The spread of Artificial Intelligence in the public sector: a worldwide overview

The implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in public settings is not a new topic. However, only recently it gained momentum, and practitioners started investigating the potentialities of this technology also within the public boundaries. Public sector plays a pivotal role in AI development both considering legislation advancement and application development, though scholars rarely focus on it, leaving an urgent gap to fill. Moreover the current body of literature is muddleheaded and scholars fatigue in disentangling and clarifying the various domains and fields of analysis. Based on these considerations, this paper aims at offering two main contributions: i) it provides a taxonomy for mapping the features of AI projects and then ii) analyzes the current trends in the development of such projects using the abovementioned taxonomy. This analysis allows us to provide a worldwide overview of the current widespread of AI applications, in order to explore the trends and identify promising paths for future research.