Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The U.S. government has cataloged over 1,700 active AI use cases, and nearly 90% of federal agencies are already using or planning to use AI. The European Commission has disclosed nearly 1,500 AI use cases across EU member states. With over 3,200 combined AI use cases cataloged across the US and EU, public sector IT leaders face an identical roadblock: traditional application delivery controllers were not designed to parse or throttle Layer 7 LLM payloads, leading to backend GPU exhaustion.

Over the past year, federal agencies gained broad access to enterprise AI through the OneGov initiative, at prices unlike any normal software deal. The current OneGov portal lists OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise at $1 per agency, Anthropic Claude at $1 per seat, and Google Gemini for Government at $0.47 per agency. Those introductory offers begin expiring on September 30, 2026, the final day of fiscal year (FY) 26, which places renewal squarely in the FY27 planning cycle.

A recent IDC Spotlight report based on a survey of 685 public sector respondents found that 72% describe scaling AI from pilot to production as "very" or "somewhat" difficult.¹ Choosing the right model is only part of the challenge. Agencies also need to get their data ready for AI.

The new columnar metrics engine in Elastic Observability enables public sector IT teams to combine logging, metrics, and traces in one platform. As a result, SREs can improve uptime while protecting taxpayer dollars in the process. Public sector site reliability engineers (SREs) operate under a distinct set of pressures, whether that’s supporting a federal agency, a health department, a public university, or a transit authority.

Public sector reliability is not a green dashboard. It’s whether people can complete the service when it matters.

Modern government missions depend on software platforms that can perform under demanding conditions. As agencies update systems that support public safety, benefits delivery, financial operations, and national priorities, they face security and compliance requirements that shape how technology is adopted as well as how it is built, operated, and evolved over time.

Public sector organizations have long relied on global cloud providers to modernize infrastructure and scale digital services. However, priorities are shifting. Today, decisions are shaped not just by cost or performance, but by where data is stored, who controls it, and how it is governed. Increasing regulatory pressure, geopolitical uncertainty, and rising expectations around data privacy are all driving this change.