1st July 2026
Think of your vision of the future. It likely starts with all the things we have to build in the physical world. Enough housing for every child to have their own room. The infrastructure for everyone to get to school and work with ease. Clean energy to power it all. What’s stopping us? Delays that keep getting worse.
We have given our local governments the task of approving what society needs most, but we haven’t equipped them with the support needed for today’s world’s demands. This creates a capacity gap that will only get worse unless fixed at the source.
So what are the problems? It starts with technology. Governments account for 40–50% of GDP while running on 1990s database software.
And then it’s the sheer amount of work on every government worker's plate. More than 15 million government workers in Europe and the US spend less than half their time on the job they were trained and hired to do. The rest is lost to admin.
This capacity gap keeps widening as the officers who retire or leave for the private sector go unreplaced. 40% of the UK's planning officers have left the profession in a decade. The same is happening across US local government.
Matthew Syed puts it, “Dutiful public servants… have been caught up in a labyrinth nobody planned, riven with terrible incentives nobody designed.” So the country waits. Families wait for homes and businesses wait for permits.
At Xylo, we are tackling these issues head on. Our vision is to make public services so delightful that the best service in every citizen's day comes from the public sector. You may not agree with every decision your government makes. But you should count on them to make every decision quickly and transparently.
Public service excellence should never be a surprise.
Our AI agents handle the admin so officers can focus on the judgement. The decision is always theirs. We build the AI behind those decisions hand in hand with the officers who use it.
We're starting with local governments, because deciding the applications of citizens and businesses is how a country actually gets built. Faster applications, decided with more confidence, mean more homes, more infrastructure, more clean energy.
The waiting, over.
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