The UK government's mandate for 5% efficiency savings across all departments by 2028-29, combined with Prime Minister Starmer's bold vision that "no person's substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality", signals a major shift in how public services must operate.
Unlike traditional IT transformations that rely on large capital investments, low-code platforms enable public bodies to modernise incrementally, delivering value fast while staying within tight operational budgets. As a result, more public sector organisations are embracing low-code technology, fuelling a broader ‘low-code industry movement’.
Testament to this, the growing cross-government low-code community for individuals and organisations looking to ‘leverage low code technologies to accelerate digital transformation, enhance productivity, and enhance public sector delivery’ is gaining additional backing, with the official service manual launched this February.
The momentum behind low-code development is undeniable. Gartner predicts that by 2029, 80% of application development projects globally will rely on low-code development, up from just 15% in 2024. More specifically for government, Gartner forecasted that over 35% of government legacy applications will be replaced by solutions developed on low-code application platforms by the end of 2025. This isn't a distant future scenario, it's happening now.
Microsoft's Power Platform has been consistently recognised as the leader in the low-code space, most recently in The Forrester Wave™ for Low-Code Platforms for Professional Developers in 2025. It offers government departments a proven pathway to transformation that balances innovation with the security and governance requirements essential to public service delivery.
As the technology landscape moves rapidly, recent announcements from Microsoft Build 2025 mark a step-change in how low-code platforms are extending the reach of AI in practical, governed ways.
Recent advances now allow public sector teams to describe the service experience they want in plain English and receive a working prototype within seconds, built using AI but governed from the outset. Crucially, with some light touch or basic guidance around correct set up, to ensure ethical and governed use of AI, this doesn’t require specialists.
The technology learns from your organisation’s own data and processes, generating secure and compliant solutions that fit within existing controls on data, identity, and access. For non-technical teams, this means that AI can now support the rapid creation of secure, on-brand digital services without needing to navigate complex development pipelines.
This addresses a critical challenge for government. While AI can generate production-grade code at remarkable speed, that code still requires extensive peer review, QA, and governance oversight. Low-code platforms like Power Platform solve this by providing pre-tested, pre-approved components that automatically comply with departmental data loss prevention policies, identity controls, and audit requirements.
The setup of the governance of these is massively simplified with Power Platform Managed Environments, enabling controlled sandboxing for the development and experimentation of AI-first apps and interconnected composable solutions. When AI generates a government application using these components, compliance isn't retrofitted, it's built-in.
In other words, AI is democratising code; Power Platform is democratising delivery. In an economy where competitive advantage is measured in weeks, not quarters, organisations that overlook this synthesis of pro- and low-code development will find themselves out-paced and out-governed.
Ask any CTO what AI has done for software engineering this year and they will praise its new-found knack for cranking out boilerplate code at bewildering speed. Yet beneath the hype lies an inconvenient truth: AI is still generating pro-code, and pro-code demands human peer review, multi-layer testing and an operational runway of infrastructure, pipelines and policy. In short, the governance burden has not vanished; it has merely shifted.
This is where low-code retains its strategic advantage. Low-code platforms are, by design, an abstraction layer sitting on top of traditional development stacks. They ship with rigorously pre-tested components, native connectors and baked-in policy controls for security, data loss prevention (DLP) and access governance. When Microsoft Power Platform’s Copilot or AWS App Studio’s generative features build an application, they are snapping those AI-written snippets into a scaffold that is already compliant.
As AI parity approaches, when both pro-code and low-code can be reliably generated by copilots, the differentiator will not be who writes the code fastest, but who deploys value fastest. Anyone can vibe code their way to a slick demo, but without compliant architecture and human-centricity built-in, that PoC will never make it to production. Low-code’s catalogue of approved components will let multidisciplinary teams research, iterate and ship in a fraction of the time, with far less risk.
Moreover, the resulting apps remain legible to business stakeholders; a citizen developer or a data analyst can inspect a flow or a canvas screen in plain English rather than trawling through thousands of lines of TypeScript.
Low-code development brings a governance edge that’s often overlooked. Because low-code solutions are orchestrated inside corporate tenancy boundaries, every AI-suggested integration is automatically subject to the organisation’s data residency, data-loss prevention and identity policies. In contrast, OpenAI integrations typically operate outside the reach of corporate governance, increasing risk.
The State of Digital Government report from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology identifies up to £45 billion in potential productivity and efficiency savings through AI adoption across government. Low-code platforms serve as a delivery mechanism for these savings, enabling rapid deployment of AI-powered solutions without the traditional barriers of complex development projects.
The path ahead is clear: to realise the full potential of digital transformation, government must embrace low-code...
Ultimately, the convergence of low-code platforms and AI represents a profound shift in how public services can be delivered smarter, faster, and more cost-effectively. As the UK government targets 5% efficiency savings and a more digital, AI-enabled civil service, low-code technologies like Microsoft's Power Platform provide an immediate and governed route to achieving these ambitions.
With AI now capable of generating working prototypes from plain English prompts and low-code ensuring security, compliance, and accessibility, departments can move from idea to impact in record time. This new paradigm empowers both technical and non-technical teams alike, removing traditional barriers to innovation while maintaining the high standards required for public service.
The path ahead is clear: to realise the full potential of digital transformation, government must embrace low-code and AI not as future strategies, but as current imperatives.
In partnership with Government Transformation Magazine and Hitachi SolutionsThe cross-government Low-Code Community of Practice is running a workshop in September for individuals and organisations exploring low-code solutions and demystifying the technology. Sign-up here.