Stop Selling the Future: What the Public Sector Must Get Right About AI Adoption
Let's start by looking at a few AI-related webinar, conference, and training images that shape how the public sector imagines AI. They all pretty much look and feel the same. When every visual points to a sleek, distant future, the public begins to expect a distant solution.
AI appears distant. It is something emerging from an imagined future rather than shaping the present. The design language suggests that technology leads and people follow, reinforcing a sense of separation and inevitability.
Here’s the real issue: public-sector AI rollouts are still framed as technology projects. Conference sessions, webinars, and social media posts fixate on AI use cases instead of human outcomes.
The goal is not to be good at using AI, but to use AI well enough that our communities feel the difference. OpenAI and Anthropic flipped that script. Their storytelling centers on people first and technology second. It’s not a vision of the future; it’s a mirror of the present.
Imagine if our stories looked more like theirs: ordinary people solving ordinary problems—AI present but understated, a collaborator in human progress rather than the hero of it.
Why it matters for government
Public-sector AI rollouts are still built around technology rather than people. The result is that AI feels like someone else’s project—a pilot, a policy, a thing owned by IT—rather than a daily tool for solving problems.
A simple visual test: if your AI slide, press release, or campaign art could double as a data-center ad, it’s wrong. Replace the circuitry with people. Show them doing the work, and let the tech fade into the background.
The story of AI in government isn’t futuristic—it’s practical. It’s the story of what people can do with it, not what AI can do for them.