This episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast brings together standout moments from 2025, featuring Tyler experts discussing how governments are strengthening resilience, modernizing through the cloud, and preparing for an AI-enabled future. The conversation highlights the many dimensions of resilience — from community engagement to cyber and operational readiness — and explores how cloud infrastructure supports always-on services and scalable operations. Guests also share why strong data governance is essential for effective AI and how emerging intelligence tools are helping agencies improve transparency, streamline routine interactions, and better serve residents. Tune in to hear how technology, collaboration, and innovation are shaping the next era of public sector service.
In this special Best of 2025 edition of the Tyler Tech Podcast, we revisit standout conversations from the past year — moments that highlight how resilience, cloud innovation, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the public sector.
The episode begins with Cate Ryba, director of resident engagement at Tyler, who unpacks the many dimensions of government resilience, from organizational and operational readiness to cyber, fiscal, and disaster recovery planning. She explains why strong community connections and real-time resident engagement are foundational to building trust and navigating disruption.
Next, Russell Gainford, Tyler’s Chief Technology Officer, explores how cloud infrastructure gives governments the flexibility, redundancy, and scale to keep services running 24/7. His insights reveal how modern cloud environments create new possibilities for continuity, failover, and system reliability across interconnected public-sector operations.
Turning to modernization, Mike Teeters, senior product manager, discusses how cloud technology helps agencies reduce workforce pressure, simplify upgrades, and scale effortlessly during peak periods — all while ensuring staff stay current with the latest capabilities.
From there, Franklin Williams, president of the Data & Insights Division and deputy chief technology officer, explains why strong data governance is essential to the future of AI in government. Clean, discoverable, and authoritative data, he notes, is the key to enabling accurate insights and unlocking the potential of emerging agentic frameworks.
Finally, Elliot Flautt, director of state data solutions, shares how governments are beginning to use AI to enhance transparency, streamline routine interactions, and guide residents to the services they need. He highlights the importance of secure, privacy-minded data practices in building the trustworthy AI systems that will increasingly support government operations.
Whether you focus on technology strategy, data management, or community engagement, this best-of episode offers practical lessons on strengthening resilience, embracing cloud-driven modernization, and harnessing AI to serve communities more effectively.
This episode also spotlights Tyler Connect 2026, where innovation and collaboration take center stage. Taking place April 7–10 at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. Connect brings together public sector professionals from across the country to explore new solutions, share ideas, and strengthen communities. It’s a week dedicated to learning, connection, and imagining what’s possible for the future of government technology. Explore registration details and early bird pricing in the show notes to start planning your Connect 2026 experience.
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Elliot Flautt: Artificial intelligence (AI) is something that could actually very much help with augmenting the staff, to be able to handle some of the more routine questions, to be able to free up that staff of that jurisdiction towards doing things that are much higher value, towards doing things that are going to actually help improve the resident experience.
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 your host, Josh Henderson. We’re so glad to have you here.
In this episode, we’re revisiting standout moments from some of our most insightful conversations of the year, featuring Tyler experts sharing their perspectives on resilience, cloud innovation, and the possibilities of artificial intelligence in government today.
Together, these highlights reveal how technology is helping governments modernize operations, strengthen public trust, and serve their communities more effectively in an increasingly connected world.
We start with Cate Ryba, director of resident engagement at Tyler, on how resilience begins with people and why strong community connections are at the heart of effective government.
Cate Ryba: When you think about different types of resilience within governments, there are a lot of different types. So, some you might not think of. People sometimes go immediately to disaster recovery.
But there are also things like organizational resilience. So how can your governmental organization resist, absorb, recover, and adapt to an ever changing and increasingly complex environment to deliver to its residents? There’s also operational resilience. How will your service delivery to your residents be impacted during disruptions?
People talk a lot about IT and cyber resilience. You think about cyber-attacks on governments that can cripple them. So, what are the redundancy mechanisms and security that you’re building into your infrastructure and your systems to make sure you can still operate in those disruptive times? I’m a big fiscal policy geek, so I think about fiscal resilience.
How does your governmental organization plan for unexpected financial hurdles? Things like property tax loss after a natural disaster or sales tax loss. And then you get to the natural disaster recovery that kind of is a big piece of resilience. So how do you make sure that you as a government can still serve your residents with critical IT infrastructure and your systems and your operations after a disaster?
So, governments today, they really need to be adaptive, they need to be proactive and responsive to the changing needs in your community. So, whether it’s an economic challenge, public health crisis, a natural disaster, governments have to withstand those shocks, but they also have to learn and evolve from them. And resident engagement is really critical because it ensures that governments are really connected to the real time needs and concerns of their constituents. Those residents then feel heard and involved.
That creates and builds trust. And that is kind of the cycle, right, that enables governments to respond more effectively, and those resident’s become partners in resilience.
They can provide those on the ground insights. They can amplify messages to others in their community during these critical times. So, it’s really a symbiotic relationship. Residents depending on governments for those resources and that support, and then governments relying on residents for feedback and collaboration.
Josh Henderson: Resilience doesn’t just depend on people. It also depends on the systems that support them.
Up next, Tyler’s Chief Technology Officer, Russell Gainford, shares how cloud infrastructure gives governments the flexibility and scale to keep critical services running through any disruption.
Russell Gainford: When I think of resilience, I think of the tooling, the processes, the ecosystem and the people that you’ve put together to ensure that your system’s not just up and running, but that if something unexpected happens, because you should always be planning that something could happen and keep track of the risk areas that you’re in, that you’re able to recover. And what does that mean for your business? And what are the implications in downtime?
Why is it more important than ever? Well, I think technology is continuing to be pervasive inside of public sector. Systems are more interconnected than ever. When you get to like citizen and constituent services, people expect them to be up 24/7.
They expect them to be there like Google is. Anytime you need it, it’s right within your grasp. And then I start to think about the emerging technologies and how they’re interconnected and they’re used much more than what they were before, which was a nine to five for certain agencies within a desktop environment. And now they’re on phones and now they’re interconnected all across everything that we do.
So, I think of like artificial intelligence, right? What is artificial intelligence? Well, it’s providing you insights and deep knowledge, but it’s doing so based off a lot of data. And that means that systems have to be available to update that data and keep track of it.
So, there’s really no shortage of reasons why resilience and keeping systems operational 24/7 is going down in requirements. If anything, it’s growing in need. What was once in the past that we had to accept a certain amount of critical loss of operating time is now becoming a scenario where we don’t, where we can expect our systems to always be running regardless of the situation.
How many regions and data centers that they have? If we look at our partnership with AWS and you get down to a certain region, you get down to availability zone. Well, availability zone by itself within a region of the country may have five or six data centers. And then you get to another availability zone, and they’re usually separated by at least 50 geographic miles between those availability zones.
And then you can go and roll over to other regions of the country. So, they’re dealing with a level of scale and a level of failover that is very hard to replicate inside of your own private cloud. So, it provides economies of scale, and it allows you to leverage those services in a much more reliable and quicker fashion. That makes sense.
So, they have tools built in to manage that for you. So, if you determine this is a critical enough system and the cost structure that we just want it running active at all times where it’s just load balancing, you can do that. Another thing you can do is you can do what’s called pilot light and disaster recovery services. So, you can literally have your one system, but it’s copying over to another geographic area real time.
And if you discover something, you can literally click a button and the system will be up and running in 60, 70 seconds for an average system. And we’ve done five tests with 5,000, 6,000 virtual machines and had them up in under 50 minutes. So, the capabilities of not just the resiliency within your application and service that you’re providing, but also the resiliency of being able to move between different geographic locations is tremendous.
Josh Henderson: While the cloud strengthens resilience, it also creates new opportunities for modernization. Mike Teeters, senior product manager at Tyler, explains how cloud technology helps governments scale smoothly, reduce workforce pressure, and stay current in a fast moving digital world.
Mike Teeters: The cloud offers a few different avenues for our customers when it comes to things like scaling and being able to address workforce pressures. You know, number one, it puts you in a position where instead of having software that you’ve installed in your data center on your infrastructure, now you’re taking advantage of cloud infrastructure and we certainly are a big advocate of the benefits of the public cloud in the sense that it provides really just unlimited scalability, really for most of our customers. And again, if you kind of think of typical types of things that occur on an annual basis for our customers, there are periods where they would have intense pressure on their infrastructure and on their data center.
That’s a really good example, you know, whether it’s year end, it’s for annual benefits application, it could be financial activity that’s occurring periodically.
All of those kinds of things are really good examples where now with cloud, you have a really easy way to scale, right?
I think in terms of workforce, it really can be kind of a workforce mitigator or maybe an answer.
I think Tyler, again, just we have such a big footprint with our solutions that it makes it a lot easier obviously to keep people current. With the cloud, you’re on the latest version of the software, and so I know many of our customers are often challenged because of just because of their staffing size and so forth. It can be really difficult to kind of keep up with versions as they get So the idea that you’re always on the latest version and you’ve kind of got an easy way to continue to stay current, that’s, you know, I think a great example where the cloud can be a benefit. And for your workforce, obviously that ensures that people are always, you know, knowledgeable in terms of the latest functionality, what’s available in that that latest version and so forth. So maybe a couple of examples.
Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Big news. Tyler Connect 2026 is heading to Las Vegas.
Jade Champion: Join us April 7 through April 10 at the Venetian Resort Las Vegas for an unforgettable week of learning, collaboration, and connection.
Josh Henderson: Connect unites public sector professionals to explore new Tyler solutions and to spark ideas that strengthen and empower communities.
Jade Champion: And now’s your chance to save $250 with early bird pricing.
Josh Henderson: Don’t wait to lock in your spot at this year’s premier public sector conference.
Jade Champion: Visit tylertech.com/connect to register today or click the link in our show notes.
Josh Henderson: We’ll see you at Tyler Connect 2026 where we empower, collaborate, and imagine what’s possible for the public sector in Vegas.
Jade Champion: Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Josh Henderson: Modernization through the cloud lays the foundation for what comes next, data driven intelligence. Franklin Williams, president of Tyler’s Data & Insights division and deputy Chief Technology Officer (CTO), talks about how good data governance is essential to unlocking the real possibilities of AI and government.
Franklin Williams: At the end of the day, your AI is only going to be as good as your data. It’s only going to be able to be as good as the data it can resend over, the data that can find, and then the data that it can access as well. And so, at the end of the day, making sure your data is clean, it’s up to date, it’s authoritative, and most importantly, it’s discoverable, is one of the main reasons why people are so focused on this, particularly in the age of AI. So, making sure your data has a good inventory around it, that the data is clean, it’s kept up to date, it’s authoritative, it’s discoverable, it’s protected, it’s secured.
Those are all the same things that a human needs, but they’re equally important to some of the new advancements that we’ve seen in artificial intelligence around, for example, agentic frameworks, these frameworks that reason over the data that’s in front of them, reason over the information to try to get to the right outcome. So, the models are getting good enough so that they can, if presented with the right information, presented with the right context, they can get to the right answer. But if your data is trapped, if you don’t have good data governance, if you don’t have the right inventory, the right discoverability, the right controls, the right access to that, then the agents are going to struggle in the exact same way that a human would.
And so, when we talk about what’s good for humans also benefits these AI systems, it’s really true because if the human can’t access it, the smartest system in the world isn’t going to be able to either. And the good news around data governance is that a lot of the investments that we’ve seen our clients been making for years around these types of programs are exactly what you need from an AI perspective.
Josh Henderson: Once that foundation is in place, the next step is putting AI to work for transparency and engagement. Elliot Flautt, director of state data solutions at Tyler, shares how governments are using artificial intelligence to better serve residents, build trust, and strengthen community connections.
Elliot Flautt: A lot of our customers are becoming more familiar with and more attuned to the different types of use cases that artificial intelligence can actually satisfy. We’re starting with a lot of the lower risk, higher impact use cases, like basically using public data and making that more effective so that people can actually start to go in and get better answers to their questions and doing so on their own time rather than having to work during business hours. Because your business hours and my business hours may not be the same. Say I’m a third shift worker and I get off at five o’clock in the morning, I’m going to need to go ask a question of my local jurisdiction when I get off work. Not necessarily during the nine to five period when a lot of people are going to be working there.
That’s super impactful. And then we’re actually starting to see a lot of the investments in the artificial intelligence space really take off in terms of being able to do what could be described as kind of like an agentic workflow where if we know about a user and we know how they’ve used government services in the past, we can actually start to suggest ways that they may find access to other services they might not have thought that they could get access to. So really being able to better engage with residents in that capacity. Data privacy and security really build towards that eventual goal, towards something that is going to be useful in the artificial intelligence realm rather than just fluff and maybe a nice to have.
I can’t say strongly enough that this is something that is going become a necessity. Being able to keep up with the same level of service demands that new residents have come to expect in larger jurisdictions may be a challenge for some of these new growing communities. I think that artificial intelligence is something that could actually very much help with augmenting the staff, be able to handle some of more routine questions, to be able to free up that staff of that jurisdiction towards doing things that are much higher value, towards doing things that are going to actually help improve the resident experience rather than just keeping up with the demand or just meeting the mail.
Josh Henderson: As we heard today, modern technology continues to open new possibilities for the public sector, from building more resilient systems to leveraging the cloud and artificial intelligence to serve communities in smarter, more connected ways.
These conversations with Tyler experts highlight how innovation and collaboration are helping governments adapt, evolve, and deliver meaningful results for the people they serve.
If you’d like to learn more, check out the show notes for additional resources, and we’d love to hear your feedback. Fill out the listener survey linked in the notes or reach out anytime at podcast@tylertech.com.
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For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson wishing you Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2026. Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.