The federal government has confirmed that all 38 federal ministries and extra-ministerial departments met a December 2025 deadline to fully digitalize their operations and transition to paperless governance, with an artificial intelligence platform developed for the civil service already logging more than 50,000 user interactions.

Head of the Civil Service of the Federation Didi Esther Walson-Jack made the disclosure at the International Civil Service Conference 2026 in Abuja, a gathering that brought together heads of service from across Nigerian states and other countries, senior government officials, reform experts, and technology stakeholders to examine the trajectory of digital governance in Africa.

She said the government’s Service-Wise GPT platform, an AI tool designed to help civil servants navigate service rules and institutional knowledge, had recorded over 50,000 conversations since its deployment. She described the figure not as a vanity metric but as evidence that technology gets adopted when it solves real problems.

Walson-Jack stressed that artificial intelligence in the public sector must function as a support for human capacity and service delivery, not a replacement for human judgement. She credited the progress achieved in civil service reform to the leadership of President Tinubu and said the administration had strengthened accountability, performance measurement, and results orientation across the public sector.

Also speaking at the conference, the group chief executive of Crown Interactive, technical partner to Galaxy Backbone on the government’s cloud infrastructure programme, outlined his company’s vision for sovereign digital public infrastructure in Africa. He described the 1Government Cloud framework as a government-focused digital workspace built around the civil servant as both service provider and citizen beneficiary. He said the civil servant was not simply the person behind the desk but the person the desk was built to serve.