A week after the UK government announced a sweeping plan to make major investments in AI, it is laying out more details about how it will take shape in the public sector. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; data sharing agreement across separate departments; and a new set of artificial intelligence tools – named “Humphrey” after a character on an old UK TV show – to speed up the work of civil servants.
The plans will be officially unveiled at a press conference on Tuesday chaired by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), along with two other departments, Work and Pensions and Health/Social Care.
According to the UK government’s artificial intelligence website, progress on the projects appears to be in the very early stages. For example, a plan to bring more AI services to the client side of the NHS is only at the ‘charter’ stage which commits to the concept. Other projects include links to Github repositories to check out some of the work so far.
It is not clear how many people in total are working on these projects, nor what third-party tools, such as LLM, are being used. (We’ve asked these questions and will update readers when we learn more.)
At their heart, projects are about efficiency. The government, DSIT said, currently spends around £23bn a year on technology and the idea will be to redistribute that money in a more modern way.
“Slow technology has hampered our public services for far too long and is costing us all a fortune in time and money… Not to mention the headaches and stress we’re left with after being put on hold or forced to a trip to fill in a form,” said Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for DSIT, in a statement. “My department will be putting AI to work… We will use technology to forcefully tackle the no-nonsense approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves.”
Plans include a new team within DSIT to run the projects, a bit like DOGE in the US, but conceived and run by government people rather than tech moguls.
DSIT is initially advancing in three areas:
1. Work of government employees. Humphrey, named after the edgy and smart assistant played by the late Nigel Hawthorne in Yes, Minister and then Yes, Prime Minister, is a suite of apps that aim to reduce the typical day-to-day workload of civil servants, most of whom which centers around the large amounts of data they are required to read and process.
“Consult” is designed to read and summarize “thousands” of consultation responses per hour. (The responses, which can be long and numerous, are a central part of how the government considers feedback from stakeholders and the public.) Parlex will allow government employees to query and read conversations in Parliament that are relevant to bills or other policy documents they are working on. Minute is a secure transcription service for taking notes from meetings. Redbox helps prepare notices and policy documents. And Lex is focused on helping government employees find relevant legal information.
2. Another part of the efficiency drive will be around speeding up public services. The idea here is to target legacy bureaucracy, of which there is a lot in the UK, such as the 100,000 calls the tax authorities receive every day, or the need for people to appear in person to register a death, or, oddly enough. , posting ads in local newspapers as part of the process of getting a truck driver’s license.
DSIT’s view is that overhauling processes like these with more AI-powered automation could save £45 billion a year. It is not clear whether this estimate is before or after deducting the cost of building and operating AI services.
3. A final area will focus on more collaboration between departments to help share data to speed up how services are procured and then how they operate.
Taken together, the various projects are a signal that the government is targeting business in the new artificial intelligence push. But they also raise a number of questions.
For example, in the case of data sharing, DSIT says the idea behind the operation here will be “a common sense approach to information sharing”. Central government departments, such as HMRC (Revenue and Customs) and the Department for Business and Trade, can, for example, share data with each other and local councils in fraud investigations. But what happens to data protection for individuals when data is shared in unintended ways?
Another potential question is about Humphrey: right now, DSIT said some of the early applications are only in testing stages, but the big question will be how far the government will go in trusting some of the AI’s conclusions. There will also be more people challenges. As one former civil servant who now works for an AI company notes, past efforts to create programs that cut across departments haven’t always worked. Cooperation, money and authority are ultimately the levers that will make or break any of these plans.
