PUBLIC SECTOR Every public sector employee in the UK spends more than eight hours per week managing data and performing routine administrative tasks, according to Microsoft’s 2024 Harnessing the Power of AI for the Public Sector report. The research shows that 45 per cent of respondents are “drowning in unnecessary administrative tasks”, with 55 per cent saying this workload negatively impacts their ability to get on with the day job, and nearly half indicating it compromises the quality of service they provide and limits how long they can spend directly interacting with the public. However, the report also states that automating routine administrative processes with generative artificial intelligence technology could save each of the UK’s almost six million public sector workers over four hours per week, an overall saving of 23 million hours. Unlocking additional productivity could drive significant economic benefits. Research from Public First predicts that if AI is rolled out effectively, it could save the UK’s public sector over £17 billion ($22.4 million) by 2035. Governments and city leaders across the world are evaluating how generative AI could help them to overcome challenges such as rapidly growing urban populations, inequality, safety and security, and climate change, says Didier Ongena, global government lead at Microsoft. “We’re at the forefront of one of the biggest technology transformations I’ve witnessed in my 20 years at Microsoft,” says Ongena. “Generative AI is fundamentally changing how governments and cities operate, making it possible to improve their current services and deliver them at a much wider scale than ever before. They can also now implement some of the many innovations they have been pursuing for a long time, and capitalise on opportunities that would previously have been impossible or prohibitively expensive. “In much the same way that low-code/no-code capabilities enable organisations to rapidly develop their own applications without skilled resources, generative AI is helping them to achieve goals such as automating tasks or 143 Photo: iStock/a_Taiga New York City Department of Environmental Protection has two self-service Azure OpenAI-based chatbots to quickly resolve common IT and human resources-related issues
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