Built to deliver: Nine trends advancing government’s capacity to deliver on big things
Governments around the globe are addressing contemporary challenges and enhancing public services through the strategic use of technology, innovation, and collaboration
Government leaders worldwide grapple with formidable delivery challenges as they strive to bridge the chasm between lofty ambitions—be it more affordable housing, energy resilience, or economic prosperity—and the stark reality of limitations in governmental capacity. This challenge is not merely about executing large-scale initiatives or investing in infrastructure; it is about fundamentally transforming governance mechanisms to improve speed, effectiveness, and efficiency.
In an era marked by escalating citizen expectations and the whirlwind of rapid technological advancements, often unpredictable in nature, the pressure on governments to deliver has never been more acute.1 This is not simply a call for improved governance; it is a clarion call to revolutionarily change public management paradigms. Governments must become more agile and responsive, equipped to tackle the multifaceted challenges of our modern world.
The quest to close the gap between promise and performance is now a central focus for many government leaders worldwide, as they seek to enhance capacity and redefine what it means to govern effectively in the 21st century.
The evolving delivery challenge
Government’s delivery challenge is hardly new. Delivering results has long been central to the legitimacy of governments. Starting several decades ago, many countries began developing highly structured approaches to improve execution across government, with a focus on addressing the gap between policy design and implementation.2
In the United States, in 2001, the President’s Management Agenda laid the foundation for improving government efficiency, emphasizing accountability and execution.3 The same year, the United Kingdom established the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit to monitor and accelerate the implementation of public service reform.4 Numerous other countries—including Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and Costa Rica—emulated the delivery-unit model.5 These units focused on delivering measurable outcomes and introduced performance metrics to improve public service delivery.6
While these early efforts achieved some success, political attention to delivery diminished over time, and many governments shut down their delivery units within a few years.7
Delivery excellence has once again risen to the top of many political leaders’ agendas.8 Today, however, governments are operating in a vastly different environment, encountering a range of factors that offer both challenges and opportunities for enhancing delivery mechanisms.
- Waning public confidence: Governments across the globe are navigating turbulent waters as they confront the dual challenge of rising citizen expectations and diminishing trust in large institutions. This erosion of public confidence can stifle innovation and constrain the very actions needed to address pressing societal issues.9 Governments have the opportunity to incrementally enhance public trust through consistent, transparent, accountable, efficient, and empathetic actions. By focusing on these principles, governments can demonstrate their capability to effectively deliver services and meet the needs of the public.
- Digital expectations: Despite improvements, government digital services generally still lag the private sector.10 In response to rapidly accelerating digital expectations, many governments have become more laser-focused on customer experience and digital delivery.11 By crafting efficient, engaging, and user-friendly digital interactions, governments can empower citizens with seamless access to services and facilitate the execution of desired transactions.12
- Emergence of artificial intelligence: The emergence of artificial intelligence signifies a transformative era for public service delivery. AI is poised to revolutionize the delivery of programs, services, and initiatives, offering unprecedented opportunities for productivity and efficiency gains. Agencies that invest in scaling AI capabilities, enhancing data accessibility, and ensuring trustworthy AI are well-positioned to thrive in this AI-driven landscape. Conversely, those that fail to embrace these advancements risk falling behind.13
- Complex cross-boundary challenges: The complexity of today’s most pressing challenges transcends traditional boundaries, demanding collaborative solutions that extend beyond the capabilities of government or the private sector alone. Governments that are willing to forge partnerships across sectors and leverage the strengths of diverse entities can significantly enhance mission effectiveness.14
To navigate the complexities of the modern era, governments should embrace transformative shifts that cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, accountability, and innovation. Central to this transformation is effective leadership—leaders who champion change and embed a results-oriented mindset that permeates every level of government. This mindset must prioritize adaptability, ensuring that government entities remain agile in the face of evolving challenges.
Tools of the trade: A broad portfolio of strategies to advance government delivery
In researching for Government Trends 2025, we found that governments worldwide, across levels, are leveraging a variety of tools and strategies to tackle some of the biggest delivery challenges, from the policy-execution gap and speeding delivery to tackling complex cross-border challenges and building digital delivery capacity.
Closing the policy-execution gap: The root of many delivery challenges is the gap between policy design and implementation, when policy design is disconnected from the implementation process.15 One issue: There is a structural separation between policymaking and operational delivery; policy is developed by one team, implemented by another, and monitored by yet another—often with limited communication among these groups.16 To address this longstanding issue, governments are employing new technologies, data insights, agile development, cocreation, and behavioral insights to enhance policy effectiveness.17 Broward County in Florida uses digital twins to predict extreme weather impacts on infrastructure for better planning,18 while the United Kingdom’s Behavioral Insights team boosted pension enrollment by making it automatic rather than optional.19
Speeding delivery: Outdated bureaucratic processes and structures and multiple layers of regulation and documentation hinder the agility of government systems. To address this issue, forward-thinking governments are streamlining government functioning by re-engineering workflows, integrating data systems, and simplifying organizational structures. The UAE’s Zero Government Bureaucracy program aims to make procedures simpler, quicker, and more efficient by consolidating similar processes, eliminating unnecessary steps, adopting commercial best practices, reevaluating existing process controls, and leveraging digital tools to automate and expedite tasks.20
Turbocharging AI and digital delivery capabilities: Governments have made strides in digital transformation but can further enhance their digital infrastructure to boost efficiency. Rapid advancements in AI are prompting a reevaluation of bureaucratic frameworks as executives adopt digital solutions such as digital identity systems, data exchanges, new platforms, and customer experience tools to improve service quality and delivery.
Tackling cross-sector wicked problems: Leaders are working to build collaborations with diverse stakeholders by understanding their priorities, convening solution ecosystems, and defining their roles within the broader ecosystem. Australia has emerged as a leader in forming innovative public-private partnerships to encourage companies to develop next-gen energy infrastructure.21
Strengthening workforce competencies: Governments worldwide are investing in attracting, retaining, and upskilling talent to help their workforce navigate evolving demands. The advent of the AI era has brought a renewed focus on public sector productivity and managing the delicate balance in human-machine collaboration.22 Governments must prioritize enhancing collaborative efforts within their institutions to establish strong connections with other stakeholders in the ecosystem. Singapore introduced a suite of AI-based solutions aimed at helping government employees boost productivity by automating daily tasks and enhancing large data set searches, nearly halving the time that employees spend on administrative tasks.23
Attracting private funding: Governments can struggle to deliver in critical capital-intensive areas due to inadequate funding and financing mechanisms, as well as risks that commercial partners see as too high.24 To address these challenges, leading governments are exploring and adopting innovative ways to derisk such projects for the private sector by developing new financial instruments to attract private funds and catalyze new markets. India has been at the forefront of developing new hybrid-annuity revenue models to attract private sector participation in highway projects.25
Nine trends transforming government in 2025
Launched in 2019, the Deloitte Center for Government Insights’ Government Trends report annually covers trends that continue to hold relevance today. Some trends, such as digital government, have been constant throughout the years. Others, such as quality of life and AI, have emerged more recently. The 2025 report identifies nine trends where governments are addressing delivery challenges.
Cross-cutting trends
Delivering on lower-cost, higher-value government: In the face of fiscal pressures, many governments are shifting their approach from seeking incremental changes and minor cost savings to fundamentally transforming the economics of fulfilling their missions. By achieving such enduring efficiencies, governments can transform their paradigms to deliver lasting and sustainable cost reduction. They aim to accomplish these objectives by enhancing operational efficiency, undertaking structural transformation, and mitigating fraud, overspending, and misuse of funds. These efforts can help streamline processes and optimize resources, potentially leading to significant and lasting financial savings.
State of play: Governments are shifting from short-term cost-cutting to sustainable strategies, leveraging AI, optimizing organizational structures, and working to eliminate persistent fraud. By embracing digital tools and structural transformations, leaders aim to increase efficiency, reduce costs, enhance service quality, and enable long-term financial stability.
Delivering on the promise of AI in government: Artificial intelligence has the potential to assist government organizations in addressing the ongoing challenge of balancing tight budgets with increasing citizen expectations. However, for AI to fulfill this promise, governments must do more than merely adopt the technology. They should ensure they have the right technology platforms, training, and partnerships to facilitate the widespread implementation of AI at scale across the organization. With government organizations beginning to lead the way in generative AI and agentic AI, the time has come to adopt these capabilities.
State of play: Many governments are taking an employee-driven approach to AI adoption. They are leveraging AI platforms, developing workforce AI fluency, implementing age Agentic AI, and implementing governance frameworks to scale AI solutions while balancing innovation with public sector responsibilities.
Delivering on reducing government red tape: Governments worldwide are looking for ways to reduce regulatory burden while safeguarding public interest. Through process improvement, workforce training, stakeholder engagement, and digital tools, they aim to improve the regulatory experience to drive business innovation, simplify citizen access to services, and reduce friction. Balancing the need for regulations with efficiency can help governments achieve better mission outcomes.
State of play: Governments are employing technological and business tools such as human-centered design, norm engineering, and AI to eliminate redundant processes and unnecessary paperwork, integrate data, and remove friction to provide better services to businesses and citizens and ease unproductive compliance constraints on government employees.
Delivering on public service modernization: Government services that involve both digital and physical interactions can present significant delivery challenges for governments—and can disproportionately impact citizen satisfaction.26 By making ongoing process improvements and using innovative digital tools and new technologies such as digital ID and AI, governments can redesign services and simplify complex interactions. The focus on improving these “high-touch” interactions can enhance the customer experience and build public trust.
State of play: Government innovators are demonstrating how to deliver high-touch services better, faster, and more cost-effectively, both through small, targeted process updates and comprehensive redesigns of delivery systems.
Domain-specific trends
Delivering future-ready infrastructure on time and on budget: Despite infrastructure being an important foundation that contributes to making modern life possible, projects often are delivered late, over budget, and fail to meet society’s evolving needs. Forward-thinking leaders are increasingly embracing new technologies and processes to optimize every stage of infrastructure development.
State of play: Governments are adopting digital twins and other novel technologies to help improve project planning and design as well as refining internal processes to streamline business-to-government interactions. They are redistributing financial risks to attract private-sector participation and helping to upskill the workforce to build future-ready infrastructure.
Delivering on a better quality of life: Governments face the task of creating the economic and social conditions that are designed to help citizens thrive. To do this, leading governments are retooling policy interventions to improve access to essential services and affordability while also designing physical and digital infrastructure to meet citizen needs.
State of play: Governments are reimagining policies and partnerships to make essential services more affordable and accessible, from housing to high-speed internet. They’re investing in infrastructure and evolving new programs to foster stronger social connections to combat isolation and build vibrant, engaged communities.
Delivering an energy-resilient future: As global energy demand continues to surge, the energy landscape is experiencing significant changes with the increased incorporation of non-conventional energy alternatives into the mix. Governments are leveraging this transformation as an opportunity to adopt a holistic approach to managing energy demand and supply, diversify the energy portfolio, and develop resilient electric grids to build long-term energy resilience.
State of play: Governments seeking to build resilience and energy security are aligning their energy strategies, policies, and regulations; investing in future-ready energy infrastructure; and strengthening energy resilience at the community level.
Delivering on the jobs of the future: As rapid technological shifts create new roles while disrupting existing ones, the challenge of preparing workers for tomorrow’s economy is increasingly urgent. With AI and automation reshaping the employment landscape, it’s important to closely align workforce development with rapidly evolving market demands.
State of play: Government agencies are leveraging data analytics and industry partnerships to transform workforce development. Through expanded apprenticeships and innovative education models, leaders are working to bridge the growing gap between worker skills and employer needs.
Delivering on space development growth: The economic, scientific, and national security benefits of space development are immense. The space industry, in collaboration with national space agencies, is on the cusp of delivering societal and economic benefits through new activities and markets that can further space development. To accelerate these benefits, leading governments are supporting the development of new markets, evolving industry regulations, and fostering new international collaborations.
State of play: Government space budgets are increasing (particularly in defense), and much of that funding is fostering the growth of a growing commercial space industry. Leading governments are rethinking national regulations and international partnerships to help nurture new markets and opportunities. Increased geopolitical tensions, however, could impact future space development.