We hear a lot about how government agencies should deploy AI. A robust dialogue about AI among government leaders, frontline employees, regulators, and technologists is a good thing. We have our own perspective because we believe AI can fundamentally transform government operations.
It’s public servants — the end users — whose opinions matter most. They want AI they can trust — one that cites their own data and functionally eliminates hallucinations. They want it to be easy to use, without weeks-long trainings to get up to speed. They want to deploy it quickly, without burdensome processes for IT.
We listened. We’ve deployed AI Answers, Roundtable’s AI-powered answer engine, to thousands of public servants. Today, our conversations aren’t about desirable or hypothetical AI uses. We’re learning how public servants — from federal to state to local agencies — are already using AI today.
Uses for AI Answers typically fall into two buckets: Quick answers and deep dives.
Quick answers include uses like 1) search and knowledge retrieval, 2) procedural guidance, and 3) summarization. Users often start search queries with phrases like "Show me all references to...", "what section of...", or asking for procedural guidance regarding best practices and resources to implement a policy.
These types of queries tell us something vital: Public servants know certain information exists, but they’ve traditionally lacked an efficient way to find what they need amidst email attachments, document repositories, chat apps, and all the other channels where information is stored.
AI Answers streamlines that process, searching across all existing knowledge repositories to surface validated information public servants can actually use. This use case is why Roundtable can save an average state agency with 1,000 employees $6.5 million a year on knowledge retrieval efficiency gains.
Public servants also use AI Answers to accurately summarize information like the proceedings of past committee meetings.
We also see public servants use AI Answers for more advanced use cases. Because AI Answers is based on an agency’s own information — and the data from partner organizations — public servants can confidently use AI-generated content for highly formatted content like job descriptions.
More complex workflows for AI are discovery and decision support. Over the course of a public servant’s day, they’re planning, communicating, and coordinating with partners at all levels of government and non-governmental partners like nonprofits. AI Answers can help them discover who or what information is needed next over the course of executing a project. It shows us that official guidance alone isn’t enough — public servants want to lean on the expertise and previous successes of peers to achieve their own missions.
We were surprised at how quickly users transitioned from pure information retrieval to using AI Answers for creation and discovery, in large part because public servants found AI-created assets in Roundtable to be more accurate and more useful than off-the-shelf AI.
How public servants are using AI in the real world informs what we build. We’re thinking about agentic workflows — multi-step projects — that can create structured outputs like checklists, timelines, or policy comparisons. We’re thinking about how we can push the boundaries of agentic workflows forward, enabling AI to create valuable work products alongside public servants to help them be their best.
We’ll continue to work side-by-side with public servants in the field to build the technology that’s most valuable for them.
How will you use AI Answers?
