is no longer about improving margins but about retaining the very ability to operate in the new paradigm.
Grab an lifejacket. The water is rising.
Link: How AI is breaking the British state — The Economist