AI readiness and service-delivery roadmap for a state government

A state government had announced an ambition to use AI in citizen service delivery, and several vendors had already presented compelling demonstrations. The centre-of-government team faced a familiar dilemma: strong political will, real service-delivery pain points, and no independent basis on which to judge which proposals were credible, what sequencing was realistic, or what the state's data and institutional foundations could actually support.

The risks of getting it wrong were concrete — public funds committed to systems that could not be maintained, citizen data handled outside a proper governance framework, and a procurement trail that would not survive audit scrutiny.

We applied the Muller AI Readiness Index across five dimensions — strategy, data, people, governance, and delivery — through structured interviews with ministries, departments and agencies, and a review of existing data infrastructure and digital-service capacity.

The output was deliberately procurement-neutral: a phased roadmap that sequenced use cases by data readiness and institutional capacity rather than by vendor enthusiasm; minimum data-governance preconditions for any citizen-facing deployment, aligned with the NDPA; evaluation criteria the state could put directly into tender documents; and a capability-building track so the state's own staff could supervise vendors rather than be supervised by them.

In line with our declaration-of-interest policy, Muller Global excluded itself from bidding on implementation work scoped by the roadmap.

The state received a defensible, sequenced plan grounded in its measured readiness rather than vendor narratives. Early foundational work — data inventory, governance framework, and a supervised low-risk pilot — was prioritised ahead of headline projects, and the tender criteria from the roadmap gave the procurement team an objective basis for evaluating proposals.