UK government’s new AI tool sees results similar to a human – aims to save £20 million in staffing costs

Government has successfully trialled a new AI tool with the long-term goal of saving costs around staffing and needless taxpayer expenditure.

The tool, called ‘Consult’, was first used on a live consultation by the Scottish Government when it was seeking views on how to regulate non-surgical cosmetic procedures, like lip fillers and laser hair removal, as use of the treatments has risen.

The tool is now set to be used across departments in a bid to cut down the millions of pounds spent on the current process, which often includes outsourcing analysis to expensive contractors.

Comments from over 2,000 consultation responses were reviewed by the AI. These were subsequently checked by a team of experts to make sure that the AI was not making any mistakes.

“When we compare Consult to the human reviewer, we see they agree the majority of the time, with differences in view having a negligible impact on how themes were ranked overall,” the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said.

What is Consult?

Consult forms part of ‘Humphrey’, a bundle of AI tools designed to speed up the work of civil servants and cut back time spent on admin, and money spent on contractors.

It forms part of the government’s plan to make better use of technology across public services, in a bid to target the £45 billion in productivity savings that it offers while creating a more agile state, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology 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,” said Technology Secretary Peter Kyle.

“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,” he said.

Consult expected to save millions of pounds

Consult is expected to undergo further consultation testing before being deployed across other government projects.

Across the 500 consultations the government runs annually, the tool could help save officials from around 75,000 days of analysis every year, which costs the government £20 million in staffing costs.

Experts who reviewed the results said that there was no clear bias and that the AI was repeatedly consistent in its findings.

“With some consultations receiving tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and given the strong levels of accuracy demonstrated in early tests, Consult will soon be used on major consultations without officials manually reviewing every response individually,” the department said.