Governments Are Deploying AI in Resident Services. Is the Identity Infrastructure Ready?

State and local agencies are caught between two forces: residents who expect modern, seamless digital services, and AI-driven systems that are about to reshape how those services get delivered. The agencies that navigate both successfully will have one thing in common. They treated identity as a strategic foundation early, not an afterthought they cleaned up later.

Too many agencies still manage identity the way they always have: project by project, portal by portal, each with its own login, its own security posture, its own small team keeping the lights on. That approach was adequate when digital services were a convenience. It is less acceptable now that they are the primary way residents interact with government. Fragmented identity means residents hit friction, development teams inherit complexity, and risk grows quietly with every new service built on an unstable foundation.

The agencies getting this right are the ones consolidating identity into a shared capability. Los Angeles demonstrated what that shift looks like in practice, replacing over 30 custom-built identity implementations with a unified resident credential serving nearly 500,000 users. The takeaway extends well beyond one city: agencies that centralize identity give their teams room to build, give residents a consistent experience worth trusting, and create a security posture that holds up as services expand.

All of this takes on new weight as AI storms into seemingly every conversation. Agencies are already testing whether agents are capable of and can be trusted to process claims, answer resident questions, and touch sensitive data. Those aren't hypothetical scenarios. They're happening now, and each one surfaces a question that identity has to answer: what is this system allowed to do, who gave it permission, and where's the record? If agencies are still sorting out how identity works for people, governing it for autonomous systems will be that much harder.

The time to lay this groundwork is before the pressure builds, not after. Auth0's Secure Every Interaction: Leader's Guide to Identity in an Agentic World walks through exactly how to get there, from evaluating your current identity maturity to building architectures that support both human users and AI agents at scale. It lays out a five-pillar blueprint for modern customer identity strategy, practical steps for operationalizing it across teams, and a forward-looking view of what identity must become as autonomous systems take on more responsibility. Read the full guide here to start building the identity foundation your agency will need. And for a look at what this shift looks like in practice, explore the City of Los Angeles story to see what it looks like when an agency commits to getting identity right.