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The UK Government’s AI driven public consultation tool ‘Consult’ (developed by its AI incubator, i.AI), has been trialled during a live consultation by the Scottish Government. The consultation sought public opinion on regulating non-surgical cosmetic procedures, such as lip fillers and laser hair removal, amid growing concerns around their safety and accessibility. Consult processed over 2,000 responses to six open-ended questions, identifying core themes which were then reviewed and refined by Scottish Government officials.
The technology marks the first real-world deployment of Consult, part of the government’s wider Humphrey AI toolkit, which is designed to reduce administrative burden and reliance on external contractors (See - Plans and progress of UK government AI adoption). Traditionally, analysing qualitative data from public consultations has been a costly, time-consuming process, however officials involved in the test reported that Consult significantly streamlined the task. “It saved [us] a heck of a lot of time,” one said, while another praised the tool for allowing them to “get to the analysis and draw out what’s needed next.”
The AI tool runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4 via Microsoft Azure and uses a combination of historic government consultation data and synthetic inputs to train its models. It also operates with a human-in-the-loop system, allowing officials to explore and validate themes through an interactive dashboard.
Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, described the results as “promising,” noting the broader ambition to modernise governance through smart automation. “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,” he said. “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.”
While still in trial, Consult is already being eyed for wider rollout across departments, with potential savings of up to 75,000 working days and £20m annually across 500 government consultations.
Despite its initial success we can but hope that government still applies a measure of caution. In particular, the issue of bias remains critical. AI’s promise of objectivity must be carefully weighed against the risks of embedded assumptions in training data or algorithmic design. Conversely, those who have used the Consult tool argue it “takes away the (human) bias and makes it more consistent,” while this may be true human oversight will remain crucial. As Consult further scales ensuring both the methodology and results are fully transparent will be important to maintain public trust.
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 10:08