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Building A Smarter Future: AI’s Role in Powering Public Sector Growth

Building A Smarter Future: AI's Role in Powering Public Sector Growth
Iain Burgess headshot

Iain Burgess

UKI Public Sector Leader at Google Cloud

The UK’s public sector faces ongoing pressures posed by budget limitations and growing demand for essential services. With stretched resources, maintaining adequate levels of service delivery has become increasingly challenging. 

In a bid to address these issues, the government has laid out its AI Opportunities Action Plan to shape the application of AI across the UK, with a particular focus on improving the public sector, introducing tools like ‘Humphrey’, an AI assistant to support the Civil Service.

This move signals a clear and essential recognition of the power of AI and generative AI to transform public services, which was highlighted in a recent report by Public First, commissioned by Google Cloud. This report found that the key benefits that AI and generative AI bring to the public sector include freeing up time, improving service quality and even unlocking up to £38 billion in annual savings by 2030.

Accelerating efficiency through AI will be essential to unlocking public sector productivity, through reducing waiting times for essential services and improving appointment access, while enhancing working conditions and driving innovation. How the government acts now will be crucial to securing a better future for our public services, ensuring that outdated technology is left in the past.

The Resource Issue

The government’s plans come at a critical time when public sector workers have been under sustained pressure. In fact, 61% of public administration workers report that overwork has increased in the last five years, while 70% say morale has decreased. Such low levels of morale impacts employee retention, creating a vicious cycle where burnt out employees abandon work, further exacerbating staff shortages and reducing service delivery capacity.

The increase in waiting lists in the NHS, currently sitting at 7.5 million, is resonant of such challenges. The government’s moves to address these challenges with new reforms, alongside the AI Opportunities Action Plan, highlights an understanding of the value AI can provide  in the delivery of healthcare. Through the introduction of AI, Google Cloud’s research estimated that an extra 3.7 million GP appointments may be created.

With the ability to automate up to a third of daily tasks, such as taking meeting notes, filling out paperwork and performing basic analysis, AI can free up employee time for higher-value work. For example, by streamlining healthcare admin, healthcare workers can focus on delivering patient care and improving appointment availability for patients more broadly.

These efficiencies will revolutionise the delivery of other key public services too, potentially enabling a 16% increase in the teacher to student ratio, while freeing up the equivalent of over 160,000 police officers in emergency services.

Barriers to Adoption

Despite the progress being made through the AI Opportunities Action Plan, its success will hinge on addressing critical barriers to adoption. Reliance on legacy systems presents significant challenges, preventing organisations from taking advantage of modern solutions. Siloed data further complicates the implementation of new tools, limiting them from being used effectively. At the same time, vendor lock-in hinders growth by trapping billions of pounds in outdated technology solutions. This money could be reinvested in cutting-edge innovations if it weren’t tied up in legacy systems.

Insufficient digital skills also pose another obstacle. Employees must be trained to take full advantage of AI, while procurement teams must understand AI’s productivity and cost saving potential. Risk averse organisational cultures and outdated procurement processes often limit the adoption of new technologies, making it harder to overhaul legacy workflows and embrace new approaches.

Realising the Benefits

To ensure the AI Opportunities Action Plan is successful and ensures the public sector feels the benefits of AI’s full potential, effective delivery of its ‘Scan, Pilot, Scale’ model will be essential. Through this, better collaboration between AI industry leaders and governments can be fostered, ensuring cutting edge technologies can be brought into public service design at the earliest possible stage.

As part of this, necessary knowledge sharing will ensure government officials understand how they can best take advantage of AI, including the important role of a secure, cloud-based system to support the development of the integrated and standardised datasets needed to power AI tools.

More so, by providing digital skills training, employees can learn to use these AI tools effectively, ethically and securely. At the same time, procurement teams can be educated on the productivity, efficiencies and cost gains to be made with AI use, helping to foster a culture that embraces innovation.

With ongoing regulatory challenges, governments must provide legal clarity on use cases to give clear guidance on safe, secure and responsible adoption. Transparency will also be critical in building public acceptance of AI adoption and countering public concerns around data use.

The Path to Maturity

By taking these critical steps, the aims of the AI Opportunities Action Plan can be delivered, seeing the public sector advance beyond early stage AI adoption, such as using tools for administrative tasks and extracting information, to truly impactful use cases that have the potential to change lives.

For example, AI has the potential to support the NHS to provide bespoke healthcare plans and automate  prescriptions for common illnesses. This can further support cost saving by limiting reliance on human doctors, allowing them to focus on treating complex issues.

At maturity, AI will play a core role in how the public sector operates, augmenting current roles and reshaping workflows. Through this, public sector leaders can transform decision making, optimise resource allocation, and experiment with new models of service delivery that drastically improve outcomes for citizens.

The full version of Google Clouds’s op-ed, including their ‘outlook for the future,’ will be published in the next edition of the Chamber UK Journal. Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive free online access to our upcoming edition.

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