The government has said a new tool called Consult, based on its artificial intelligence (AI)-based suite Humphrey, has been used to analyse a recent consultation from the Scottish Parliament looking at regulation for non-surgical cosmetic procedures. The trial has the potential to save the government a significant amount of admin time and cost in the analysis of feedback from experts and members of the general public in response to policy proposals.
The trial used the AI tool for analysing comments from experts and the public. According to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), using AI to process consultation responses has the potential to save officials 75,000 days of manual analysis every year, which costs £20m in staffing costs.
DSIT said Consult was able to summarise what the public had told the government in response to a consultation for the first time – providing nearly identical results to the manual work officials tasked with analysing public consultations.
Reviewing comments from more than 2,000 consultation responses using generative AI, Consult identified key themes from the feedback across each of six qualitative questions. The themes were checked and refined by experts in the Scottish government, then Consult was used to categories individual responses by theme. DSIT said this gave officials more time to examine the details of the responses and evaluate the policy implications of feedback received.
As this was the first time Consult was used on a live consultation, experts at the Scottish government manually reviewed every response. The trial found that when looking to the work of a human reviewing the consultation feedback responses manually compared to Consult, differences in reviewers’ interpretation of the comments received had a negligible impact on how themes were ranked overall.
Commenting on the trial, technology secretary Peter Kyle said: “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.”
Consult is part of the Humphrey 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 and forms part of the government’s plan to make better use of technology across public services, in a bid to target the £45bn in productivity savings.
Feedback from officials who worked with Consult from the Scottish government on this first live test included comments such as “pleasantly surprised”, while others said it provided a “useful starting point” in the initial analysis. According to DSIT, the feedback from the people who worked on the trial consultation suggests that Consult can reduce human biases, which makes the analysis of feedback more consistent.
The government plans to use Consult on major consultations without officials manually reviewing every response individually. However, DSIT said officials will always review the themes and how responses are sorted into them through an interactive dashboard that will allow them to filter and search for insights.
