A rapid increase in the adoption of digital platforms has been shifting paradigms in all aspects of the society, bringing the debate on the future of democracy, and redefining the traditional roles of public institutions. Academics, policymakers, and citizens from different levels of government have a surging interest to comprehend how to properly frame and adapt the transforming demands, opportunities, and social dynamics stemming from technologies which allow sharing data and processes, expanding digital capabilities, and amalgamating services and governance tools. In parallel, discussions surrounding the digitalisation of governance amplify concerns regarding accountability, accessibility, and civic engagement. Digital platforms blur the boundaries between the interior and exterior of organisations, promising horizontal coordination, and independent access to informational resources, going beyond traditional hierarchical dynamics of power.

On the one hand, technology can be used to legitimize the public sector, bringing citizens closer to politics, and reducing civic apathy. Yet, on the other hand, if this digitalization process is left unquestioned, the foundations of democracy as we know it will be eroded. Hence, the penetration of data-driven decision-making into unprepared local government institutions is expected to cause serious implications (both positive and negative), particularly with the current development of smart cities, which implement new types of interactions between citizens and municipalities. Yet, literature generally only take into account a single channel of electronic government provision such as websites or social media networks, ignoring other possible channels and neglecting novel types of interactions they may enable (e.g. use of mobile apps, adopting sensors for public transport, waste management or forecasting extreme phenomena), where citizens are assigned a new role as an ‘informant’ of public policies, complementing the traditional roles of service recipient and participant in public decisions - even if they are not even aware that may be occurring.

Since existing indexes do not account for this new type of interactions, this research aims to gauge the extent of 'platformization' within Portuguese municipalities, by building an Index that combines both qualitative and quantitative data, through an exploratory sequential mixed methods approach. The outputs of this research are expected to not only chart the penetration of digital platforms within Portuguese municipalities but also to enlighten the understanding of how these technologies impact public oversight, citizen participation, and governmental legitimacy within the context of local democracies, addressing major societal problems of participation, representativeness, access, and accountability.

Smart technology generally and AI specifically is assumed to lead to a redesign of service delivery processes towards a renewed, human-centric model that places the service user at the centre (O’Reilly 2010). How AI is designed becomes essential to achieving this aspiration. Yet, despite a recent interest in human-centred design (HCD) in public management, both the concept and the practice remain insufficiently conceptualized and understood (Bason and Austin 2021; Trischler et al. 2019). This is particularly the case for public sector AI (Vogl et al. 2020; Zuiderwijk, Chen, and Salem 2021). HCD is defined as ‘a way of thinking about intentional processes for creating societal change’ though emphasis is on organizational change (Bason and Austin, 2021, 1). It is framed in the context of collaborative innovation and new models of public governance that emphasize citizen involvement and input that is supposed to feed into public policy and service design (Bason and Austin, 2021; van der Bijl-Brouwer and Dorst, 2017).

In situating this proposed paper in the inter-connected fields of AI studies and HCD in public management, this article addresses the following research questions:

• What does HCD mean for the adoption of AI in public management?

• How are the characteristics of HCD used in the design of a new, AI-enabled service delivery model that explicitly and fundamentally claims to be human-centred?

• In what ways is an AI-based public service delivery model human-centred, and in what ways it fails to meet this expectation?

This paper aims to address these research questions by analysing a multi-annual AI program, entitled AuroraAI National Program, developed by the Government of Finland during 2019-2023 (Leikas et al. 2022). AuroraAI was defined as ‘a concept for human-centric and ethical society in the age of artificial intelligence’ (Ministry of Finance 2019, 9). The ambition of AuroraAI was to transform Finland into a ‘human-centric society’. It aimed to achieve this desideratum by means of a new service model that is based on a ‘human-centric service market’ that gravitates around particular life events and business activity. It uses artificial neural network (ANN), i.e. ‘the AuroraAI network’, which was defined as a ‘decentralised open network of smart services and applications’ that connects different service providers (public, private and non-governmental). Its citizen-centric focus and service orientation were evident: ‘AuroraAI seeks to provide a holistic set of personalised AI-driven services for citizens and businesses in a way that is human-centric and works towards their wellbeing as its ultimate goal’ (OECD 2021).

However, there have been concerns that AuroraAI was human centered only in theory and the program ended up being largely a technical experiment (Leikas et al. 2022). The paper begins with a theoretical review of HCD in public management to distil its key characteristics. On this basis, we will then derive an analytical framework of HCD for public sector AI. Then, we will present the case study method, interview and archival data and move on to present the findings, followed by discussion and conclusion.

A new wave of digital technologies is currently rapidly changing our economies and societies (Van Dijck, Poell & De Waal, 2018; Zuboff, 2019; Strømmen-Bakhtiar, 2020). The combination of platform technologies and artificial intelligence is radically transforming economic relations and also societal patterns. Social media and digital platforms have rapidly changed the ways in which we consume, meet partners and organize both work and leisure. The current fascination with – and fear of – general artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT highlights the current focus on technology as a key driving factor of change in our modern societies.

This digital transformation generates a host of questions in society related to topics as diverse as fake news, new labor conditions, stress among children and new forms of crime (Trittin-Ulbrich et al., 2021). For this reason, the digital transformation is not a topic for only the information technology specialists in government but touches upon all policy domains. Government policies for sectors as diverse as social security, policing, sustainability, healthcare and culture and arts are all influenced by the digital transformation.

To further enhance the complexity of the issue, the digital transformation of society needs to be understood as a double challenge for governments. On the one hand, governments need to provide answers to new challenges such as re-organization of labor, fake news and digital crime (Van Dijck, Poell & De Waal, 2018; Strømmen-Bakhtiar, 2020. On the other hand, governments themselves are rapidly transforming through the incorporation of new technologies in their internal and external processes (Mergel et al., 2019).

This reflective essay will explore the governance of the digital transformation as a double challenge: a challenge to the organization of government and a challenge to the role of government in society. One could also argue that this is an issue of a new form of alignment: the institutional form of government needs to be re-aligned with the structure of society. I will discuss the nature and pervasiveness of the digital transformation, the key challenges for governance, and the types of responses that are being developed in the forms of hard and soft rules. I will end with a brief research agenda and basically a call for public administration scholars to engage in multidisciplinary research on these topics.

The advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) popularised through applications like ChatGPT have accentuated the governments’ ambition to enhance the quality and efficiency of public services and policy. Although public services have been using comparable systems and platforms, such as big data analytics and automated decision-making systems, for decades, recent developments around generative AI and its alleged capacity to simulate human functions (to a certain extent), is accompanied by both promise and risk. Not only are these aspirations and threats significant for future public services provision, they also constitute a challenge in relation to how we prioritise and define public values. This paper will utilise a ‘value-chain approach’ to explore and summarise the immediate experiences of AI in public services and will set out some of the hurdles and challenges associated with these innovations. While value-chain approaches are traditionally associated with identifying sequences in a (commercial) production (manufacturing) process, in order to identify and deliver value to producers and consumers, more recent literature has applied this approach to a public service context, including digital service delivery and public policymaking. In doing so, this approach highlights the nuanced ways in which value is determined in the public service environment and the unique intertwined relationship between digital services and public value. This paper provides an opportunity to reflect on some of the promises of AI, as well as presenting some elements for better diagnostic tools in forecasting and evaluating digital platforms and systems utilising generative AI. This includes recognising and assessing value issues associated with data quality, intellectual property, surveillance, privacy, and transparency, etc. Embedded in this discussion is an exploration of how public values are negotiated, how they evolve, and how they are balanced between one another. In this sense, the paper will provide an overview of the relationship between the evolution of contemporary public values and digital technologies and services.