Public services worldwide are experiencing sharp increases in applications, complaints and petitions as AI tools make it far easier for people to draft forms and formal requests. Researcher Chris Schmitz, who is tracking the phenomenon under the term "agentic flooding," argues this presents both a strain on institutions and a genuine opportunity, since many of the new submissions come from people with legitimate claims who previously found the application process too burdensome to complete.

Schmitz's forthcoming paper, to be presented next month at the AI Ethics and Society conference, examines 84 cases of potential flooding across 11 jurisdictions. Figures cited include UK housing ombudsman complaints rising from 2,600 in 2022 to over 7,000 last year, and a fivefold increase in complaints to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with similar surges in Brazilian judicial petitions and German parliamentary petitions. Unlike the flood of low-quality AI-generated bug bounty reports seen last year, Schmitz says most of these public service submissions are genuine, reflecting reduced "administrative burden" rather than spam, and he sees the trend as a chance to redesign services for the AI era.