Ensuring that government services are accessible through the channels people are already using is both an opportunity and a priority.
Consider what it means to have a child with a disability in Australia. A family will simultaneously deal with the NDIS for support funding, state health services for clinical care, the education system for learning support, and Centrelink for financial assistance.
While designing government services around functional portfolios such as health, education and transport reflects administrative logic, citizens experience government through life events that cut across those boundaries. But because agencies operate in silos, each with its own entry point, eligibility criteria and processes, coordinating across them can become a significant burden for Australians already under pressure.
Recent research highlights the gap in how services are structured and how citizens experience them. According to Publicis Sapient’s 2025 Digital Citizens Report, Australians navigating major life events were more likely to turn to friends and family (55 per cent) or Google (48 per cent) than to digital government services (41 per cent). And as AI-powered search engines increasingly become the default starting point for navigating complex decisions, the expectation of a single answer will only grow.
This raises an important question: how can governments remain the trusted front door for citizen access to services?
The case for a different model
“One front door” digital services, such as Service NSW and Services Australia, have made meaningful progress in improving how citizens access government. But improving the entry point is only part of the challenge.
To a citizen, Medicare and My Health Record both feel like “health”. Behind that door, though, they remain entirely separate systems. The challenge is how to coordinate services across agencies in ways that reflect how citizens actually live.
Various models have sought to address this. Cohort-based service delivery, which organises services around shared citizen journeys rather than departmental responsibilities, is one approach that has attracted interest. Starting a family, ageing into retirement, living with disability: these are the organising principles that citizens navigate, and they cut across portfolio boundaries by design. However, such models reveal the complex challenge of securing alignment across portfolios with different investment priorities and accountability frameworks.
Legacy technology also adds complexity, with many digital government platforms built by layering modern interfaces onto older systems, leaving each agency with its own data architecture. Addressing that technical debt means rearchitecting the data layer sitting beneath the interface.
The good news is AI offers an opportunity to radically change the speed and cost of modernising legacy platforms, reduce friction in delivery and enable smaller, more manageable steps toward change.
What makes AI possible
None of this requires restructuring agencies from the ground up. Using AI prudently to modernise platforms, combined with smarter data architecture, allows for better coordination and orchestration of services, providing a more integrated experience for citizens.
Australians are already engaging with these technologies in significant numbers: just over half of those surveyed in the Digital Citizens Report (51 per cent) are using generative AI, with 29 per cent doing so daily. Ensuring that authoritative government services are accessible through the channels people are already using is both an opportunity and a priority.
Increasingly, that also means ensuring government systems are structured in a way that AI agents can navigate effectively: clean, accessible data layers that allow automated tools to retrieve, interpret and act on information across agency boundaries, rather than hitting the same walls that citizens currently face.
While the structural barriers to joined-up government services are real, with the right combination of modern data architecture and AI-enabled orchestration, it becomes possible to deliver services that reflect how citizens actually live, rather than how agencies happen to be organised.
For the Australians navigating complex life events, it is a gap well worth solving.
By Steven Metzmacher – Vice President, Public Sector, Publicis Sapient Australia