When AI advancements occur in finance and education, the media notices. FinTech promises to reinvent money, while EdTech can reinvent learning. Both attract heavy venture capital and constant media attention.
Yet a third pillar of daily life, government, is quietly undergoing its own AI revolution.
GovTech doesn’t trend on social media, but it shapes how billions of citizens pay taxes, access benefits and prove their identity. The irony is striking. Governments are among the largest service providers in the world, yet their technology stories rarely make headlines.
The reason is partly perception: Startups are celebrated as innovators, while public agencies are dismissed as slow and bureaucratic. Procurement cycles are lengthy, and success often looks incremental.
Yet GovTech is already one of AI’s most transformative frontiers.
The Overlooked Sector
GovTech faces several key hurdles in gaining attention and investment.
First, the funding narrative. Investors flock to sectors where revenue growth is visible and rapid. Governments, with their cautious adoption and procurement hurdles, don’t fit that mold.
Second, the optics problem. A new digital bank is easy to market; a digital land registry system is not.
Third, political complexity. Public technology projects are tied to elections, policies and long-term accountability, raising the regulatory stakes, making them less glamorous.
Yet the impact is undeniable. According to the World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index, as of 2023, 63% of the 198 economies surveyed have digital government strategies that reference a whole-of-government approach as part of a public-sector modernization plan. The OECD likewise stresses that governments are uniquely positioned to deploy AI not only for efficiency, but for inclusion and accountability, if properly governed.
In other words, GovTech may not attract the most venture dollars, but it already shapes the lives of more people than any commercial app ever could.
From Digital IDs To Citizen Services
What does AI in government actually look like? The applications are surprisingly diverse.
Efficiency is the most obvious benefit of AI in the government. Automated workflows reduce backlogs, and predictive analytics help allocate resources. Digital assistants free up staff for complex tasks.
GovTech also plays a crucial role in improving the daily lives of citizens. In Vietnam, smart city initiatives in Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City are applying AI to traffic control, e-government and pollution monitoring. Da Nang’s Intelligent Operations Centre, for example, uses AI and blockchain to process most administrative procedures online and supports a 24/7 public-service chatbot. Such projects position emerging economies as test beds for scalable AI solutions to global urban challenges.
Similarly, India’s Aadhaar and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) show how overcoming legacy systems enables leapfrogging to advanced governance. Together, they form part of the India Stack of identity, payments and digital records.
But the real disruptor may be transparency. AI-driven audit trails, explainable decision models and digital logs make processes more visible to citizens. The World Bank has showcased how AI/ML can transform messy procurement data into analyzable formats and help identify red flags, work that’s now influencing reforms.
This is critical in an era of declining trust: The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that government remains one of the least trusted institutions worldwide, with skepticism about competence and fairness at record levels. AI, if applied responsibly, can help reverse that trend by making governance efficient, auditable and fair.
How GovTech Can Facilitate Trust
Despite the promise, GovTech faces real risks. Algorithms trained on incomplete or biased data can amplify inequality, such as welfare eligibility algorithms in the Netherlands that wrongly flagged families for fraud, leading to financial and social harm.
Biometric databases also raise concerns about surveillance and misuse. Kenya’s Huduma Namba digital ID project sparked legal challenges over fears of exclusion, data security and government overreach. Without safeguards, such systems risk eroding trust and civil liberties.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation enshrines a “right to explanation,” but many governments lack such recourse, leaving citizens vulnerable to opaque algorithms that decide access to credit, healthcare or benefits. Without checks, errors or biases, risk scaling unchecked across entire populations.
Without governance, AI could entrench systemic biases instead of eliminating them. The GovTech sector must therefore pair innovation with safeguards: explainability, citizen engagement and independent oversight.
Reframing The Narrative
GovTech is not loud. It doesn’t produce viral apps or billion-dollar IPOs. But its impact is profound.
Every time a citizen accesses welfare, verifies credentials abroad or trains for a new job on a government learning management system, GovTech is at work. If FinTech reshaped how we spend and EdTech reshaped how we learn, GovTech is quietly reshaping how we trust.
To gain traction, the sector must highlight human outcomes over technical features, build cross-sector partnerships that validate impact and adopt shared benchmarks that measure equity and trust, not just efficiency. By embedding safeguards and telling its story through citizens’ lives, GovTech can shift from being invisible infrastructure to being recognized as the infrastructure of trust.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Trushant Mehta
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: Forbes, 15.10.2025
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