Transforming Public Sector Services with AI: A Vision for the Future

Transforming Public Sector Services with AI: A Vision for the Future

Informed Solutions' Transformation Director David Lawton reflects on the current state of AI in the Public Sector, shares his thoughts on the path ahead, and outlines how Public Sector leaders can work with industry experts to unlock opportunities for transforming the quality of services for citizens.

In the landscape of technical innovation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents a potential game changer for a public sector, which is caught in the middle of limited investment and a plethora of new economic, societal, and environmental challenges.

Yet, as we delve into the use of AI into public services, we find ourselves at a crossroads between ambition and execution. Through award-winning work with public sector clients, engagement with industry forums and partnership with academia, I've had the opportunity to reflect on both the challenges and transformative possibilities AI presents.

The Present Challenge: Ambition vs. Execution

The obvious prizes for AI-based services in the public sector has led to a surge in the number of pilot projects. However, the transition from the experimental phase to impactful, national-scale deployment remains limited. The recent Digital Leaders AI Attitudes survey (March 2024) underscores this gap, revealing growing concerns about organisational capability to scale AI-based initiatives alongside a perceived low return on investment from AI initiatives.

I was recently invited onto a panel discussion at the recent Digital Leaders Public Sector Innovation conference alongside experts from leading public sector organisations including the Department for Works and Pensions, the National Audit Office and Number 10. During the discussion, I reflected that we're currently in the foothills of AI adoption and that there are many parallels with experiences of the first wave of digital transformation from a decade ago. In those early stages, people focussed on putting paper-based processes online, rather than re-imagining how services and their operating models could be transformed and made 'digital-native'.

With this experience in mind, it's easy to draw parallels with a lot of the AI work currently taking place within public sector estates: individual pockets of AI are being deployed as a small part of end-to-end services (e.g. chatbots to route customer calls, Natural Language Processing to search unstructured data). That's not to say that there aren't significant benefits to be realised by tackling the low-hanging fruit of repetitive manual work, but these advancements only scratch the surface of what is possible.

The real question that emerged during our panel discussion was whether we are truly setting an ambitious enough vision for transforming public services with AI.

The Future Risks: Navigating 'Rubbish AI'

Looking ahead, we're concerned that we face a period of 'rubbish AI': siloed solutions, quickly deployed to take advantage of open-source data science and cloud-based LLM technologies without a deep understanding of models' underlying foundations, limitations, and the data on which they were trained.

This not only risks poor service performance but also presents the very real potential for issues in key aeras such as privacy, ethics, and bias to undermine public trust and create a barrier to sustainable transformation.

Meanwhile, the development of frontier AI technologies will continue its exponential progress, developing and showcasing remarkable technical achievements (for example OpenAI's recent unveiling of its Sora text-to-video model). Such developments clearly provide profile and commercial potential for the organisations that develop them, but they also help to prepare wider society for the future potential of these capabilities.

As this bleeding-edge AI development continues towards its stated goal of delivering Artificial General Intelligence, it will fall on society at large to discuss and decide how and where it will be safe and appropriate to deploy such capabilities. The recent EU AI Act is a great example of developing regulation in this area - clearly setting out situations in which AI systems represent unacceptable levels of risk and prohibiting them.

Realising the Opportunity: Informed Solutions' Approach

For all of the innovation at the frontier, delivering real, on-the-ground change requires the safe and ethical integration of new capabilities into real-world products and services. This requires transformation of organisational and service delivery operating models.

At Informed, we have focused on the safe, secure, ethical, and effective rollout of nationally scaled AI programmes including an innovative first of its kind AI-based decision support platform, which is helping NatureScot manage the sustainable development and protection of sensitive land across Scotland. With impressive, demonstrable business efficiency impacts it has just been awarded aprestigious Scottish Government's Digital Planning Innovation Award. Alongside this, and in a critical national healthcare infrastructure setting, our teams' AI and data science-led approach to helping the NHS better understand and mitigate patient safety in care settings has been recognised with a Global Innovation Award from the World Innovation Technology Services Alliance.

What's made these projects successful has been our approach of embedding data science as an enabler for innovation within multi-disciplinary teams that combine domain subject matter experts, user researchers, service designers, data and security specialists, developers, testers and platform engineers.

Just because these new technologies enable a different approach to delivering services, doesn't mean that the proven principles and value added by established disciplines like User Centred Design don't apply. Our Communities of Practice are embracing the disruptive and transformative opportunities offered by AI, tackling questions such as:

· What does service design look like in a world of pro-active agents and personalisation?

· And what is good content design when content is dynamically generated based on the user's needs?

Charting the Path Forward

Embracing AI in public services is not merely about adopting new technologies; it's about fundamentally transforming how these services are delivered to better meet the needs of citizens. This transformation requires a deep understanding of user needs, a commitment to fairness, security, and governance, and a strategic approach to innovation.

At Informed Solutions, we are dedicated to working with our clients to deliver this transformation, leveraging our award-winning expertise to guide public sector organisations through the complexities of AI adoption and benefits realisation.

By prioritizing ethical innovation and user-centric design, we aim to unlock the full potential of AI, ensuring that public services are not only more efficient and responsive but also more aligned with the values and needs of the communities they serve.

In navigating the future of AI in the public sector, we remain focussed on delivering solutions that are not just technologically advanced but also socially responsible and aligned with the broader goals of public service. Through continued education, trust-building, and leadership, we can harness the transformative power of AI to create a brighter, more efficient, and more inclusive future for public services.

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