A week after the UK government announced sweeping plans to invest heavily in AI, it is revealing further details about how this will materialize in the public sector. Topic: AI assistants to speed up public services. Data sharing transactions between siled departments. and a new set of AI tools (called “Humphrey” after a character in an old British TV political comedy) to speed up the work of civil servants.
The plan will be formally announced at a press conference on Tuesday led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and two other departments, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Health and Social Care.
According to the UK government’s AI site, progress on the project appears to be at a very early stage. For example, plans to introduce more AI services into the customer-facing side of the NHS are only at the ‘charter’ stage, promising the concept. Other projects include links to Github repositories where you can see some of the work we’ve done so far.
It’s not clear how many people are working on these projects in total, or whether third-party tools such as LLM are being used. (We asked these questions and will update our readers as we learn more.)
The essence of the project is to focus on efficiency. DSIT said the government currently spends around £23 billion a year on technology and would like to reallocate that money into more modern ways.
“Technology gridlock has held back public services for far too long, costing us all a lot of time and money… Not to mention the stress. It’s a form of stress,” said Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for DSIT, in a statement. “My department will leverage AI…to use technology to push back against the pointless approach of the public sector sharing information and collaborating to help the people they serve.”
The plan includes a new team within DSIT to lead the project, similar to DOGE in the US, but conceived and run by government officials rather than technology industry heavyweights.
DSIT will initially focus on three areas:
1. Civil servant work. Humphrey is named after the sarcastic and wise assistant played by the late Nigel Hawthorne in Yes, Minister and later, Yes, Prime Minister. It is a series of apps, many of which are aimed at easing the typical daily workload of civil servants. You need to read and process large amounts of data.
‘Consult’ is designed to allow you to read and summarize ‘thousands’ of responses to consultations in a few hours. (Answers can be long and numerous, but they are a central part of how the government considers feedback from stakeholders and the public.) With Parlex, government officials can Ask questions and read other policy-related conversations in Congress. The document they are working on. Minute is a secure transcription service for taking notes from meetings. “Redbox” is useful for creating briefings and policy documents. And “Lex” is focused on helping government officials find relevant legal data.
2. Another element of efficiency is faster public services. The idea here is to take aim at Britain’s traditional bureaucracy. The tax office receives 100,000 phone calls every day, or the need to appear in person to register a death, or, strangely enough, there are many such bureaucracies in the UK. , place an ad in your local newspaper as part of the process of obtaining a license to drive a truck.
DSIT believes that overhauling these processes with increased automation powered by AI could save £45bn a year. It is unclear whether this estimate is before or after the cost of building and running the AI service.
3. The final area will focus on increasing collaboration between departments to support how services are procured and data sharing to speed up their capabilities.
Taken together, the various projects show that governments are serious about promoting new AI. However, it also raises many questions.
For example, in the case of data sharing, DSIT says the operational philosophy here will be a “common sense approach to sharing information.” Central government departments such as HMRC (HM Revenue and Customs) and the Department of Industry and Trade can share data with each other and with local councils, for example in fraud investigations. But what happens to an individual’s data protection if their data is shared in an unintended way?
Another possible question concerns Mr. Humphrey. Currently, DSIT said some of the early apps are in the testing phase, but the big question will be how much the government will trust some of the AI’s conclusions. There may also be more human issues. assignment. One former civil servant who now works for an AI company notes that previous efforts to create cross-departmental programs haven’t always worked. Ultimately, cooperation, funding, and authority will be the tools that will determine the success or failure of these plans.