At Civic Roundtable, our mission is to power a more effective, efficient, and integrated government by bridging silos, streamlining coordination, and building institutional memory for public servants across the United States.
With that mission in mind, we hosted our 2025 Veterans Services & AI Implementation Roundtable earlier this month — a virtual, off-the-record session designed to bring together state leaders from across the country working at the intersection of veterans services, technology, and public sector innovation. The goal: exchange insights, surface shared challenges, and explore how AI could be thoughtfully applied to amplify capacity, strengthen service delivery, and protect trust.
The conversation was grounded in real-world experience — from improving claims processing, to coordinating workforce programs, to expanding access to accurate benefits information. But as with all of our Roundtables, the real value came from the collective wisdom of practitioners navigating similar challenges every day. From that discussion, three key themes emerged:
Reporting, data collection, and information retrieval continue to pull valuable hours away from mission-critical work. Participants discussed the toll this takes on service quality and staff well-being, and how targeted use of AI could help reclaim time for direct engagement with veterans.
The faster veterans can get accurate, relevant information, the better their outcomes. Leaders spoke about the importance of making benefits information easy to find, ensuring it’s trustworthy, and removing barriers to understanding or access — whether those barriers are technological, procedural, or linguistic.
There’s growing curiosity about AI’s potential to automate repetitive tasks, speed research, and surface insights from large volumes of data. But alongside that optimism is a clear insistence on guardrails: keeping systems secure, ensuring accuracy, protecting privacy, and maintaining human oversight for the decisions that matter most.
These themes are central to the work we do at Civic Roundtable — giving public servants one secure place to find, share, and act on the information that matters most. By pairing that foundation with carefully scoped AI capabilities, we can help agencies spend less time chasing details and more time delivering impact.
What made this Roundtable unique wasn’t just the focus on AI — it was the collaborative spirit in which participants approached the topic. There was space for creativity, caution, and cross-pollination of ideas — from automating recurring job posting research, to quickly parsing thousand-page medical records, to pulling program impact reports in minutes instead of days.
At Civic Roundtable, we’re committed to supporting this work — not only with technology, but with spaces where leaders can think together about what’s possible, what’s responsible, and what’s next. If you’re exploring how AI could support your agency’s mission — or simply want to connect with peers facing similar questions — we’d love to hear from you.
In service of public service,
The Civic Roundtable Team
