The soon-to-be-released book Zero-Click Government by Gustavo Maia examines a structural shift in how public institutions determine when the State acts.

Maia is the founder and CEO of Colab, a Brazilian GovTech platform focused on strengthening collaboration between citizens and governments, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on GovTech & Digital Public Infrastructure.

For most of modern administrative history, government action has followed a reactive logic: the State intervenes only after a citizen submits a request, fills out a form, proves eligibility, or initiates a procedure. Even after digital transformation, much of that logic remains intact.

The book argues that as administrative data, digital public infrastructure, and artificial intelligence expand governments’ informational capacity, the timing of public action may begin to change. Institutions increasingly possess signals about risks, needs, and life transitions before requests are made. This creates the possibility of a more anticipatory State, but also raises deeper questions about legitimacy, agency, democratic accountability, public value, and institutional design.

Rather than treating this as a purely technical shift, the book asks what happens when the burden of activation moves gradually from citizens to institutions, and what safeguards are needed to ensure that anticipatory government remains democratic rather than merely technocratic.

The first edition will be published in Brazil in June 2026 by the newly created Zero-Click Government Institute (ZCGI), with an English edition planned for September 2026.

In the commentary below, Beth Simone Noveck reflects on the democratic implications of anticipatory governance and argues that if governments are going to act on inferred rather than expressed demand, then participation, accountability, and public oversight must become embedded into how these systems are designed and governed from the start.

We anticipate a child’s needs without hesitation, feeding her before she is hungry. But choosing for an adult is rarely the "omakase experience"; it is more often experienced as a loss of agency. The safeguards that matter most are those that prevent anticipatory government from becoming a kitchen where the citizen never sees the menu.

Zero-Click Government: A Response from Beth Simone Noveck

The shift Gustavo describes, from a State that waits for requests to one that acts on what it already knows, shifts who bears the burden of initiating public action.

The unanticipated consequence of governing in advance is that it concentrates interpretive power in the hands of those who design the data systems, set the thresholds, and define what counts as a life event.

The redistribution away from the individuals least well-positioned to bear the cost of navigating public administration and toward the institutions that already hold the information is long overdue.

But the unanticipated consequence of governing in advance is that it concentrates interpretive power in the hands of those who design the data systems, set the thresholds, and define what counts as a life event.

We anticipate a child’s needs without hesitation, feeding her before she is hungry. But choosing for an adult is rarely the "omakase experience"; it is more often experienced as a loss of agency. The safeguards that matter most are those that prevent anticipatory government from becoming a kitchen where the citizen never sees the menu.

Moving toward a "zero-click government" means double-clicking on exactly those participatory governance features that prevent technocratic closure.

If the State is going to act on inferred rather than expressed demand, then affected communities need to be involved in the design of anticipatory systems, not simply their evaluation after the fact.

Too often, public engagement enters the picture only after a system has already been built: the feedback button, the complaint hotline, the comment mechanism on the already-drafted proposal. If the State is going to act on inferred rather than expressed demand, then affected communities need to be involved in the design of anticipatory systems, not simply their evaluation after the fact.

That means ensuring that the systems governments use to make predictions are transparent, understandable, and open to challenge.

Publishing technical documentation matters, but so does creating standing opportunities for the people who understand these transitions in practice — social workers, teachers, public health practitioners, frontline staff — to stress-test assumptions, identify blind spots, and challenge the proxy variables that inevitably find their way into predictive systems.

Even the question of which life events should trigger intervention ought to be subject to public deliberation. A birth, a job loss, a chronic diagnosis: these may appear from inside a ministry to be straightforward administrative categories, but they are experienced very differently across communities.

What feels like timely support in one context may feel intrusive in another. Those judgments should not be made solely by data teams.

The antidote is not to slow down anticipatory capacity but to democratize it.

The risk is real, and the book is honest about it. When governments shift from responding to requests to acting on patterns in data, the locus of decision-making migrates from elected officials and street-level bureaucrats toward data teams, model designers, and procurement offices. That migration is not inherently antidemocratic. But it becomes so when anticipatory systems operate without integrated practices of regular and meaningful public engagement. The antidote is not to slow down anticipatory capacity but to democratize it.

And Gustavo’s own argument can be extended further. Public services have long operated through a reactive model, the form, the queue, the request, which places the burden of activation on the people least equipped to bear it.

But public engagement often reproduces exactly the same problem.

Governments formulate a plan, publish it, and invite residents to comment after the core decisions have already been shaped. This is the democratic equivalent of the form: a procedural step that rewards those with the time, resources, and institutional familiarity to participate while leaving many others outside the process entirely.

We need an equivalent shift for participation itself: moving the burden of contributing knowledge from citizens to institutions.

This book proposes shifting the burden of accessing services from citizens to institutions. We need an equivalent shift for participation itself: moving the burden of contributing knowledge from citizens to institutions.

Instead of episodic consultation on already-formulated plans, governments can build systems of continuous collective intelligence that always listen to the problems communities are experiencing and their actual priorities. AI can make this possible at scale. 

In Bogotá, an AI chatbot on WhatsApp enabled tens of thousands of residents to participate in budgeting conversations in less than two weeks. In Hamburg, AI tools help transform large volumes of public comments on urban planning into structured analyses that inform policy decisions. In Brazil, AI is being used to connect public proposals to legislation under active consideration.

These examples point to a model in which participation becomes infrastructure rather than an occasional event.

Engagement cannot be a phase in the project plan. It has to be a permanent posture.

But this only works if engagement is treated as a core institutional competency rather than as a communications exercise. When governments are acting continuously on the basis of data, the engagement that informs and checks that action must also be continuous. It has to be built into the operating rhythm of every team that touches an anticipatory system: policy designers, procurement officials, analysts, frontline workers, and managers. Engagement cannot be a phase in the project plan. It has to be a permanent posture.

The deepest tension the book surfaces, though not one it fully names, concerns what the traditional request actually was. The form, the queue, and the application imposed burdens on citizens that this book documents carefully. But the request also served another function. It was a signal. It told the State, imperfectly and unevenly, what people actually needed.

People need accessible, low-barrier ways to say “you got this wrong,” and for those corrections to feed back into the system rather than disappear into isolated case management.

An anticipatory State that replaces requests with inferred action risks losing that signal. Something has to replace it: not another form, but a real feedback infrastructure with institutional consequences for the errors it surfaces. People need accessible, low-barrier ways to say “you got this wrong,” and for those corrections to feed back into the system rather than disappear into isolated case management.

The anticipatory State also requires institutions capable of learning from error. Mistakes are inevitable under conditions of uncertainty. But most public institutions still treat error as failure rather than information. Democracies will need oversight bodies, accountability mechanisms, and internal cultures that treat correction as routine if anticipatory governance is to remain legitimate over time.

Zero-Click Government calls for mechanisms that are as easy to use as the anticipatory action was to trigger. That is the gold standard. And building institutions capable of meeting it may be the hardest part of what this book proposes.