6 service delivery pillars government should prioritize for 2025 and beyond.

Moving into 2025, government agencies are facing a flurry of opportunities and uncertainties as they navigate new mandates, slightly bigger IT budgets, readier access to emerging technologies, and more scrutiny of government efficiency. Another key factor that agencies must deal with is rising citizen expectations.

With enhanced service delivery still a top priority across the public sector, in this post we’ll discuss six areas where agencies need to focus their strategic investments in 2025 and beyond.

1. AI-powered service delivery.

For decades, many agencies have relied on manual processes to deliver services to constituents. These outdated systems are inefficient and create significant backlogs, long wait times, and frustration for their users.

With AI, federal agencies can streamline workflows and provide faster, more reliable services to the public. But AI adoption isn’t just to support externalengagement. Beyond citizen-facing tools, AI is also revolutionizing internal processes through workflow automation, which will substantially reduce administrative burden.

By automating back-office processes, agencies can drastically cut down processing times and minimize human error. For instance, a benefits agency using AI tools could reduce application processing time from weeks to days, so citizens receive critical services faster.

2. Empathetic service delivery.

It may seem counterintuitive, but technology can actually drive more empathetic experiences. Think about it: One of the most important measures of effective service delivery is time. The more time you save, the better experience you provide. When citizens engage with government for assistance — especially in an emergency — the last thing they need is complexity, confusion, or long wait times.

Truly empathic service delivery understands where the user is coming from and meets them wherever they are. That could include providing self-service options, offering support across multiple channels, making information easier to find, or collecting customer data from all channels to understand individual needs and behaviors. By prioritizing digital capabilities like AI, data integration, and interoperability, agencies will be able to make citizen interactions more intuitive and efficient, and become more responsive to citizen needs overall.

3. Change management — but for citizens.

There's been plenty of discussion about how agencies can help their organizations transition to a more modernized posture. But there’s less talk about ways government can help citizens accept and adopt these new digital service models. Agencies should anticipate that even in 2025, some citizens still won’t be comfortable engaging on digital channels — whether it’s due to lack of trust, lack of digital skills, or both. Others may want to engage digitally but may not have the knowledge or access.

This year and beyond, agencies should be considering ways to drive more people toward a digital posture. That could include prioritizing digital literacy programs, promoting equitable access to technology, making online experiences simpler and more intuitive, investing in better infrastructure, and doing more to ease public fears around privacy and security.

4. Personalization.

Recent studies found that 79% of constituents expect “dot gov” experiences to be on par with private sector experiences, and 80% of constituents say they’re equally or more likely to use government services that are personalized for them. Yet agencies at all levels still appear to be struggling with personalization. In October, 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report evaluating how agencies were progressing in their modernization efforts in compliance with the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experiences Act (IDEA). Of the law’s eight modernization requirements, GAO found that “customization” was the least addressed. In fact, only half of the agencies that reported on their IDEA progress even mentioned customization — the other half reported no advancement in that area at all.

Why the lack of progress? It could be due to outdated technology, data challenges, siloed systems, lack of time and resources, or all the above. Whatever the reason, agencies will need to double down on customization in 2025 — not just for compliance reasons, but because citizen expectations demand it. Without personalization, citizens will only grow less engaged as digital experiences continue to fall short of expectations. Blame it on the private sector — but government can no longer afford to rely on a one-size-fits-all model.

Creating multiple content variations per audience per channel can quickly add up, which is why improving content management should be a top priority in any personalization strategy. Moving forward, agencies should also focus on integrating data across systems to create unified customer profiles, adopting advanced data analytics to understand user behavior and preferences, and exploring the potential of AI to efficiently generate personalized experiences at scale.

5. Accessibility.

The good news is that of the 21st Century IDEA’s eight modernization requirements, the “accessible” category is where federal agencies reported the most progress. The bad news is that “governmentwide Section 508 conformance remains low and without improvement” in fiscal year 2024, according to GSA’s 2024 compliance assessment.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice recently issued a rule requiring state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps accessible for people with disabilities, per the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — with a compliance deadline of April 2026 for larger jurisdictions, and April 2027 for smaller ones.

Given these trends and mandates, there’s work to be done in 2025 and beyond to ensure all citizens and staff have equitable access to government services. This could involve making certain modifications — like converting pictures and documents so they can be read with assistive technology, captioning videos, using a compliant color contrast, and generating alt text for images, among others. Fortunately, Adobe has incorporated hundreds of accessibly capabilities into our tools, which can automate most of these improvements and make these transformations much easier.

6. Cross-agency collaboration.

As complexity increases in the user experience, citizen satisfaction scores tend to drop. And complexity tends to be highest in multi-agency experiences, which are common whenever a citizen experiences a life event — like retirement — and must interact with several different agencies, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans Affairs.

That’s why in 2025 and the coming years, we expect to see more focus on cross-agency collaboration. By looking at life events holistically, agencies can better understand what the total experience looks like for the customer, what part their services play in the customer’s broader journey, and which other agencies are involved. With that understanding, agencies can begin working with their counterparts to improve data sharing, interoperability, and workflows across their organizations — with the goal of providing seamless, secure, and efficient experiences at every stage of the customer journey.

The Biden administration recommended significant budget support for these types of interagency projects, and it’s expected that the Trump administration will do the same, due to its increased focus on government efficiency. This means now’s the time for agencies to invest in the digital capabilities that will fuel these collaborative projects.

Get started with Adobe.

Adobe solutions can equip your agency with the digital capabilities you need to advance in each of these six priority areas — and strategically integrate them to improve end-to-end service delivery by fiscal year 2026.

To explore these recommendations in depth and discover ways to incorporate them into modernization strategy, contact Brian Chidester, Adobe’s head of industry strategy for public sector at bchidester@adobe.com. Learn more about Adobe Government Solutions here.

Brian Chidester is the head of industry strategy for public sector at Adobe and the host of “The Government Huddle with Brian Chidester” podcast from GovExec. Formerly, Chidester served as the industry vice president for global public sector at Genesys. He also has held global public sector leadership roles with OpenText, Arrow ECS, and S&P Global. Chidester holds a B.S. in Communications Studies from Liberty University. He is a board member for the University of South Florida — Muma College of Business, an advisor to the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance at the World Economic Forum, and a member of the Forbes Technology Council.