UK public sector organisations may be seen as cautious adopters of technology, but according to one senior executive, the opposite is now true when it comes to agentic AI.

In an interview with Think Digital Partners, Matthew Higham, technology and digital officer UK at ServiceNow said that central government departments, arms-length bodies and the NHS are embracing agentic AI more strategically than many commercial enterprises – and are already unlocking new ways of delivering citizen services.

“Honestly, I think public sector are probably grabbing this better than commercial,” said Higham. “The very structure of public sector – if you think about central government and ministerial departments – means they’re accelerating their adoption of this kind of technology.”

ServiceNow works with departments across Whitehall, the Cabinet Office and the NHS, and Higham said conversations have shifted rapidly over the past year. Rather than asking whether to use AI, leaders are now focused on how to apply it at scale.

A key distinction, he argued, is intent. While many private-sector organisations are “sprinkling AI” across existing processes to reduce costs, public-sector bodies are thinking more ambitiously.

“Civil service is absolutely looking at the growth engine,” he said. “That’s what we need to do – transform citizen services.”

Agentic AI is being viewed not just as an efficiency tool, but as a way to fundamentally redesign how services are delivered to citizens and patients.

Breaking the dependency on massive transformation programmes

One of the most significant advantages for government is the ability to create cross-department workflows without moving or centralising data.

Traditionally, major public-sector transformation has depended on long, expensive programmes to standardise systems and migrate data. Agentic AI changes that equation.

“You can now start to create workflow between entities without really ever having to move the data,” said Higham. “You can layer it into existing architecture and suddenly release value.”

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Higham added that 2025 marked a turning point where public sector leaders realised they could make “a revolutionary leap” in service delivery without first paying down years of technical debt.

This, he said, opens the door to pan-government digital services that cut across organisational boundaries, even where legacy systems remain in place.

“They’re dealing with legacy tech debt in the background,” he said, “while still delivering brand new citizen services now.”

He described a paradigm shift from incremental, evolutionary change to faster, outcome-driven transformation.

Public sector a priority for 2026

ServiceNow’s Matthew Higham

Looking ahead, Higham said the public sector will be a major focus in 2026, with an emphasis on high-impact use cases and faster execution.

“It’s about impact. Public sector has switched on to the ability to provide brand new citizen services. Our focus is helping them execute that – not in three years’ time, but [in 2026].”

ServiceNow is also investing in training for IT professionals alongside frontline knowledge workers, enabling them to use agentic tools to redesign processes themselves.

Higham’s comments suggest that for a sector long constrained by fragmented systems and slow-moving change programmes, agentic AI may represent a chance to move faster without starting from scratch.

As he noted, government has finally found “the sticky glue that sits in the middle”, connecting data, organisations and services in ways that were previously out of reach.