The Capgemini Research Institute’s report, Data foundations for government: From AI ambition to action, explores the public sector’s readiness today to realize the potential of its data estate – to improve decision-making, efficiency, and effectiveness – but also to harness AI to transform the future of government.

Key insights include:

• Most public sector organizations are already exploring or actively working on Gen AI initiatives, and 90% are planning to explore, pilot, or implement agentic AI in the next two to three years.
• To harness AI’s transformative power, governments need strong data foundations that ensure data availability, accessibility, quality, and governance, along with a scalable data infrastructure. Yet, fewer than 25% report high maturity in any aspect of data readiness, while only one-third of public sector organizations qualify as frontrunners in building data readiness.
• All public sector organizations we surveyed either have or plan to have data sharing initiatives, which are crucial to addressing complex, interconnected societal issues. However, the majority (65%) are still in the planning or pilot stages, and only 35% have rolled out or fully deployed data sharing initiatives.
• The majority of public sector organizations have concerns about sovereignty related to data (64% of organizations), cloud (58%), and AI (52%), highlighting their need to maintain agency and control in the digital sphere as they build their data and AI capabilities.

The report findings are based on a global survey of executives from 350 public sector organizations in countries across North America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East. The survey included government agencies at national, state, local, and international levels, covering public administration, tax and customs, welfare, defense, security, and healthcare.

Data foundations for government: From AI ambition to action provides leaders of government organizations, and the growing number of CDOs and CAIOs in public sector organizations, with a roadmap to bridging the gap between AI ambitions and data readiness. To learn more about how the transformative power of AI is reshaping government operations, download the Data foundations for government: From AI ambition to actionreport today.