In light of the growing pressures on the UK’s public sector, Google Cloud’s UKI Public Sector Leader, Iain Burgess, explores how the AI Opportunities Action Plan can drive efficiency, improve service delivery and unlock significant cost savings.
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 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 – including 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How the government acts now will be crucial to securing a better future for our public services, ensuring that outdated technology is left in the past.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 are under sustained pressure. In fact, 61 per cent of public administration workers report that overwork has increased in the last five years, while 70 per cent say morale has decreased. Such low levels of morale impact 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, highlight an understanding of the value AI can provide in the delivery of healthcare. With 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 more broadly on delivering patient care and improving appointment availability for patients.
These efficiencies will revolutionise the delivery of other key public services too, potentially enabling a 16 per cent 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.
Additionally, the public sector faces a range of legal and regulatory challenges with the handling of sensitive citizen data. Responsible AI use will be critical, while transparency around how data is being used and stored is central to gaining public trust – 60 per cent of public administrators reported they would be cautious using AI tools more extensively.
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.
An Outlook for the Future
While challenges remain in the public sector’s digital transformation journey, the rewards of AI adoption are profound. AI presents a lifeline to overburdened services, with the potential to save billions annually, alleviate pressure on staff and elevate citizen experiences.
The AI Opportunities Action Plan signals the beginning of this journey. By overcoming existing barriers through modernising infrastructure, upskilling employees, and addressing regulatory challenges with robust data security measures, the aims of the plan may be realised, and public sector organisations can start to reap the benefits of AI.
Then, as AI exceeds the early adoption phase to be at the core of operations, its impact will extend beyond solely productivity gains. It will redefine how services are delivered, reshape roles and enable innovations that have the ability to change lives. By embracing AI, the UK can establish a truly citizen-centric public sector, suited to meet the needs of today and those of the future.
Featured image via raker / Shutterstock.
Iain Burgess
DesignationUKI Public Sector Leader at Google Cloud
