Not only is it important for governments to plan for aging societies, but it is also important for public servants to adapt to the changing nature of governance with a reduced workforce. AI could help close some productivity gaps due to a shrinking workforce, but governments still need to rethink their administrative structures to meet this coming challenge. This would include rethinking civilian sector wages and allowing the hiring and retention of private sector workers.

As large numbers of public servants retire and societal needs evolve, the biggest challenge will be maintaining high-quality public services with a shrinking workforce. Adapting to these changes is difficult at the best of times, but with fewer staff and increasing demand, it becomes especially critical.

It is important to think about the implications of aging in the civil service, as it plays a huge role in shaping society and economies, from the impact on the types of products we consume , designing and enforcing complex antitrust laws, and implementing policies related to climate change, artificial intelligence (AI), data protection, and much more. Truly empowered public servants can fundamentally transform lives, but to do so they need the right tools and support.

In the OECD area, for example, there are more workers aged over 55 than under 34, a trend particularly visible in Italy and Spain. The UK experienced a series of recruitment freezes in the 2010s, which reduced the number of people under 34 in the civil service, exacerbating this problem.

An older civil service has multiple consequences. This reduces opportunities for new ideas and talent to enter government and increases ministries’ reliance on a few senior civil servants to retrain their institutional knowledge.

This is not necessarily a challenge, but without upskilling and training mechanisms to share knowledge across generations, valuable information can be lost, a problem highlighted by the UK Cabinet Office. The UK Public Accounts Committee highlights low pay and a lack of mechanisms to track and improve productivity as the main reasons for workforce attrition within the UK civil service.

Germany’s civil service, which will shrink by around 30% by 2030, is already putting severe pressure on basic public services, but is also undermining the country’s business environment. This is evident in the long delays in obtaining approvals and permits for basic items such as marriage certificates or even for hiring foreign talent needed to fuel the economy.

This, combined with a population more opposed to immigration, leaves Germany facing chronic labor shortages in its economy. This will impact not only the federal government, but even more so local governments, given that they bear the brunt of public service delivery on the front lines.

One solution being considered is to invest heavily in AI and digitalization to make government tasks more efficient and allow the existing civil service to spend time on more strategic tasks. In recent years, the use of AI to address governance issues has seen success in Germany.

However, these initiatives are slow to develop, as an aging civil service is less open to or feels less empowered to use AI, and a more intangible factor is Germany’s love of paper bureaucracy.

More broadly, as various countries face the prospect of a shrinking civil service, it is essential to empower and train civil servants to use tools such as AI. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics saved nearly a month of staff time by using AI to code and map results to a complex survey the agency previously conducted.

While the process would normally take 25,000 man hours, with AI it took 1 day. However, for AI to be effective, public servants must feel empowered to do so. A report from Apolitical highlights that more than 53% of civil servants surveyed believe that they are not empowered to use AI effectively.

The big question worth asking is how governments can internally manage such a complex transition while maintaining and updating the type of delivery expected of citizens. This requires a fundamental overhaul, given the reduced number of young employees to work with.

Although AI will play an important role in closing productivity gaps, it will not be enough. Retraining and retaining existing employees is an intermediate step, but this must be complemented by efforts to attract recruits from outside government – ​​a difficult task given the complexity of civil service recruitment.

However, the aging of societies and the civil service constitutes a significant challenge that governments must be able to address head on, and without delay.

The author is a policy advisor at WisdomCircle, an age technology platform.