In the corridors of Whitehall, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming the backbone of the UK government’s vision for a modernised public sector. A flurry of behind-the-scenes activity over the past 12 months strongly suggests that 2025 could mark a tipping point in uptake and investment in the technology.
In March 2024, for example, the National Audit Office reported that more than two-thirds of the government bodies it surveyed were already piloting or planning AI projects, in use cases that included supporting operation decision-making and improving internal processes. Many of these could go into production during 2025.
And following Labour’s general election victory in July, Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, commissioned tech entrepreneur Matt Clifford to create an AI Opportunities Action Plan, identifying how AI might be used to drive economic growth in the UK. One major focus of the report, which is expected imminently, will be how AI might be used to transform public services. This will likely influence how the UK government invests in AI over the coming year.
The scale of opportunity
There are high hopes for new efficiencies and substantial cost savings. According to Faculty AI and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the government could save up to £200bn over five years if it properly embraces AI. That’s an enticing target for policymakers struggling to contend with a £55.5bn fiscal deficit.
Take, for example, Redbox, an AI exemplar project named after the ministerial red box. This tool is set to revolutionise how the government operates by preserving knowledge that might otherwise be lost during staff turnover and ensuring that lessons learned from past projects are never lost. One use case is how it uses AI to enable ministers and civil servants to quickly search through a wealth of information and government documents to generate summaries of complex, detailed government papers and policies to provide tailored briefings.
Another project underway within the NHS is using AI to prevent harmful prescription errors, which could save thousands of lives, and billions of pounds. This example highlights AI’s dual role in improving efficiency and safeguarding citizens – a theme that runs through many of the government’s AI initiatives.
This is an important point, because in addition to transforming how public sector employees work, it’s just as vital that AI unlocks direct benefits and positive outcomes for the public at large, winning the trust of those who might be concerned about the technology’s risks or distrustful of the government’s intent in introducing it.
Reshaping public services for the people
The most powerful way to do that may be by ensuring AI improves their day-to-day interactions with the government, making them easier and faster to conduct, whether they’re registering a birth, applying for state benefits, or renewing a passport, to name just a few examples. In the words of chancellor, Rachel Reeves, a key focus of the AI Opportunities Action Plan will be identifying how AI technology might be used to “deliver the public services that people deserve.”
In other words, AI must be seen to be actively supporting the design and delivery of public services that are more inclusive and responsive to the evolving needs of the general population and specific communities within it. The public must see solid evidence that AI has made improvements to the services they use.
The scale of the opportunity is huge, according to a study published in 2024 by the Alan Turing Institute. Its researchers set out to calculate the scale of citizen-facing, bureaucratic public service transactions and to provide a measurement of the potential for automating these using AI. They concluded that, in central government alone, some 377 citizen-facing services are provided, and each year, these are used to conduct approximately one billion transactions. Of these one billion transactions, 143 million are complex bureaucratic procedures involving exchanges of data and decision-making, conducted by 201 different services.
“We estimate that 84 per cent of these complex transactions are highly automatable, representing a huge potential opportunity: saving even an average of just one minute per complex transaction would save the equivalent of approximately 1,200 person-years of work every year,” the researchers write.
Smart use of generative AI by public sector bodies holds out the promise of more personalised access to services and more streamlined processes. Take, for example, someone who needs to apply for social housing services. It’s a process that typically involves multiple steps, form-filling, and appointments, depending on their needs and location.
If a local housing authority was able to use its own data as the engine of an AI-driven approach, for example, that person would be able to find information and instructions based on their personal circumstances, reducing complexity and speeding up their access to appropriate services in a more streamlined, relevant way.
There is also the hope that this approach might speed up the delivery of decisions and outcomes for the public. Generative AI can support self-service portals and chatbots, making it easier for people to get answers to their questions and complete transactions at their own convenience. Current pressures within the UK public sector mean they frequently experience prolonged waiting times and decision backlogs. The deployment of AI could dramatically turn that situation around and, by automating responses to routine queries and tasks, public sector bodies free up civil servants to focus on more complex challenges and decision-making.
Humanising the citizen experience
In the private sector, businesses have made huge strides in streamlining the digital journeys taken by customers in recent years. In the public sector, the picture is far more mixed, due to competing priorities, budgetary limitations and the way that different departments and agencies often silo data. What is needed now in government is an approach that acknowledges that services work best when they’re built around the needs and expectations of the people at which they’re aimed.
In 2025, as the government continues its work on AI, it should be aiming to lay the groundwork for an entirely new citizen experience – one that is more efficient, more transparent and, paradoxically, more human. The stakes are high, but the potential rewards are enormous, both in terms of service efficiency and individual outcomes for members of the public.
[See also: Housing: Let’s build]
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