Have you missed the most exciting thing in government tech?

11 August 2025 | The 25th edition of Future States by Apolitical CEO and Co-Founder Robyn Scott. Subscribe to the newsletter

AI is sucking up all of the oxygen in conversations about better public services. The potential of AI to make governments more effective is immense and I’ll be following the frontiers of this closely. But generative AI coincided with the teenage years of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) — which is already providing better public services at astonishing scale — when the latter was just getting global recognition and momentum. As a result, DPI missed the spotlight.

This is a loss in a world where people are desperate for better, cheaper government systems and services.

First, what is DPI? Digital Public Infrastructure refers to the foundational digital systems that enable essential public, and sometimes private, services to function efficiently and at scale. DPI underpins identity, payments and data exchange. Think of it as the digital plumbing (even the metaphors for DPI are mundane!) beneath modern societies. It’s invisible when it works, transformative when built well and dangerous when neglected or abused.

If you’ve heard of DPI, you’ve probably heard of Aadhaar, India’s pioneering digital identity system and the grandfather of DPI. The world’s largest biometric database, Aadhaar has more than 1.2 billion people enrolled (that’s a sixth of humanity, if you want perspective on that number). Today, Aadhaar’s identification system operates with other DPIs in an ecosystem that powers everything from the direct transfers of benefits to mobile wallets, to vaccinations records, to small businesses paying their taxes online.

Don’t think of DPIs like Aadhaar as a single app or platform, but instead an interoperable government system that makes digital service delivery possible.

Excitingly, the best of DPI is increasingly being shared and adapted across countries. Aadhaar has inspired open-source versions and adaptations from Africa to Latin America. Initiatives like India’s Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) are helping governments avoid vendor lock-in, build sovereignty and leapfrog legacy tech.

And the frontiers are delivering real value.

When I asked my friend Reuben Abraham (CEO of Artha Global and a DPI expert) about his favourite example of DPI, he pointed to the Digital Energy Grid, also out of India. The grid is designed to support the sustainable energy transition and handle increasingly complex decentralised energy systems.

It assigns unique identifiers to assets, consumers and transactions. Using machine readability, it digitises essential metadata like energy rating and certifications, enhancing grid efficiency. Just as a good road network underpins trade across regions, the grid aims to coordinate energy, value and data across India’s energy system, even more important thanks to the energy gobbling of AI.

And this is just one of many inspiring examples. At the same time, DPI is not without controversy. Concerns over Aadhaar, for example, range from privacy to data security, perhaps unsurprising for a system of this scale. Adding to the challenge, DPI will increasingly be powered by AI, increasing its risks and opportunities.

Credit to the World Economic Forum which — recognising that DPI deserves to be better known and more discussed — recently launched a Global Futures Council on “Govtech and DPI”. I’m happy to be part of this and will be sharing some insights from our work.

Done right, DPI is a public good in practice, dramatically lowering the cost of service delivery, unlocking innovation and increasing citizen trust. Done badly — or handed over wholesale to private actors — it risks exclusion, surveillance and a loss of national control over critical infrastructure.

If you would like to dig deeper into the fascinating topic of DPIs — and digital transformation of government — explore Apolitical’s Digital Transformation Community, supported by the DPI Academy.

Also at Apolitical

This week our team is excited to be launching our new short course on prompt engineering. It's mainly video-based, and like everything we do at Apolitical it's designed specifically for public servants. Whichever AI tools your team is using in government, this will help them get better results; from risk analysis to scenario planning. We have several new courses dropping on our Government AI Campus in the next few months, so stay tuned.

Good news from around the globe

When your policy really, really works

It's important to spotlight real-world policy impact when it happens so here is a nice one: Helsinki clocked zero traffic deaths in the past year. City officials introduced broader speed limits in 2021, and then invested in new speed cameras. The strategy is based around Finland's "Vision Zero" policy which has now at least part-achieved its original goal of zero traffic injuries or deaths. Now to keep it up.

As ever, I welcome your feedback — and your stories. If you’re working on public sector innovation anywhere in the world, let me know. Especially if you’re working on something that others should know about. And if you’d like to guest edit an edition of this newsletter, let us know.

Until next time,

Robyn Scott Apolitical CEO & Co-Founder