Government-built AI tool used to cut admin work for human staff
A Government-built AI tool has been used for the first time to summarise public responses to a consultation and is now set to be rolled out more widely in an effort to save money and staff time.
The tool, called Consult, has been used on a live consultation by the Scottish Government when it was seeking public views on how to regulate non-surgical cosmetic procedures.
The UK Government said the tool analysed responses and was able to produce results identical to human officials, and will now be used to review responses from other consultations, while also being developed further, and claimed it could help save human workers from 75,000 days of manual analysis each year, which costs around £20 million in staffing.
Some consultations receive tens or even hundreds of thousands of responses and the UK Government said the AI tool would reduce the need for human staff to review each response manually and categorise it.
Consult is part of a suite of AI tools called Humphrey – named after the senior civil servant in Yes, Minister – which the UK Government is using to speed up the work of civil servants and cut back time spent on administrative tasks and money spent on contractors.
That technology is part of wider plans announced in January by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer aimed at making the UK an AI global superpower, which also include proposals to expand the UK's AI infrastructure.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: 'No-one should be wasting time on something AI can do quicker and better, let alone wasting millions of taxpayer pounds on outsourcing such work to contractors.
'After demonstrating such promising results, Humphrey will help us cut the costs of governing and make it easier to collect and comprehensively review what experts and the public are telling us on a range of crucial issues.
'The Scottish Government has taken a bold first step. Very soon, I'll be using Consult, within Humphrey, in my own department and others in Whitehall will be using it too – speeding up our work to deliver the plan for change.'
The Government has said it hopes to make better use of technology across public services, with the aim of making around £45 billion in productivity savings.
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