About a year ago, Luke Jordan and I argued that the future of public services would not be shaped only by user interfaces, but by agents acting on behalf of users. We warned that if governments ignored this shift, AI and automation would not democratize access. Instead, they would professionalize it for those who can pay (an argument developed further in The Agentic State).
Today, the BBC published an investigation showing that driving instructors in the UK are selling their login credentials to touts and bots, who bulk-book tests and resell them for up to £500. Learners without money wait months, sometimes years. But those who pay get served.
What’s happening is illegal and exploitative. But it’s also so predictable. When public systems imagine only humans logging in one by one, demand for intermediaries doesn’t disappear. It moves into the shadows. Credentials get shared, screens get scraped, access gets resold. The result is exactly what we warned about: agents for the few, queues for the many.
The real choice facing governments is not whether agents should exist. They already do. The choice is whether they operate in the shadows or in the open, regulated, auditable, and designed for equity.
Getting there requires more than aspirational AI strategies. It means building:
- secure delegation credentials
- digital power of attorney and mandates
- agent-friendly APIs instead of scraping
- auditable trails for agent actions
None of this is simple. Formal delegation creates its own challenges, which includes fraud vectors, verification costs, and the risk that benefits still accrue to the well-connected. But those challenges can be governed. The informal market cannot.
The question is no longer whether public services will be mediated by agents. The question is whether governments will bring them into the light.