GovMesh Horizons 2025
Doing more with less through digital transformation
GovMesh was founded as a community for digital government leaders at the beginning of 2025,
focused on creating an intimate closed-door space for governments to share lessons and
discuss digital government challenges with those “beyond the usual suspects” who they might regularly see on the international circuit.
Through events in Singapore, Berlin and Vilnius, the
community has scaled to 20+ countries and international organisations.
GovMesh Horizons brings together the collective thought leadership of the GovMesh
participants, reflecting on the year just gone and the key themes of the year ahead.
Executive Summary
2025 has been a year of big choices in the digital government world, with various definitions of the digital state emerging against a period of rapid geopolitical, economic and technological change. In the contexts of rising citizen expectations and tightening budgets, it placed the question of how technology might evolve statecraft more in the foreground than ever.
Approaches have differed – from Albania’s all-out embrace of Artificial Intelligence to the leadership of India and Brazil in the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) space, from whole-of-government shared services in the UK to the nascent “Agentic State” in Ukraine.
But governments have been united by wrestling with the same digital government “polarities”: balancing digital sovereignty and collaboration; maximising the benefits of private sector collaboration while minimising its risks; and embracing AI in a responsible way.
GovMesh Horizons brings together the collective thought leadership and voices of a dozen members of the GovMesh community, formed at the start of 2025 to create an intimate space for governments to discuss the digital government present and future. Through their voices, this paper reflects on the year just gone, and speculates about how to build positive momentum into 2026.
2025 is framed as “a year of big choices”, with questions of digital sovereignty and AI adoption front of mind. As security, risk management and control become increasingly prominent themes, governments are increasingly thinking about how to derisk without being isolated and going digital alone.
The pressures around rolling out AI are not unrelated. Many interviewees raise the idea of “AI panic”, a feeling of being left behind if unwilling or unable to roll out AI in the short-term, and an awareness of the growing gap between the development of AI technology and actual adoption in government. Our leaders are navigating how to resist the urge to rush into adoption without rejecting the opportunity of AI, focusing on choosing the right pilots and setting themselves up structurally for success.
In navigating these themes, our interviewees highlighted five lessons from 2025:
Sovereignty is about knowing when and where to lean on trusted partners, not about doing everything on one’s own
Embracing an AI rollout is a question of state capacity, not a moment in time
AI transforms service delivery when it is used as part of a bigger state redesign, not an add-on
Leaders need time to step back, not just push forward
In a time of heavy digital change, good communications are more important than ever
Looking ahead to 2026, the prospect of needing to do more with less is clear. Funding cuts in international development and a sense of government services bursting at the seams mean there is near consensus around the need for what the UAE’s Abeer Tahlak calls “radical reimagination triumphing over incremental improvements”.
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Scaling digital success will involve contextualising global offers, building resilience across and throughout government, and getting the perennial challenge of investment right.
In doing so, our leaders offer five further reflections for the year ahead:
Doing more with less requires redesigning government, rather than stretching its limits, but countries do not have to start from scratch and go it alone
Scaling transformation comes from embracing horizontal opportunities over asserting central control
Successful AI scaling will depend not just on builds, but contextualisation and reuse
Creative approaches to strategic investments remain a gap, especially with regards to multi-agency and cross-border initiatives
Cross-border collaboration will likely become more the norm, and more necessary