Governments worldwide face mounting pressure to improve the speed, accuracy and personalization of public services. A structured government AI action plan can help agencies meet this challenge by supporting predictive insights, faster decisions and more responsive citizen engagement.

Salesforce Inc.’s Agentforce platform aims to accelerate these goals by automating routine tasks, improving service delivery and enabling AI-powered agents to manage citizen inquiries, code enforcement and benefits applications, according to Paul Tatum (pictured), executive vice president of global public sector solutions at Salesforce.

Salesforce’s Paul Tatum talks with theCUBE about why a government action plan is crucial for driving innovation, efficiency and public trust.

“What we saw here in the United States with this administration is the AI action plan that came out a few months ago,” Tatum said. “I think if you look at where AI is going, where Salesforce and Agentforce is going, like the government could use some help in this space of citizen services, engaging responsiveness. The nice thing about the government is they are very responsible with our data. They are careful and they do have standards and compliance and security requirements that we have to abide by at Salesforce as a company.”

Tatum spoke with theCUBE’s Gemma Allen and George Gilbert at Dreamforce, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. The conversation explored the goals of a government AI action plan and how Agentforce fits into that evolving vision (* Disclosure below.)

Through the government AI action plan lens

Balancing risk aversion with innovation is essential to making a government AI action plan both responsible and effective. By reframing caution as a strategic advantage, public agencies can adopt AI in ways that safeguard citizens while accelerating transformation, according to Tatum.

“What you’re seeing is governments ultimately are pretty risk averse,” he said. “Its a bold statement for the United States as a country to say, ‘Listen, we need to really, really double down on AI at the infrastructure level, at the chip level, at the enterprise software level. By the way, as government organizations, we need to do more with AI.’ Today, every [request for proposal], every RFI that comes out of the government has an AI component. You must deliver this particular capability, and there has to be AI capacity and capability within it.”

Government requests for proposals and requests for information increasingly demand AI capabilities as this cutting-edge technology becomes vital to enhancing efficiency, transparency and decision-making in the public sector. This shift reflects the drive to modernize public services amid rapid technological change, moving beyond digitization to intelligent transformation, Tatum pointed out. 

“The government is in the process of going from, ‘Let’s play with it, let’s kind of see what it is,’ he said. “What that is showing up in these [requests for information], RFPs is ‘Let’s go build the new systems.’ It is taking what is frankly mountains of a workload, overworked great civil servants, and trying to augment their work and help them. If you were to go to the CMS.gov website or IRS.gov and hit the help button, there are over 200 URLs. The day will come where there will be an agentic helper on that webpage.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dreamforce:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dreamforce. Neither Salesforce Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE