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All civil servants in England and Wales will get practical training in how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up their work from this autumn, the Guardian has learned:
More than 400,000 civil servants will be informed of the training on Monday afternoon, which is part of a drive by the Cabinet Office minister, Pat McFadden, to overhaul the civil service and improve its productivity.
At the same time, the size of the civil service is being reduced by tens of thousands of roles through voluntary redundancy and not replacing leavers.
The government said officials would be tasked with figuring how they could use AI technology to streamline their own work wherever possible.
Officials are already piloting a package of AI tools known as “Humphrey” – named after the senior civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby from the 1980s TV sitcom Yes, Minister.
In March, it was announced that officials will be told to abide by a mantra that says: “No person’s substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard.”
The practical training, set to roll out this autumn, will give all civil servants a working-level knowledge of AI and show how it is already being used to cut the time spent on every day tasks.
A recent pilot of AI by the Scottish government used a Humphrey tool to sift consultation responses about regulating cosmetic surgery such as lip filler and found that its results were similar to those produced by humans but quicker.
No decision has yet been taken on its wider rollout but the government said across 500 annual consultations the tool could help spare officials from as much as 75,000 days of analysis every year, which costs the government £20m in staffing costs.
The Department for Work and Pensions is also using AI to understand high volumes of correspondence, which used to take weeks. This allows benefits or pensions recipients to be identified as potentially vulnerable and in need of urgent support.
In a message to all staff, Sir Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary, said he was “proud” of the civil service’s “ability to continuously adapt to new challenges” as he urged them to consider how it “needs to evolve and reform”.
He said: “The prime minister has set us an important task in building a productive and agile state, which will involve us preserving and championing everything that is great about the civil service while changing to meet the challenges of an uncertain world.”
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He added: “We need to seize the opportunities of artificial intelligence and other technological developments to continually modernise everything that we do.
The training will be provided through the One Big Thing project, which develops officials each year on a key skill that has been identified as valuable for the organisation’s future.
While the government is rapidly embracing AI in Whitehall, some are sounding the alarm about its potential to introduce or reinforce errors and bias without adequate human oversight.
The Guardian revealed in December that an artificial intelligence system used by the UK government to detect welfare fraud had been showing bias according to people’s age, disability, marital status and nationality.
