Trust at Scale: How Civica Is Building AI for 100 Million Citizens
Summary
- Civica, a public sector SaaS and services provider serving close to 100 million citizens worldwide, turned years of acquisition-driven complexity into a single source of truth built on Certinia.
- Civica CIO Simon Cornwell told theCUBE Research that trust is the deciding factor in public sector AI adoption, where every purchasing decision has to be defensible to citizens.
- Data residency and sovereignty requirements shape which AI models Civica can use for citizen data, reinforcing that governance and explainability matter as much as AI capability.
- Cornwell holds AI vendors to a clear standard: they have to demonstrate, with authenticity and credibility, how their product works and how it fits into an already multi-vendor technology stack.
- Certinia's suite of Veda AI agents and the system of action architecture are built to earn the kind of explainable, judgment-informed trust Cornwell describes as the real currency of enterprise AI today.
Trust at Scale: How Civica Is Building AI for 100 Million Citizens
Civica's software and services power everyday moments for close to 100 million citizens across the world, from paying a parking permit to arranging social care for a relative. Reaching that scale took decades of growth and a string of acquisitions that left the company with a patchwork of disconnected systems.
At Dreamforce 2026, Civica CIO Simon Cornwell sat down with theCUBE Research to explain how Civica turned that patchwork into a single source of truth, and why that foundation is what makes AI worth trusting at public sector scale.
A Single Source of Truth for 100 Million Citizens
Civica has spent decades building software and services for public sector organizations, mostly local and central government, and its products touch close to 100 million citizens worldwide. The work is unglamorous and constant, and it runs entirely on data.
Cornwell owns Civica's internal technology stack, including Salesforce, Certinia, telephony, and finance systems. He described a company that grew organically and through acquisition, and picked up a landscape of bespoke systems and disconnected data along the way. Civica is now in the middle of a transformation built around Certinia, which he called the center of gravity for everything tied to the customer. Data now moves from sales through delivery inside a single source of truth, closing the gaps left by systems that never talked to each other.
Trust as the Foundation for Public Sector AI
Cornwell was direct about where AI adoption gets harder in government work. Public sector organizations answer directly to the citizens they serve, and every purchasing decision has to be defensible to them. Data residency and sovereignty rules mean some models are off the table entirely, depending on where they run and where the data lives.
Asked to sum up where enterprise AI stands today, Cornwell landed on trust, calling it “the most important word” in every conversation he has with industry leaders. That trust runs in both directions. People need to trust what the AI is doing before they will rely on it, and the more that trust builds, the better the judgment calls people make on top of it. Better judgment compounds into better outcomes over time. Civica's single source of truth is what makes that trust possible in the first place: an AI recommendation is only as good as the data behind it.
Pro Tips
A few practical takeaways for teams evaluating AI vendors in regulated industries:
- Ask any AI vendor to explain, in plain terms, how their product works and exactly where your data goes. A vague answer is a warning sign, no matter how advanced the technology sounds.
- Map data residency and sovereignty requirements before selecting a model or platform, especially for citizen or regulated data, since some options may be off the table entirely depending on where they process and store information.
- Treat AI vendor evaluation as an integration question. Ask how the tool works alongside the rest of an already multi-vendor stack, since very few organizations run on a single vendor.
- Build governance into the rollout from day one, including a clear way to pause or stop an AI tool if it stops behaving as expected. Waiting until the tool is live turns governance into an afterthought.
What It Takes to Earn Civica's Trust
Cornwell was equally clear about what it takes for an AI vendor to earn that trust: the vendor has to demonstrate, with real authenticity and credibility, how their own product works and how it fits alongside everything else already running in the business. No enterprise runs on a single vendor, he pointed out, so a tool that cannot explain itself or work well with the rest of the stack does not clear the bar, no matter how advanced it looks.
That is the same standard behind the model Civica is building around Certinia, where connected data across sales and delivery feeds a growing layer of Veda AI agents designed to earn trust through explainable, judgment-informed action.
Watch the full conversation above to hear Cornwell talk through Civica's transformation in more depth, the trade-offs of sovereign AI, and why he thinks the industry needs to bring the responsible AI conversation back to the center of the room.
Ready to see how your organization can win bigger, deliver smarter, and grow stronger with Certinia? Sign up for a demo today!
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