Believe It Or Not, The Government Is Adopting AI to Make Your Life Easier
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Believe It Or Not, The Government Is Adopting AI to Make Your Life Easier<br>The public sector moves slowly by design. That might actually help it get AI right.
Alex Kantrowitz<br>May 22, 2026
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This conversation is sponsored by Kyndryl<br>The Department of Motor Vehicles might not be where most people expect to find cutting-edge technology. But in a recent interview, Brian Shell, a senior partner at Kyndryl, recounted a surprising array of AI use cases in place at state DMVs right now.<br>Today, DMVs and state agencies are using AIs to cut wait times, reduce paperwork, and rethink what it means to serve the public. Just imagine the license photo process, which can be arduous, made smoother by AI that gets the background exactly right. That’s rolling out in some locations today.<br>Rapidly advancing AI capabilities, Shell argued, have sparked to “a resurgence in the spirit of public service” and a desire to deliver for taxpayers. We get into what’s happening in this Q&A below, edited lightly for length and clarity.<br>Alex Kantrowitz: The public perception of government is that it’s slow to adopt technology. Is that true when it comes to generative AI?<br>Brian Shell: Well, maybe appropriately so to some extent. Governments are durable institutions, and so they should be thoughtful about their adoption of new technology, and we’re definitely seeing that here.<br>Governments want to have policies and regulations in place before they start adopting things wholesale. That said, there are a lot of people in government who are adopting generative AI. We’re seeing AI piloted and then moving past pilots in lots of states and agencies. Are they adopting it as fast as tech startups? No. But I wouldn’t say that’s a problem.<br>We’re about three and a half years past ChatGPT’s introduction. Does the fact that government is now actively engaging with this technology signal that no area of society can really leave it alone?<br>The pervasiveness of AI is very much clear at this point. It’s going to be a part of every area of the world that interacts with technology. It’s today’s version of ‘every business is an IT business.’ It used to be that you could run your business without IT but that’s not been the case for 30 years. This is in that same vein. It will become part of everybody’s technology landscape.<br>When I think of government, I think of deterministic activity, meaning concrete processes with concrete outcomes. Generative AI is inherently probabilistic. How does an institution set on defined results create the openness to integrate a probabilistic technology?<br>The way I see governments implementing AI right now is actually still more on the deterministic side of the house. I don’t see them using a lot of LLMs to generate new content. I see them using what they’re calling discrete, practical, or tactical use cases of AI to help solve specific problems.<br>Using AI to create new stuff — which generative AI is by its very nature — hasn’t really hit full scale yet, and I’m not sure how they’ll adopt it. It’s an area that doesn’t jibe well with the general setup of government. They don’t want to be guessing.<br>So then explain the use cases that are actually happening in government right now.<br>We’re seeing small, medium, and even large deployments that are more focused on specific business areas with well-understood problems. On the smaller end, one example is AI photo background removal at DMVs, which sounds simple, but it’s had a real impact on citizens. One DMV has taken their photo capture process from a three-to-five minute ordeal down to five to ten seconds at the desk. People used to have to walk to another area where a high-resolution camera and a big blue backdrop existed. Now there’s a camera at every desk: look over here, click, and the AI does the background removal, checks for glasses, head tilt, all of it. Ten seconds and they’ve captured the photo. That’s a small use case built into an already existing flow to make life easier for citizens.<br>On a larger scale, we’re seeing agencies use AI to modernize processes. As they work to replace legacy systems, they’re leveraging AI to help them move faster through enormous amounts of data.<br>The DMV isn’t exactly known for its efficiency. Walk me through how they went from seeing this technology to deciding, ‘yes, let’s implement it’ for something as seemingly sacred as taking the photo for your license.<br>This is the area I probably know best, because it’s where I work every day. One of the big themes for DMVs over the last five to ten years has been citizen experience. That’s become a pervasive focus across DMVs in the US. Some people might shake their head and say it hasn’t worked in their state, but overall it’s been a genuine priority: how do we improve the DMV experience for the people we serve?<br>And when you have that guiding principle, you can start identifying bottlenecks. Ask any...