The UK government has been integrating artificial intelligence into workloads for quite a while and now the government is sharing its results of that experience; put briefly, it has led to a dramatic speed up of public consultation responses, leading to significant savings in time and taxpayer money.
In one scenario, the government’s AI tool, Consult, was able to analyze over 50,000 responses to the Independent Water Commission review in two hours with human accuracy - this has the potential to save 75,000 days of manual work each year.
Earlier this year, the government announced that the water regulator, Ofwat, was to be replaced due to scandals including sewage spillage and financial mismanagement. This decision, according to the government, was made with the help of AI which helped to speed up the time it took to reach the decision.
An Independent Water Commission analysis used AI to sort through 50,000 responses and it helped to pick out themes in those responses in around two hours, costing £240. Experts then only took 22 hours to check the results from the AI.
To assess the AI’s performance, the work of Consult was compared with two expert groups’ findings and 83% of the time it agreed with one or both of the groups, while the two groups only agreed with each other 55% of the time. This uniformity will lead to fewer bottlenecks in decision-making pipelines.
Aside from the IWC use case, Consult has also been used successfully in the Scottish government’s consultation on non-surgical cosmetics and the Digital Inclusion Action Plan where it helped to sort responses.
Consult is a tool within a larger suite called Humphrey. As more consultations arise, it will be leveraged to save officials time and reduce staffing costs by as much as £20 million. The government hopes that this will lead to a more agile and effective state.
The government also mentioned another, now retired tool, in the Humphrey suite called Redbox. At its peak, it was being used by thousands of government employees to improve productivity by summarizing documents, drafting briefing notes, and more.
Redbox was retired by the government, however, because similar tools were included with packages from Microsoft that the government had already bought. Those that developed Redbox have moved to work on other Humphrey tools as well as GOV.UK Chat which will soon appear in the GOV.UK app.
Source: Gov UK