This episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast explores how state and local governments are adapting to an evolving tech landscape and rising operational demands. Dustin Haisler, president of e.Republic, joins guest host Bob Ragsdale to share insights from the Center for Digital Government’s Beyond the Beltway conference. They discuss how agencies are addressing technical debt, building enterprise strategies, and embracing continuous improvement to meet changing expectations — all while navigating emerging technologies and workforce challenges.
In this episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast, we examine how the evolving tech landscape, AI adoption, and changing organizational demands are reshaping state and local government.
Guest host Bob Ragsdale, director of analyst relations at Tyler, sits down with Dustin Haisler, president of e.Republic, for a forward-looking conversation on the trends shaping public sector innovation. Drawing from his insights at the Center for Digital Government’s Beyond the Beltway conference, Dustin explores how governments are managing technical debt, building enterprise technology strategies, and adapting to emerging tools and innovations shaping public sector operations.
Dustin also discusses how agencies can embrace continuous improvement, foster a culture of innovation, and meet rising expectations from residents. From workforce reskilling to the importance of data governance and enterprise solutions, this episode is full of practical guidance for public sector leaders charting a course through uncertainty.
Tune in to hear how IT leaders and mission owners alike can seize this moment to reimagine service delivery — and why there’s never been a more exciting time to work in government.
This episode also highlights Tyler Connect 2025, our annual conference designed to bring public sector professionals together to empower, collaborate, and imagine. Join us in San Antonio, Texas, from May 11-14, 2025, for product training, networking, and inspiration to help drive your organization forward. Early registration is now open — visit tylertech.com/connect to secure your spot!
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Dustin Haisler: What an amazing time to be a public servant. What an amazing time to be in state and local government. Whether you’re an IT leader or you’re a mission owner, you can completely reimagine what it means to deliver services.
Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, this is the Tyler Tech Podcast, where we explore the trends, technologies, and people shaping the public sector. I’m Josh Henderson. Thanks for joining us. In this episode, we’re turning things over to guest host Bob Ragsdale, director of analyst relations here at Tyler, for a timely conversation with Dustin Haisler, president of e.Republic.
Building on insights shared at the Center for Digital Government’s Beyond the Beltway Conference, Dustin explores the GovTech trends reshaping how agencies operate, from AI policy and budget priorities to the need for enterprise strategies that address technical debt and support continuous innovation.
You’ll also hear how state and local governments are adapting to rapid change and rising expectations.
It is such an insightful conversation jam packed with takeaways for today’s public sector leaders. So, let’s dive right in.
Bob Ragsdale: Well, hey, Dustin. It’s great to connect with you again and, particularly wonderful to have you joining us here on the Tyler Tech Podcast. Back in February, you were one of the hosts at the Center for Digital Government’s Beyond the Beltway conference, and it was an amazing event. I enjoyed it thoroughly. But I was hoping we could dive into some of the tech trends, the budget forecasts, and some of the policy tips and insights, that you shared with the attendees at the start of the conference.
From your perspective, when we began that conference, what major shifts or standout items kind of emerged this year in terms of themes?
Dustin Haisler: Well, first of all, great to see you, Bob, outside of the conference, and thanks for letting me have an opportunity to share a little bit about what what’s going on. Everything is changing every day, as we were kind of discussing. There are new shifts that are taking place. So, as we look at state and local as a market, I mean, the biggest shift is that this market is gaining a lot of new responsibility.
So, the federal government or the federal administration is looking at pushing a lot of these responsibilities to state government agencies. And so, states are trying to figure out ultimately, what am I going to have to pay for? What am I going to have to absorb? And so, optimization, efficiency, and innovation have kind of emerged out of necessity as a key aspect of this.
So, I think you’re seeing those changes in addition to this this exponential technology landscape around government where AI is changing everything. It’s changing behaviors. It’s changing the way constituents are interfacing with government. And so, you kind of have the perfect storm of change and exponential behaviors, that are impacting state and local all at one time.
Well, let’s dive into AI for a minute then. We hear a lot about it. The landscape is changing quickly, but AI is changing quickly. And I imagine a lot of, state and local governments aren’t really steeped in AI. So, how are they dealing with it?
Dustin Haisler: So, it’s interesting. We’ve seen an evolution of AI within state and local government. I mean, under the Biden administration, we saw an executive order drop with the federal government’s approach to that. And, basically, what we saw after that is about 30 states that each had their own governors pass some flavor of executive order to try to codify some aspect of approaching AI. , the most popular thing kind of in 2024 was an AI task force or council or some type of group just to figure out, like, what is our approach to this? What are the guardrails we need to have in place to recommend legislation to their legislatures?
And so, we’re moving from that now into 2025, where it’s kind of moved from pilot to enterprise. So now the rhetoric has changed into, what do I how do I implement this? How do I take the guidance that’s there, and how do I move forward with this, and what does that look like?
And I think this landscape around AI and state and local is fascinating because a lot of people can consider AI to be just the standalone thing that you’re going to go buy, you’re going to go procure – we can put the guardrails in place to go procure it by one of these solutions, but that’s not the case.
We’re seeing embedded AI working its way into government technology, into the existing applications that they have. And so, whether a state has a strategy or the guardrails in place or not, we are seeing significant movement of AI adoption that they may not even know about. And then you have the employee behavior, right, the shadow AI where people are bringing it in, and they’re trying to use it to help reply to emails to constituents and other types of things. So, it’s this fascinating kind of parallel where we’re trying to move into an enterprise roll out of it.
We’re seeing city governments able to move a little bit quicker there. They don’t have much of the guardrails and legalese as some of the states do. But then you have where we are from an employee standpoint, constituent standpoint, where people are taking public data, they’re going to public hearings, and then they’re saying, hey, here’s five things that you might want to consider based on this prompt that I got.
So, a lot of really interesting things.
Bob Ragsdale: But how do how can leaders that manage that? I mean, it sounds like a lot of fragmentation is happening right there. How do they deal with that?
Dustin Haisler: It’s a great question. I mean, I think this is where you have to think about some of the things that you may not want to talk about all the time.
Governance and it’s like back to the basics. You aren’t going to be able to buy and control every piece of AI technology that you bring into your environment. So, you need to think about, how do I create the right foundation for these things to exist?
And do I need to take an enterprise approach to that too? Does it make sense for me to have 50 separate applications that each have their own embedded AI? Now I have to kind of think about them.
How do I deal with records management associated with it? How do I deal with understanding explainability of each of the models? So, there’s all these questions that are there. And so, I think enterprise approach, you got to have very consolidated way to do that.
Also, one of the biggest challenges with AI that we’ve seen in government isn’t the deployment of it. It’s the fact that once they deploy it, they realize, oh, man. I’ve got to connect it to my existing data. And so, if your data is in 50 different places, that also creates a challenge because you can’t extract any benefit from it.
It’s not a silver bullet solving your unstructured data problems. And so, I think, again, it goes back to kind of the enterprise approach. It comes back to looking at kind of that platform approach to how you’re going to do it. So, I think governance, thinking about the elephants in the room with, like, records management and enforcing your policies and those types of things, how you practically and realistically do that in addition to from a data structure standpoint.
How do I ensure everything is connected so that I can actually get value out of this and make data driven decisions that aren’t just isolated in one part of my city or in one part of my state? It’s connected to the entire apparatus.
Bob Ragsdale: So, when you talk to leaders, are you giving different guidance for leaders at different levels, say state and local? Because I would imagine if I were a local leader, and I think about it in terms of technical debt, I may not actually have the technical chops to manage some of this stuff. And so, I have to have good data governance and things like that. So, how do I go there?
Dustin Haisler: It’s the chicken and the egg problem. I mean, I think the challenge is whether they like it or not, it’s here.
They’re like, this isn’t a technology. You can sit on the sidelines and say, we’ll figure out how to service our technical debt and what our AI strategy is going forward.
Like, your employees are using it. Shadow AI use is rampant. So, this this kind of forces the need for agencies to take an enterprise approach and to think about, okay. Well, what are the guardrails I put in place?
How do I do that? I think we see, with the state and local split there, some states have a lot of technical debt and innovation debt that they have to service as an aspect of this. And so, it may take them a little bit longer to move forward a lot, kind of set up sandboxes.
They may be more regulated, especially around health and human services use cases, and then they’ll kind of get into more enterprise rollouts. What’s interesting is at the city level, we’re seeing cities that don’t have as much technical debt are moving very quick into it. And so, they’re looking at ways to write ordinances with it, and they’re looking at all kinds of new use cases outside of this just the standard administrative stuff. And so, I think these types of dynamics that are happening are showing there is a little bit of a division, but we still run into the same problems as a part of this.
Because it goes back to not just the governance stuff, but then it’s like, well, what can I do with it? What’s acceptable? What are the use cases I’m going to have in place?
What can I bring into it? Can I put PII into it? There are all of these things that have to be confronted.
And then at the end of the day, your policy is only as good as the piece of paper that you wrote it on. And so, how do I actually train my staff on what’s expected, and how do I deal with reskilling, and how do I deal with some of these other, more complex sides of the equation?
So, as you look across, different government organizations, where are you seeing it kind of AI kind of universally working well and then kind of universally, where are people running into issues?
So, I would say from our surveys, we’re seeing a lot of the administrative task things like writing replies to emails, basic data processing, summarization of text, translation, kind of the administrative functions of AI are doing really well. I call these the party trick dynamics of AI, though, because I think they’re only showing the art of the possible, and there’s so much more that this technology can do when you think about low code, no code development, and all kinds of things on top of that. I think agencies they may prompt something, get a reply back, but going deeper and kind of exploring that requires more experimentation, more thoughts on how they can kind of apply it.
So, I think those are some of the initial use cases that we’re seeing, but we also know there’s an explosion of things that are happening. You look at, like, agentic communication and some of these new waves that are starting to kind of enter the vocabulary. Just when we figured out GenAI, now we have new naming conventions that are coming in that we have to prepare for. And so, I think we have to shift from just the administrative core focus area here into now, how do we use this to make more data driven decisions, but also deal with things like ethics and bias and some of the inherent things that may be there that we may not be experts in?
How do we navigate that? Like, how do we take an enterprise approach to solving those?
Bob Ragsdale: Let’s talk a second about agentic AI because I think it’s a term that is as you said, it’s very new. This year seems to be coming to the forefront of some people’s minds, and I think in other people, they’re not really aware of it. So, maybe you can explain a little bit what it is and where people will see the benefits of it.
Dustin Haisler: So, I think when you look at AI as a category, it’s not new. It’s been around for decades.
And then GenAI came into the picture in 2022. And, basically, this was a way that human was in the loop prompting. It’s all about human empowerment, unlocking human potential, and so it’s very empowering and democratizing the technology and data and decision making. And then you get into the agentic side of things.
And so, basically, that blurs the line with where the human is at in the loop. So, the human may initiate a prompt and say, hey. This is my goal. But from that point forward, these models are autonomous or semi-autonomous where they can go out and find other ways to do that.
So maybe I get a speeding ticket in a city. And if I go and I prompt a traditional LLM, I’ll get a reply that’s a point of view in different ways that I can deal with that. But if I go to an agent-based architecture and say, hey, give me different strategies.
It’s not only going to come up with those things, but it may complete each one of them. It may go through the process of discovery and ask additional questions that I did not explicitly program within it. And so, you start to see this new wave where the blind where the human is at is a little bit more blurred. Now as it relates to our market, what’s interesting is agencies are starting to get hit with agentic communication.
So, there’s already examples where maybe it’s a pothole, maybe it’s a freedom of information request.
There are firms that are out there where users can go and they could basically hire a bot to go do these tasks for them, and they’re starting to impact government in the traditional channels that government has to support. And so, I think the opportunity slash challenge for state and local government is how do you interface back? Is the future of government infrastructure agent to human, like in a lot of humans being overwhelmed at a call center with bots, or is it agent to agent? And I think this isn’t like a two to three plus year thing. This is like a 2025 and 2026 thing that’s, like, starting to hit the radar of agencies. And I think there’s a lot more that we’re going to have to unpack here, but they’re already starting to see it today. So, it’s a really wild time in, in our market.
Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Hey there, Tyler Tech Podcast listeners. Have you heard the buzz? Our annual user conference, Tyler Connect 2025, is officially on the horizon. And I’m here with my colleague, Jade Champion, with some exciting news to share.
Jade Champion: That’s right. Early registration is now open and trust us, you don’t want to miss this. Mark your calendars for May eleventh through May 14, 2025, because we’re heading back to sunny San Antonio, Texas.
Josh Henderson: I can picture it already. The unique charm of historic Market Square, the vibrant Riverwalk, and, of course, the iconic Alamo. And let’s be honest, it’s not just the location that makes Tyler Connect a must attend event.
Jade Champion: Absolutely. Tyler Connect is one of the largest gatherings of public sector professionals, and it’s your chance to collaborate with peers who are solving challenges with innovative solutions. It’s packed with product training, network opportunities, and inspiration to help you and your team thrive.
Josh Henderson: Whether you’re a first-timer or a Connect veteran, this conference always delivers. And let’s not forget, you’ll leave with new knowledge, practical tools, and meaningful connections to apply in your work and share with your teams.
Jade Champion: Head to tylertech.com/connect to take advantage of our early registration pricing, which secures your spot for an unforgettable time in San Antonio.
Josh Henderson: We can’t wait to see you at Tyler Connect 2025, a place to empower, collaborate, and imagine what’s possible for the public sector, all in the heart of Texas. Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Bob Ragsdale: Budget is always a big topic particularly when there is a change in administration, then there’s always change in in budget priorities. What are you seeing with respect to budget? What’s happening right now?
Dustin Haisler: I mean, I think you’ve seen a few things. I mean, I think, spending will increase in about thirty one states.
Budgets are relatively flat, from kind of the last cycle. We are seeing certain recessionary indicators that are definitely causing concern. But I think one thing, to take a couple steps back is, whenever there’s periods of economic uncertainty in the market from a from a technology standpoint and from kind of a government technology standpoint. This is actually where agencies lean into tech.
Not because tech is a silver bullet to solving all of our problems, but because technology unlocks efficiency. Constraint breeds innovation. And agencies historically going back to two thousand eight, going to the pandemic, looking at all of these periods of previous economic uncertainty, whether it met the definition of a recession or not, any type of recessionary indicator equates to additional spend in technology. And, actually, this year, when we look at that, even though budgets are going to be flat, states are going to take on more responsibility.
They’re going to have to do more with less. Cities are going to take on new responsibilities. The funds are still flowing. The waiting and the mechanics of how those funds flow is changing, and some of those are kind of working their way out.
But agencies are going to have to lean into finding better ways of doing things both with process and also with technology. And so, we’re anticipating about a six point four percent increase in tech spend in 2025 over 2024. It’s about $154 billion in technology-related spend split between state and local government, 51% state, 49% local. So, this is going to be a rocket of a year for technology and innovation in government, and we’re just getting started, and we’re just starting to see some of those impacts.
So, I think it’s important just to know, like, when you look at the macroeconomics, that doesn’t mean that agencies will pause. Actually, we’re seeing the inverse where agencies are doubling down saying, no. We have to solve this right now. We’ve got to fix this problem.
So, this is the time for action, not to wait to see how the dust settles with federal actions through the court system. Like, these are real challenges you’re going to have to take on immediately.
Bob Ragsdale: So, are we seeing any, early signs of success? I mean, have you seen examples of any municipalities or any states that are you’re going, like, wow, that was innovative, and I’m really impressed that they’re moving in that direction.
Dustin Haisler: We’re seeing a ton of innovation. I mean, across the country. I think there’s a few things that are happening.
I mean, I think a lot, a lot of times right now, states are focused on efficiency and innovation, and they’re doing it through a lot of different ways. I mean, it’s such a prominent topic now that we actually stood up at government technology and efficiency tracker that’s state by state because this is a new vocabulary word that’s kind of entered the 2025 words, but it’s not new to the market. I think you also have a ton of innovation that’s happening both at the state and local level where people are looking at how can I use technology to, like, to change things, to change the way that we make decisions, to be smarter at how we use data in our financial planning?
But also, like, how do I democratize access to our knowledge to the constituents, so we don’t run into the open data problems of the past? When I was in government where we just dump a bunch of data on people and expect them to understand how to use a CSV file. It’s like, no.
You can leverage this and make more informed decisions and engage with government differently. And I think there’s pockets of that across the country.
And I think states and locals are moving into this. I mean, they’re coming to the table and finding ways to do more with less, but also to use technology and people in a way that just drives outcomes that we could not anticipate in the public sector a year ago.
Bob Ragsdale: Well, I would imagine also I mean, one thing that, at least, I perceive to be happening in this environment is it’s really energizing a lot of the public. It’s really energizing a lot of residents of our states and things like that. And so, I imagine that they’re probably asking more of governments during this sort of transition where they’re asking different questions of government. And so how can CIOs and IT leaders deal with that as they go through this transition of meeting those residents’ expectations?
Dustin Haisler: I think that’s that is the question of the day. Because when it comes to that, there’s definitely a potential disconnect that can happen.
And I think when you think about AI and even, like, emerging technology maturity, we often look at it just through a one dimensional lens where it’s like, where is the government at? Where should they be? And I think that’s kind of the wrong way to look at it. The way you should look at it is where’s the constituent at? And then where are we at?
And then where are the disconnects between those? And I think it’s important to track consumer behavior. It’s important to look at how your people are using technology so that you can also meet their expectations. But if there’s a gap in that, if they’re using agentic communication to send me FOIA requests and to deal with all of their transactions, and I’m still over here using basic sandbox AI tools, there’s going to be a huge operational inefficiency where I’m now having all of these citizens tying up human capital to deal with manual requests that should just be agent to agent.
And so, I think for CIOs and other people in that seat, the challenge is not just keeping up with the pace of the market. That’s just exponential, that’s a losing battle.
It’s keeping up with your people. It’s keeping up with your citizens. It’s keeping up with your employees. It’s being plugged into that.
So, I would say as you think about governance now our kind of fun topic here, don’t think about governance in the context of, like, how you’ve traditionally done it by bringing different business stakeholders together and getting some people from, like, the business community and, like, get actual real people and have them inform some of that process. Get the non techies to be part of the process so that you can understand and align your strategy with where people are really at and then use data. You can see what’s bot-based and what’s human traffic on your site.
You can look at how people are using technology today and then understand the patterns that are emerging from that data so you can make informed decisions. I think the most important thing is this is not like a multi-year thing that we have, oh, we can figure this out by the end of the decade. Like, this is a now thing, and this is like every single quarter, every single month, every single week you go on vacation, things are going to change. And so, you also have to update how you think about governance is not an annual exercise where you bring in bag lunch for everyone.
If you talk about this, like, this is something that’s changing on the fly and you can’t even predict the end of the year. So, you need to meet more frequently. You need to think about those things more frequently. But I think it’s an exciting time. Some people see this and they’re like, oh, this is disruptive, and this is going to change everything. I mean, what an amazing time to be a public servant. What an amazing time to be in state and local government.
Whether you’re an IT leader or you’re a mission owner, you can completely reimagine what it means to deliver services. We can take all this institutional knowledge that’s so complicated and written in legalese and make it accessible to people, not just our citizens, but also our staff. So, I think it’s an incredible time to be in this market.
Bob Ragsdale: But speaking of the pace of change, as an IT leader with, as you said, every month, every week every day, things are changing. How do you keep your staff motivated and tied to this and willing to move at this level of change?
Because if change is not welcome to everybody, we’re asking a lot of people in this situation.
Dustin Haisler: It’s a great question. And I think it comes down to culture and again, some of the best ways to keep up with exponential technologies and exponential behavior changes It’s not just knowing where they’re going. It’s also having the right environment for it. So, of course, you’ve got to deal with governance. You’ve got to deal with, like, making sure you have an enterprise technology stack for this that can deal with it.
You also have the right culture. You have to have the right culture in order for these things to stick. And if your culture is one where you do a big kind of ERP project, you pop a bottle of champagne at the end of it and say we’re done, it’s going to be a very disruptive ride for you because we’re in a period of time where you will never be done. Continuous improvement is the only way to keep up.
And so, you really need to operate in a state of continuous improvement. You need to embed that in your culture. You need to make it part of the way that you do work. Find ways to empower people to identify opportunities for improvement.
Give them the latitude to make those decisions. And I think in government, we have to change the culture. Now there are bright spots of this. Like, there are probably public servants listening to this that are doing that now.
So, keep doing that. Like, empower people, find ways to do that. But as agencies are complex adaptive systems, we have to find ways to empower our people to be part of this change.
There will be job tasks and job roles that are impacted by this, and the best way to navigate that is to empower those people to be part of redesigning the future. There will be large scale projects that we have to undertake. And one of the biggest challenges we see right now in the market is just workforce burnout. Right?
There’s so much happening – I might have the funding, the right resources, and everything else to move – but the challenge is, I just don’t want to overwhelm my people with another project. And so, I think these are all things that we have to kind of navigate and get people grooved into this this notion and this mindset of continuous improvement and innovation within state and local government. And everyone has a role in that.
It’s not just a CIO thing. It’s not just a mission owner thing. It is down to the individual person that’s pressing the button has a role in this as an organization. And so, I think we can’t neglect the importance of culture in this moment in time, investing in culture and in the soft dynamics of that that are required.
No management book is going to give you a silver bullet to solving this. This takes time. This takes a lot of conservative effort, and it’s also it’s contextual to your organization. What may work in your city, it might be completely different from my city.
You all know your cultures, and so you have to hack them in order to make them ready for all the stuff that’s about to hit them.
Bob Ragsdale: So, as we wrap up today’s podcast, and this has been absolutely fantastic, and I appreciate all your insights. If you were to tell one leader that is watching us right now, and they’re going to leave this podcast today, what is the first piece of advice you would say when you leave this podcast, go do this?
Dustin Haisler: I would say first, piece of advice, don’t not do anything. This is an opportunity where you may not know specifically what steps to make, and you may normally wait for someone else to kind of be that first mover so you can do that. This is something that’s impacting all of us at the same time. And I think the solutions may not always be clear, but the speed of change is, and we need to move, and we need to move forward.
And so, as you look at the overwhelming landscape we’re in, leverage the opportunity in whatever capacity you can to take a step forward, to do something. Don’t sit back. Don’t not do anything. Take a step forward.
Move the needle. Rewrite the rules of this market. And then I would say kind of the secondary part of that is also make sure you have the right foundation for that. Because as we’ve seen time and time again, you may have the best idea in the world, and you may have the shiniest technology in the world that you want to bring in.
But if your infrastructure is fragmented, disconnected, your data is unstructured, you’ve got, like, 50 different solutions that are there, like, that is going to hold you back. It may not be “technical debt” because it’s stuck in some legacy technology infrastructure, but it is definitely a form of innovation debt because you’ve got so many applications that it would take you a decade to connect them all. And so, I think you need to think about the basics and the plumbing that’s necessary to confront that. So, move forward, address the stuff that’s foundational to making this happen, and then share and partner and learn with each other.
We’re all we’re all kind of confronting this together. And I think you all have done a great job of sharing these proof points and these case studies of people that are doing it well. So, continue to do that.
Continue to share and learn from one another, because this is an incredible time to be a public servant. I’m a little bit envious, and I’m on this side kind of watching it happen. But, but it’s so fun to see just the amazing amounts of innovation that are coming out of cities all over the world and can’t wait to follow some of the traction that happens through the end of this year.
Bob Ragsdale: Well, great insights as always, and I can’t wait to have you back on the Tyler Tech podcast again sometime soon to have another great conversation like this. So, thank you so much, Dustin. Appreciate your time.
Dustin Haisler: Thanks, Bob. Appreciate the opportunity to join.
Josh Henderson: As we heard today, navigating the future of government technology requires more than just keeping up with new tools and trends.
Leaders across the public sector are taking bold steps to adapt, and conversations like this help us all better understand where government is headed and how technology can help pave the way. If you’d like to learn more about the topics we discussed today, check out the show notes for additional resources.
We’d love to hear your feedback. Fill out the survey linked in the show notes or reach out to us anytime at podcast@tylertech.com. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast so you never miss an episode.
For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson. Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.