Last month I gave evidence to the Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee in Parliament. I haven’t written much about it because you can watch it yourself here. I thank the committee for inviting me to speak, and its members for their insightful questions on how technology has improved service delivery. Since my appearance I’ve been asked a few times what I think was the most thought provoking question or comment the committee made, and it’s perhaps not the one you think it might be, so I’m writing about it here. That comment was from...
It's likely there are hundreds of solutions that utilise generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) already in use across the public sector. Where I work we're already using AI for a variety of tasks, from drafting reports using i.AI's pilot of Minute , or writing job applications which we developed ourselves . Under the surface of these solutions you'll find many have at least one thing in common; They are essentially user interfaces for large language models (LLMs) owned by OpenAI, Amazon, Google, or Meta. We've seen a lot about scaling up the use of AI in the public sector recently, and this letter from the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology states that the Government calculated their efficiency targets using the assumption that 100% of routine tasks could be automated. Whether that's achievable is a question for another time, but even if half of that target was reached, that's 50% of UK public sector tasks essentially outsourced to US tec...