The UK government has stepped-up efforts to modernise the public sector through digital transformation. The £3.25bn Transformation Fund, demonstrates just how much value is placed on improving productivity and efficiency. Increased investment is a positive step forward, but funding alone won’t address fundamental challenges in the public sector.
Across sectors, organisations are being asked to do more with less. The scale of this imbalance is particularly visible in public sector organisations such as the NHS, where demand continues to outpace capacity. 7.1 million people are on waiting lists, outweighing the 106,000 staff vacancies currently being advertised. Without a fundamental shift in how services operate, these pressures will only intensify and become unmanageable.
The public sector must rethink how it handles data and day-to-day workflows. That means bringing in smarter, more connected systems that help people get more done — orchestration and automation are going to play a big role in making that happen.
From fragmentation to orchestration
A key objective within public sector organisations should be to move away from fragmented systems towards more seamless, agent-driven orchestration. Right now, siloed data and disconnected workflows are major barriers to achieving efficiency. Information gets stuck across departments, platforms, and teams, which slows coordination and decision-making.
The scale of the issue is clear: the NHS operates on over 44,000 healthcare IT systems, while government departments rely on over 190 authorisation services. Layering AI on top of that, without fixing fragmented foundations, risks making the problem worse. Instead of streamlining operations, disconnected AI tools could just reinforce the same inefficiencies already in place.
Agentic AI can play a key role here as it orchestrates across systems, people and data. Rather than automating individual tasks, it can be embedded in end-to-end workflows, reducing siloes and creating the foundations to achieve operational efficiency. This orchestration layer is where productivity gains are unlocked, it reduces duplicated efforts and bottlenecks, as well as allowing for faster, data-driven decisions to be made.
But true value and productivity gains require more than orchestration alone, there also needs to be automation to reduce the burden of complex, data-intensive and repetitive tasks on staff.
The autonomous assistant
Orchestration is critical to improving system-wide efficiencies, but in the public sector it is important that improvements are made at an individual workforce level. Manual, outdated administrative processes continue to place a heavy burden on staff. A recent report shows that NHS doctors can spend up to four times longer on paperwork than with patients; proving that legacy systems can’t meet the demands and pace of modern public services and are causing operational strain.
Business Orchestration and Automation technology enables processes to run more efficiently, while freeing up time for employees to focus on higher-value, citizen-facing work where human interaction matters most.
Trained on specific datasets, it can apply contextual and domain-specific knowledge to the tasks it supports, allowing it to operate autonomously. Unlike traditional automation, which relies on predefined rules, orchestration and automation systems can adapt to changing inputs, make decisions and continuously optimise workflows. This allows them to operate more flexibly and in real-time, which are crucial capabilities for working in complex and fast-moving environments.
Early adopters are already demonstrating the impact. NHS North West London automated 18 processes and in turn saved £370,000 in manual effort per year and 56 hours a day saved in clinical settings. This is a great example of the measurable impact created when automation acts as an enabler of productivity in the public sector, working with human workers to ensure they can spend time on tasks that matter most.
A governed, human-in-the-loop model
Carefully orchestrated automation also introduces a powerful decision-support layer, operating at a speed and scale that humans alone cannot match. By processing large volumes of data, identifying patterns and surfacing insights in real time, it enables faster, more informed decision-making. However, the value of these insights relies on human oversight and accountability remaining in the operational loop.
As the public sector looks to orchestrate and automate, ensuring strong governance is just as important as the promised productivity gains. In sectors such as healthcare, where systems contain highly sensitive data that influences life impacting decisions, robust governance and human oversight are essential safeguards.
Even though various tools can now operate autonomously across workflows, they should not function without accountability. Human expertise, professional judgement and ethical oversight remain critical, especially in complex public sector environments where contextual understanding and empathy are required. Organisations in the public sector must therefore adopt a strong human-in-the-loop model where individuals remain responsible for monitoring outputs and validating decisions.
This governance layer is essential for ensuring transparency, maintaining public trust and reducing the risks associated with bias, inaccurate outputs or unintended consequences. It also helps ensure that sensitive information, such as patient records and citizen data, is handled securely.
Orchestration and automation must sit at the centre of the public sector transformation
The ongoing financial and operational pressures facing the public sector signal a fundamental shift in processes and operations is necessary. Orchestration and automation should sit at the centre of this transformation. As an autonomous, context-aware layer, it has the potential to understand processes, make decisions and act across systems, enabling the public sector to do more with less, without compromising quality.
In this context, the question is no longer if the public sector should modernise through orchestration and automation, but how quickly it can do so.
