Government has over 1,500 services across dozens of departments. When something significant happens in your life, it is your job to find them, understand them, and deal with each one separately.
| Today | With an agent |
|---|---|
| You search GOV.UK, guess which service you need, and hope you find the right one | You describe your situation in plain language and the agent identifies every relevant service |
| You fill in the same details on every form — name, address, NI number, again and again | Your verified data is used once — the agent fills in forms across departments for you |
| Nobody tells you about services you are entitled to but did not know existed | The agent proactively surfaces services you are eligible for but would never have found |
| If your situation crosses departments, you navigate each one alone | One conversation spans every department involved in your life event |
| There is no record of what you were told, why, or what happened next | Every action is recorded: what was done, by whom, why, and with your explicit consent |
For agents to work on behalf of citizens, two things must be true.
The citizen needs a trustworthy agent
Government services need to be understandable by that agent
For citizens and the people who help them
For departments and service teams
The citizen side consumes what the department side publishes. Neither works without the other.
For a service to work through an agent, the department will need to publish a structured service description — a machine-readable expression of policy decisions they already make. Every service description has four dimensions.
What the service is. Department ownership, SLA, fees, redress routes.
Who qualifies. Evaluable conditions published by the department.
The valid sequence of steps. What must happen before what.
What data is shared, from where, with whom, and for what purpose.
Together, these four dimensions form the complete contract between a department and any agent acting for a citizen — structured records in a service registry, versioned, governed, and published automatically to every channel.
One conversation that spans every department. You describe what is happening in your life; the agent takes care of the rest.
"My husband died three weeks ago." The agent understands your situation and identifies every service you need — across every department, not just one.
All the services laid out together — what needs to happen, in what order, and which departments are involved.
Before anything is shared, you see exactly what data will be sent, to whom, and why. You approve each one individually. Nothing happens without your say-so.
Forms are pre-filled from your verified details. The agent submits on your behalf, service by service, so you are not re-entering the same information six times over.
Every submission is confirmed — what was sent, to which department, when, and with a reference number. You have a permanent record. So does the department.
The Legibility Studio is where departments make their services ready for agents. It is an authoring, auditing, and measurement platform — one place where service teams describe what their services do, and then see how agents are using them.
Describe your services using the four-dimension model. The editor guides service teams through identity, eligibility, journey, and data sharing — with LLM-assisted generation for teams starting from scratch.
Every agent interaction with your services is recorded. The evidence explorer lets you replay any citizen journey step by step, see exactly what data was shared and why, and investigate complaints with full context.
See which of your services are agent-ready and which have gaps. Coverage cards show completion status. Priority sorting helps teams focus on the services that matter most.
The most common concern about AI in government: what if it gets things wrong? The answer is an architecture where the AI is never the one making decisions.
If the AI suggests something that contradicts the service description, the runtime blocks it. The AI is a communicator, not a decision-maker.
This is evolution, not revolution. The operating model builds on foundations government has already laid.
Identity verification is reused, not rebuilt. The agent authenticates citizens through One Login, the same infrastructure departments already trust.
The Tell Us Once principle — notify government once, not repeatedly — currently applies to death notifications. This model extends it to every life event.
The four dimensions complement GDS's existing service register and design standards. They add machine-readable descriptions alongside the human-readable guidance departments already publish.
This does not replace departmental back-end systems. It makes them accessible through a new channel — one where citizens are guided rather than left to navigate alone.
The most common objections, and how the architecture addresses each one.