AI in Public Sector to strengthen public trust & transparency with intelligent business automation

Can AI make headways in a highly regulated Public Sector industry?

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March 16, 2023

Can AI make headways in a highly regulated Public Sector industry?

Progress in technologies used for different industries never stops as it intends to improve the quality of operations. The same is true for the Public Sector industry, and the latest progress it is witnessing is the use of AI in the Public Sector. But, what’s the extent of AI for this sector at the grassroot level? Let’s find out more below.

Citizens heavily depend on public sector organizations for access to public data from different departments such as civic information, healthcare, tourism, immigration, and municipal services. Public organizations and municipalities are tasked with providing the necessary information to citizens on a timely basis and archiving any information provided to them by the citizens. Employees in these institutions are often tasked with ensuring the sorting and classification of public documents, correct archival, and making them easily accessible to the citizens upon requirement. These tasks are very crucial proper for the functioning of public organizations and for providing the correct information whenever required.

Public sector institutions follow four key objectives while providing public services – maintaining trust, practicing transparency, maintaining accountability, and encouraging sustainability. However, the sector is often affected by government policies, regulations and restrictions, and even outdated ways of working. This often makes it challenging for citizens to deal with Public Sector organizations in conventional ways.

Here’s where business automation solutions powered by Artificial Intelligence derive public service transformation by automating various time-consuming tasks such as case management, document archival, resolving public inquiries, etc. to ensure better work quality. Our blog talks about how AI business automation solutions can make large headways in the Public Sector, and how the resultant transformation can enhance trust and transparency with citizens and maintain their faith in the sector’s organizations.

Key challenges faced by Public Sector organizations:

Before we delve into AI and how it can transform the sector, we need to address some of the roadblocks faced by the sector in more depth. Many daily operations in the Public Sector face significant challenges that affect operational efficiency, cause delays in resolving citizens’ needs, and ultimately might cause a drop in public trust in these organizations.

Long hours might go into manual and repetitive tasks of handling all the public inquiries that are received through emails and documents This causes delays in providing info and a drop in efficiency.

Unsustainable archiving and storage of the documents could lead to the deterioration of the heritage and legacy of public services, along with damaging or misplacing them.

Data breaches have a high possibility of occurring in the Public Sector due to the inherent handling of large data volumes and less scrutiny to keep it protected.

Lastly, piling workloads may increase work pressure for the sector’s employees, further affecting the quality of work and speed of task completion.

All these roadblocks ultimately affect citizen trust and transparency. And these are the two aspects that are crucial for government authorities, especially in public welfare, as the organizations might need to handle sensitive data. Despite these challenges, many Public Sector organizations are turning towards AI which can handle citizen inquiries present in both structured as well as unstructured data (free-text) formats by using Natural Language Processing engines.

AI government services for public service transformation

AI implementation in the form of Intelligent Automation and Intelligent Document Processing uses Natural Language Processing to read, extract, and process data from emails and documents handled by employees in public sector organizations. This processing involves reading, extracting, and interpreting the relevant information, be it from public documents or public inquiries, and using language-based decision engines to take various business decisions.

Another AI-powered technology called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) makes it possible to extract relevant information by identifying key intentions, key words and phrases, and other important data points. Using this info, OCR can further facilitate the AI to carry out different actions such as:

These actions carried out by AI solutions that involve accurate extraction of information and high-quality text interpretation can unlock numerous benefits for Public Sector organizations. Some of these business values generated through AI adoption in the sector are:

Faster completion of day-to-day tasks that require the use of public data.
Well-organized document archival can provide easier access to citizens for public information.
Enhanced communication with citizens through accurate and timely responses

Fueled by these business values, public sector organizations can use AI as a highly efficient system to handle emails and documents received from citizens, and the ones that they need to provide the citizens based on the latter’s inquiries. The archival of documents through AI also brings in the implementation of a proper framework and categorization. By receiving accurate information on a timely basis and a way to access it via a well-organized system can make the citizens happy to use the services being provided, thus bolstering the values of trust and transparency.

AI solutions help balance efficiency and data privacy, thus protecting citizen’s data

In addition, the use of AI solutions that are data-secure and help protect citizens’ information provides a much-needed facet of maintaining data privacy and security. This is because of stringent rules and regulations enforced in many regions of the world for organizations to protect customer data, make use of it in a limited manner, and stay compliant with internationally recognized data privacy regulatory bodies.

AI adoption and the business values that it generates can help organizations make information management sustainable through the digitization of all paperwork that contains public data. Earlier information mainly existed in the paper format and being sustainable was a challenge as it is difficult to properly archive all the paperwork. But with digitized mediums, this challenge can be mitigated as well.

To conclude, Artificial Intelligence indeed carries a vast scope of expansion and transformation in the Public Sector. And as we saw in this blog, the uses of AI and the advantages that it provides over conventional ways of working are things that organizations in this sector should be aware of. AI might have always been most appropriate to implement in the Public Sector, but as of recent times, this sector has shown a most welcome readiness in accepting AI technologies for a better future.

About Simplifai’s AI Solutions for Public Sector

Simplifai is an AI solutions company that enables Public Sector organizations to incorporate Intelligent Document Processing in their work operations with the help of our Digital Employees.

The Digital Employees comprise individual product modules such as Emailbot and Documentbot, together with other components such as API/RPA integration, Natural Language Processing, and business rules. A Digital Employee for the Public Sector can seamlessly handle repetitive tasks such as processing incoming and outgoing public documents, maintaining citizen records, and properly archiving of documents.

Want to know more about how the Simplifai’s Digital Employee for Public Sector works? Click the button below for more information.

Explore more about our Digital Employees for Public Sector