Government digital experiences are no longer evaluated against peer agencies. They are measured against the best commercial experiences citizens use every day, including banking, retail, healthcare and travel. Persistent abandonment, rising call-center demand and declining public trust are not user experience (UX) problems but are signals of deeper operational and governance challenges.
Advances in AI-driven diagnostics, content intelligence and agentic workflows now allow agencies to modernize incrementally – faster and with far less institutional risk than even a year ago. This creates a practical opportunity for government leaders to improve digital services without disruptive multi-year transformations. Today, government agencies have access to a modern suite of AI-enabled content and experience platforms — such as Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe’s AI/GenAI capabilities and integrated content orchestration — that can address challenges like legacy content fragmentation, search failure and slow performance.
Commercial expectations are now the baseline
Citizens approach government digital services with expectations shaped by modern commercial platforms. They expect fast load times, intuitive navigation and clear paths to completion, regardless of the complexity behind government programs. Research from Qualtrics consistently shows that more than 60 percent of users abandon public sector digital interactions when they cannot complete a task quickly or confidently. GAO analysis further suggests that 40 to 50 percent of inbound call-center volume could be deflected if self-service experiences worked as intended.
We see this dynamic play out repeatedly in practice. In one state government engagement, Protiviti supported contact center operations overwhelmed by transactional demand during a surge in public need. The root cause was not just volume, but digital services that failed to resolve issues upstream, forcing citizens into phone-based channels. Addressing the problem required both operational intervention and experience redesign.
Abandonment has compounding effects. Abandoned digital journeys push users toward higher-cost channels such as phone calls, mailed forms or in-person visits. This increases staffing pressure, extends service timelines and raises cost-to-serve metrics. This issue gets further elevated when statutory risk, benefit access delays and legislative accountability are considered. Most damaging, abandonment erodes trust quietly and reinforces the perception that government services are difficult to use.
Why government experiences break down operationally
The root cause is rarely a lack of technological investment. Instead, government digital ecosystems are organized around internal silos rather than citizen journeys. Content ownership is fragmented across departments, approvals are manual and risk-averse and success is measured by publication rather than task completion. By contrast, composable and responsible AI-enabled content platforms — such as Adobe’s Content Supply Chain and AI-driven generation/optimization tools — allow governments to unify content, automate tagging and classification and embed governance into the workflow rather than retrofitting it.
We see this consistently in government cloud and digital transformation efforts. In one engagement, Protiviti worked with central leadership to establish a unified vision and roadmap for cloud adoption across agencies. The challenge was not technical feasibility but governance fragmentation, inconsistent standards and the absence of a shared operating model for digital services.
Performance compounds these issues especially when considering factors like rural access, mobile-first and low-bandwidth citizens. Industry studies from Google Web.dev and Akamai show that each additional second of page load time reduces user satisfaction by 15 to 20 percent. Many government websites exceed underperform modern performance thresholds due to legacy infrastructure, monolithic content management system (CMS) platforms and inefficient content delivery architectures. Over time, these factors reinforce one another, making even well-funded modernization efforts difficult to scale.
Why this is different than one year ago
In the past year, AI-assisted experience analytics, automated content inventorying and agentic workflows have matured significantly. Agencies can now analyze thousands of pages for performance, accessibility, duplication and relevance in weeks rather than months. Content intelligence tools surface redundant, outdated or low-value content, dramatically reducing the manual effort that historically stalled modernization.
Equally important, these capabilities enable incremental modernization. Agencies prioritize the highest-impact journeys first, delivering measurable improvements without large-scale platform replacement or organizational disruption. This approach aligns closely with recent U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance that emphasizes modular delivery, phased funding and incremental risk reduction, allowing agencies to show progress, justify continued investment and build momentum in a way that reflects how government programs are increasingly planned, funded and governed.
How to change now
Agencies should approach modernization based on maturity, not aspiration. The most successful transformations we see are grounded in an honest assessment of current-state capabilities across governance, content, technology and operating models.
- Early-maturity agencies are typically those where digital services are largely content-driven, siloed by department and measured by publication rather than outcomes. For these organizations, the priority is visibility. Establishing AI-driven baselines and foundational experience platforms (e.g., Adobe Experience Manager and Edge Delivery Services) for page performance, search success, abandonment and call deflection across high-volume services creates a shared fact base.
- Mid-maturity agencies often have modern platforms in place but lack consistency at scale. These organizations benefit most from orchestrating content and workflows around citizen journeys, standardizing templates and embedding governance into day-to-day operations and leveraging AI-enabled content lifecycle tools and Adobe Workfront for workflow management.
- Advanced agencies have already strong foundations, including clear ownership, structured content, performance visibility and embedded governance. For them, the opportunity shifts from modernization to continuous optimization (Adobe’s integrated analytics and GenAI tools). AI-driven insights can be used to dynamically refine experiences, personalize content responsibly, improve service equity, and cost-to-serve reduction as part of normal operations.
The goal is steady progress, meeting agencies where they are today and enabling experiences that work better for citizens and for the people who operate and support them.
To learn more about our public sector and Adobe consulting services, contact us.
