Do citizens around the world want their governments to speed up their use of AI to deliver services, or do they think that their governments’ AI efforts are moving too fast? Although the answer differs from region to region, one of these opinions has a much stronger impact than the other on popular sentiment.
This finding arose from the latest edition of BCG’s biennial Digital Government Citizen Survey, which has emerged over the past decade as a valuable resource on citizens’ opinions and beliefs about government digital service delivery. The 2026 edition, spanning 44 countries and 48,500 respondents, arrives at an inflection point for governments and their ongoing digital transformations, thanks to two recent revolutionary developments: the rapid expansion of AI and the rise of agentic AI.
Over the past decade, governments have successfully expanded their digital services, which have become essential to citizens around the world. Usage, adoption, and quality are all up, but citizen satisfaction has dropped despite the arrival of more expansive, more personalized digital services. Expanding use of AI would help governments transform those services and revive citizen enthusiasm. However, pursuing that course carries some risks, too.
In the past two years, the proportion of the global public that uses AI weekly has surged. With increased exposure, citizens have concurrently grown more comfortable with AI and the role it plays in their lives. This year’s survey revealed that the individuals who are more proficient with AI are seven times more optimistic about its benefits versus its risks. At the very top of the proficiency curve, however, the most experienced users demonstrate greater caution, indicating a need for careful calibration of AI scale-up. For governments, the pace of AI deployment in relation to citizen attitudes will be key.
Despite an overall trajectory of increasing openness to AI, it is increasingly clear that attitudes about AI depend on where you are. The Middle East and Africa continued to show the greatest comfort with AI of any region, despite a shift of 9 percentage points to a more neutral view. In the Americas, public opinion trended in the other direction, with a 5-percentage-point increase in citizens who said that AI’s benefits outweigh its risks. Asia-Pacific broadly sits at the global average, while Europe registered the lowest comfort level of any region—9 percentage points below the global average. Understanding citizen opinions will be key to governments’ strategic thinking, as will acknowledging that citizens’ AI sentiment will continue to evolve. For a deeper dive into citizens’ sentiment in specific countries, explore the DGCS interactive dashboard.
A critical insight from the 2026 survey is that governments today have a mandate to embrace AI to scale up their digital transformation. This year’s findings indicate that citizens are increasingly ready for the next step in the AI era—particularly when it comes to performing tasks in which they are directly involved—but nearly two-thirds still want human oversight to be embedded in the structure of digital services.
In fact, lower citizen satisfaction levels with these services correlates with citizens believing that their governments are moving too slowly in adopting AI, rather than too quickly. This counterintuitive sentiment is balanced with many recent global narratives that emphasize pockets of pushback to AI. It also shows that today’s openness to government exploration of AI in digital services is fluid, as citizens’ trust in government’s use of AI continues to evolve. Those trust levers will be crucial for governments as they try to fulfill expectations that they will take that next step in deploying AI to improve their offerings. For governments, the looming question then is, “How do we capitalize on this window?” The report outlines six steps that will help governments to meet citizens’ expectations for deploying AI to accelerate their digital service transformations.
For a detailed discussion of the survey’s findings and their implications for how governments should respond to citizens’ expectations, read BCG’s 2026 Digital Government Citizen Survey Report.
