AI use surges across governments, reaching 82%: report

An IDC study of 118 U.S. federal, state, and local government leaders and decision-makers revealed that 82% of the agencies surveyed have already adopted artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can reason and act with human assistance.

Meanwhile, 60% of the surveyed government leaders believe they are ahead of the private sector in adopting AI, and 83% of AI agents are considered key to transforming their organizational structure, according to Salesforce’s March 26 post.

Government agencies that have traditionally lagged in digital transformation may experience significant changes as AI becomes more popular. Research from IDC indicated that leaders believe AI agents can drive a more responsive and mission-focused government. Paul Tatum, Executive Vice President for Public Sector Solutions at Salesforce, shared this perspective:

“Government leaders no longer see AI as a back-office experiment. They see it as a critical pillar of national competitiveness and service delivery. In today’s landscape, integrating agentic AI is now mission critical.”

The majority of those surveyed, at 56%, said agentic AI will have a far greater impact than the internet and cloud computing; 51% claimed it would even surpass PCs’ impact, and 46% believed AI will be more transformative than smartphones. In addition, 71% of organizations are set to increase their use of agentic AI by next year, while almost all (94%) believe AI agents will transform the nature of their work.

“The private sector has got a million different things they have to deliver on,” James McClain, acting chief technology officer for the All of Us program at the National Institutes of Health, said in a recent press briefing at Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in Washington, D.C. “There’s a critical mass of concentration of common use cases [in government]. What you end up seeing is we can gain some acceleration, because we’re all working on a suite of commonalities of use cases, whether they be around data automation, process automation, customer support, those things are a place where there’s tremendous opportunity, and it goes across sectors.”

The survey suggests that the growing adoption of AI will significantly redefine how governments will operate in the years ahead. The IDC survey found that 89% of public sector leaders expect humans to work alongside AI agents by 2030, while 74% anticipate that most employees will have AI systems reporting to them within the next five years.

The shift is also expected to reshape organizational structures. The majority of respondents predicted that agentic AI will drive major changes, with 83% expecting structural transformation and 74% anticipating the emergence of new teams and departments, and some even foreseeing workforce expansion in certain areas, such as leadership roles.

At the same time, job functions are set to evolve dramatically. Around 91% of government leaders think that most employees will transition to new roles, while 92% expect a proportion of existing jobs to be changed by AI.

Find out more about the IDC survey here.

Is agentic AI replacing how we work?

AI systems are designed to act more independently than traditional assistant tools— planning, making decisions, and even executing tasks—but can they also replace human work? Not exactly. Although more research, such as the IDC, has confirmed that people are becoming more trusting of AI to automate tasks, humans still need to work alongside the tech and supervise it.

“AI doesn’t think. It doesn’t think for you. Where the intelligence comes from is you,” said Cassie Kozyrkov, Google’s former Chief Decision Scientist, in her keynote at Mindvalley’s AI Summit in August 2025. “Instead of Artificial Intelligence, it should stand for Automation Improver, or maybe even Approachable Interface.” Kozyrkov believes the most apparent danger of AI is not what it will do to us but what it will steal: our excuses.

Elsewhere, a Zoho report in May 2025 showed that APAC is moving quickly toward workplace digital transformation, leaning on emerging technologies such as AI. Per the report, APAC workplaces are turning to AI in droves, with Zoho tagging adoption rates at 54% in 2024. APAC’s AI adoption figures are almost double the global average, driven by rising use cases in customer care, coding, automation, and personalization services.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

Watch: AI’s Biggest Power Lies in People, Not Tech