TLDR: Paul Mukherjee, CTO of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), believes agentic AI will fundamentally reshape government operations by shifting focus from processes to outcomes. He experienced a ‘lightbulb moment’ witnessing an agentic AI solution for cloud migrations and sees its immediate application in cost reduction, despite acknowledging significant mindset and ethical challenges.
Paul Mukherjee, the Chief Technology Officer for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), has expressed profound optimism regarding the transformative potential of agentic artificial intelligence within government. Speaking at a recent ServiceNow public sector event, Mukherjee revealed a ‘lightbulb moment’ after witnessing a demonstration of an agentic AI solution capable of automating complex tasks, specifically migrating applications from legacy data centers to cloud-native environments. He stated, ‘I was absolutely blown away, and we’re actually exploring doing that.’
Mukherjee, who joined Defra 18 months ago, highlighted the unprecedented pressure on government to innovate and deliver services differently. He believes AI can be instrumental in shifting the civil service’s focus from merely streamlining existing processes to fundamentally reimagining and achieving better outcomes. ‘The big prize will be reimagining how we deliver an outcome, forgetting how we’ve done it historically,’ he explained. As an example, he posited a hypothetical customer contact service where AI could handle 90% of the target audience by default, allowing human intervention for the remaining 10% with more complex needs, thereby overcoming current blockers to change.
While acknowledging the country’s financial constraints, Mukherjee conceded that the immediate application of AI in government would likely be for ‘cost takeout.’ However, his long-term vision extends to leveraging agentic AI for more intricate technical challenges, such as large-scale cloud migrations.
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Despite his enthusiasm, Mukherjee is pragmatic about the hurdles ahead. He noted that achieving an outcomes-oriented approach requires a significant ‘mindset shift’ at the top levels of government. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of resolving critical ethical and operational questions surrounding the human-AI relationship, particularly concerning accountability for automated decisions. Nevertheless, Mukherjee, with his background in enterprise architecture in pharmaceutical and technology companies, remains confident in agentic AI’s capacity to demonstrate novel ways of achieving governmental goals.
