RESEARCH REPORT
The velocity of work
3-MINUTE READ
December 23, 2025
In brief
- Federal leaders know the future is arriving fast—and that artificial intelligence (AI) will shape how their agencies rise to meet it.
- We outline a strategic framework to harness its potential for significant productivity gains and cost reductions.
- Drive meaningful change by anchoring AI initiatives in mission outcomes, modernizing data infrastructure and fostering workforce development.
How AI turns possibility into productivity
Across government, the promise is clear: Artificial intelligence (AI) can streamline workflows, supercharge productivity, reduce costs and boost mission outcomes. Working in tandem with AI tools, federal employees can approach their tasks with greater insights and precision, and, ultimately, see better outcomes and more impactful results from their work.
79%
of federal leaders expect the level of change to increase over the next six months
94%
of federal leaders believe that AI is beneficial to cost reduction
66%
of federal leaders think AI is being implemented faster than expected
That promise isn’t just theoretical. Agencies are already setting bold goals and aggressive timelines for generative AI (Gen AI) adoption. And rightly so. Accenture conducted a study of 250 senior federal leaders to elicit their perspectives about GenAI and their path to reinvention. According to our survey, nearly one-third of federal agency leaders expect GenAI to increase productivity by at least 30% within three years. And more than nine out of 10 federal leaders believe AI will help their agencies adjust to cost reductions and efficiency demands.
But while ambitions run high, execution has not kept pace. Many federal agencies struggle to turn vision into progress. In fact, our research shows that growth in actual GenAI implementation in government is lagging well behind private-sector benchmarks.
That gap is explainable—and, in our experience with our own federal clients—easily closed. Meaningful reinvention takes more than pilot projects. It requires coordinated, often complex shifts in how agencies use data, manage IT systems, conduct their work and reshape, train and utilize their workforces.
A better way forward
There is a smart way to achieve tangible, quantifiable success at AI-enabled reinvention—one that is already highly proven in the commercial sector. The opportunity is enormous, and federal agencies will need to act now or risk losing out on significant gains in terms of process productivity — which focuses on reduced cost and time savings — and knowledge productivity — which focuses on improved mission or business outcomes.
Our bottom-line message is this: federal agencies should take a more analytical approach to finding right-sized, meaningful, high-impact changes at the business process and functional worker levels.
In other words, productivity can’t be unlocked in theory — it must be engineered into practice.
Five high-value federal opportunities to accelerate impact
For federal agencies navigating rising public expectations, workforce constraints and mission urgency, generative AI offers more than efficiency gains — it provides a path to smarter, faster and more adaptive government. While the journey to scaled transformation will take time, there are high value starting points where agencies can generate meaningful returns quickly.
Invest in platform-based GenAI solutions to deliver immediate, enterprise-wide support for knowledge workers and empower employees to draft, edit, translate, summarize and analyze with greater speed and precision.
Blend human expertise and GenAI to modernize how agencies interact with the public to solve customer-service challenges: hefty labor costs, high attrition rates, the training burden and legacy technologies and processes.
GenAI-driven tools and solutions can be highly effective against many systemic challenges, including system fragmentation, manual clinical validation, outdated infrastructure and sophisticated fraud schemes.
Aging mainframes and outdated codebases strain budgets, hinder innovation and limit citizen services. Transform legacy systems through AI-assisted code conversion, modernization of business logic and deployment of scalable cloud-native architectures.
ERP systems, often fragmented and costly, can be transformed by GenAI through unified workflows, automated tasks, predictive insights and optimized performance, building a resilient digital backbone for enhanced mission and operational efficiency.
The road ahead
By targeting high-impact, high-visibility functions like personal productivity, customer service, fraud prevention and system modernization, agencies can demonstrate early wins, build enterprise readiness and scale their successes.
How to choose the right AI use cases for your agency — and get started today
Smart AI reinvention doesn’t mean doing everything at once. It means using analytics and precision to choose the right places to start. That means zeroing in on the functions that matter most to your mission, identifying the work within those functions that is most measurable, repeatable, predictable and transactional, and deploying solutions with clear goals and a clear path to adoption.
The moment is now
The path forward is clear—and full of possibility. Generative AI isn’t just another tech trend. It’s a singular opportunity for federal agencies to drive meaningful change, increase productivity, reduce costs and reimagine how government serves the American people. But it’s also increasingly viewed by federal leaders as a core capability that can enhance their agencies’ resilience in times of uncertainty and disruption.
The opportunity is huge — but the window is now. Federal leaders who take bold, smart steps today can position their agencies to lead tomorrow, not just in technology adoption, but in mission delivery, workforce empowerment and citizen service.
The era of AI-powered productivity is here. With the right mindset, a strategic plan and the right partner, your agency can fully realize it.
Let’s get started.