Deloitte Insights delivers proprietary research designed to help organizations turn their aspirations into action.

DELOITTE INSIGHTS

  • Home
  • Spotlight
    • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
    • Top 10 Reading Guide
    • Celebrating Earth Month
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Resilience
  • Topics
    • Strategy
    • Economy & Society
    • Operations
    • Workforce
    • Technology
  • Industries
    • Consumer
    • Energy, Resources, & Industrials
    • Financial Services
    • Government & Public Services
    • Life Sciences & Health Care
    • Technology, Media, & Telecom
  • More from Deloitte Insights
    • About
    • Deloitte Insights Magazine
    • Press Room Podcasts
Deloitte.com
Deloitte Insights logo
  • SPOTLIGHT
    • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
    • Top 10 Reading Guide
    • Celebrating Earth Month
    • Resilience
    • Artificial Intelligence
  • TOPICS
    • Strategy
    • Economy & Society
    • Operations
    • Workforce
    • Technology
  • INDUSTRIES
    • Consumer
    • Energy, Resources, & Industrials
    • Financial Services
    • Government & Public Services
    • Life Sciences & Health Care
    • Technology, Media,& Telecom
  • MORE FROM DELOITTE INSIGHTS
    • About
    • Deloitte Insights Magazine
    • Press Room Podcasts
  • Welcome!

    For personalized content and settings, go to your My Deloitte Dashboard

    Latest Insights

    Creating opportunity at the intersection of climate disruption and regulatory change

    Article
     • 
    7-min read

    Better questions about generative AI

    Article
     • 
    2-min read

    Recommendations

    Tech Trends 2025

    Article

    TMT Predictions 2025

    Article

    About Deloitte Insights

    About Deloitte Insights

    Deloitte Insights Magazine, issue 33

    Magazine

    Topics for you

    • Business Strategy & Growth
    • Leadership
    • Operations
    • Marketing & Sales
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Emerging Technologies
    • Economy

    Watch & Listen

    Dbriefs

    Stay informed on the issues impacting your business with Deloitte's live webcast series. Gain valuable insights and practical knowledge from our specialists while earning CPE credits.

    Deloitte Insights Podcasts

    Join host Tanya Ott as she interviews influential voices discussing the business trends and challenges that matter most to your business today. 

    Subscribe

    Deloitte Insights Newsletters

    Looking to stay on top of the latest news and trends? With MyDeloitte you'll never miss out on the information you need to lead. Simply link your email or social profile and select the newsletters and alerts that matter most to you.

Welcome back

To join via SSO please click on the key button below
Still not a member? Join My Deloitte

How artificial intelligence could transform government

by William D. Eggers, David Schatsky, Peter Viechnicki
  • Save for later
  • Share
    • Share on Facebook
    • Share on Twitter
    • Share on Linkedin
    • Share by email
26 April 2017

How artificial intelligence could transform government Cognitive technologies have the potential to revolutionize the public sector—and save billions of dollars

26 April 2017
  • William D. Eggers United States
  • David Schatsky United States
  • Peter Viechnicki United States
  • Save for later
  • Share
    • Share on Facebook
    • Share on Twitter
    • Share on Linkedin
    • Share by email

Can “smart” technology make government, well, smarter? It’s already happening: Through AI-based applications, developers are looking to transform the public sector by automating tasks and much more. But for optimal gain, agencies must make tough choices about where and how to introduce new technologies.

Artificial intelligence already helps run government, with cognitive applications doing everything from reducing backlogs and cutting costs to handling tasks we can’t easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions and identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition. Indeed, while we expect AI-based technology in the years ahead to fundamentally transform how public-sector employees get work done—eliminating some jobs, redesigning countless others, and even creating entirely new professions1—it’s already changing the nature of many jobs and revolutionizing facets of government operations.

Agencies today face new choices about whether some work should be fully automated, divided among people and machines, or performed by people but enhanced by machines. Our latest report, AI-augmented government, conservatively estimates that simply automating tasks that computers already routinely do could free up 96.7 million federal government working hours annually, potentially saving $3.3 billion. At the high end, we estimate that AI technology could free up as many as 1.2 billion working hours every year, saving $41.1 billion.

​Learn more

View the AI in Government collection

Read the full article

View the analysis

Listen to the podcast

Watch the video

AI’s impact

Cognitive technologies could eventually revolutionize every facet of government operations, from virtual desktop assistants to applications that can govern large, shifting systems.2 Indeed, they are already having a profound impact on government work, with more dramatic effects to come. AI-based applications can reduce backlogs, cut costs, overcome resource constraints, free workers from mundane tasks, improve the accuracy of projections, inject intelligence into scores of processes and systems, and handle many other tasks humans can’t easily do on our own, such as sifting through millions of documents in real time for the most relevant content.

Four automation choices

AI’s potential benefits for government are clear. But which functions should be automated or made “smart,” and to what degree? Assessing different options’ business implications involves four main approaches to automation: relieve, split up, replace, and augment.

Relieve: Technology takes over mundane tasks, freeing workers for more valuable work. The Associated Press, for example, uses machines to write routine corporate earnings stories so that journalists can focus on in-depth reporting.22 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs Agency has automated the most tedious aspect of its call center work, opening case numbers for advisers so they don’t have to search the database. The agency estimates this has reduced handling times by 40 percent and processing costs by 80 percent.3 The relieve approach allows government to focus on reducing backlogs or shifting workers to higher-value tasks.4

Split up: This approach involves breaking a job into steps or pieces and automating as many as possible, leaving humans to do the remainder and perhaps supervise the automated work. Relying on machine language translation and leaving professional translators to “clean up” the results is one example. For example, at the United Nations, machines could handle live translation of the assembly meetings for spectators, while expert translators could revise transcripts for later release to news outlets. Several federal entities, from the White House to the US Customs and Immigration Services, have chatbots designed to answer basic questions and leave complicated responses to a human.5

Replace: In this approach, technology is used to do an entire job once performed by a human. The US Postal Service uses handwriting recognition to sort mail by ZIP code; some machines can process 18,000 pieces of mail an hour.6 The best opportunities for replace include repetitive tasks with uniform components, decision making that follows simple rules, and tasks with a finite number of possible outcomes. If you’ve ever fought a computer program (maybe on an airline website?) because your situation lay outside the narrow possibilities its designers imagined, you know how frustrating it can be.

Augment: In this approach, technology makes workers more effective by complementing their skills. This is the true promise of AI: humans and computers combining their strengths to achieve faster and better results, often doing what humans simply couldn’t do before. When technology is designed to augment, humans are still very much in the driver’s seat. An example is IBM’s Watson for Oncology, which recommends individual cancer treatments to physicians, citing evidence and a confidence score for each recommendation, to help them make more fully informed decisions.7

For each of these automation approaches, government agencies should consider their priorities. A cost strategy uses technology to reduce costs, especially by reducing labor. A value strategy focuses on increasing value by complementing human labor with technology or reassigning it to higher-value work. Of course, the two can be combined.

Ultimately, cognitive technologies will fundamentally change how government works—and the changes will come much sooner than many think. Strategic workforce planning must evolve beyond a focus on talent and people to consider the interplay of talent, technology, and design. As technologies advance in power, government agencies must bring more creativity to workforce planning and work design. Mission, talent, and technology leaders must work together to analyze the issues and opportunities and propose a path forward.

For our full report on how cognitive technologies could transform the public sector, see AI-augmented government.

Credits

Written By: William D. Eggers, David Schatsky, Peter Viechnicki

Endnotes
    1. Deloitte’s research into the UK government suggests that automation and AI could replace up to 861,000 public sector jobs by 2030, saving some £17 billion annually in wages compared to 2015. See Deloitte UK, The state of the state 2016–17: Brexit and the business of government, 2016, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/uk/Documents/public-sector/deloitte-uk-state-of-the-state-2016-report.pdf. View in article

    2. Federal Aviation Administration, “En route automation modernization (ERAM),” www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/eram/, accessed March 16, 2017. View in article

    3. iGov News, “HMRC to become a ‘government leader’ on automation software,” September 27, 2016, www.igovnews.com/#!/news/view/57ea3e898d525b643323bbbb. View in article

    4. David Schatsky, Craig Muraskin, and Ragu Gurumurthy, “Cognitive technologies: The real opportunities for business,” Deloitte Review 16, January 26, 2015, /content/www/globalblueprint/en/insights/deloitte-review/issue-16/cognitive-technologies-business-applications.html. View in article

    5. Matt Leonard, “White House open sources Facebook Messenger chatbot,” GCN, October 17, 2016, https://gcn.com/articles/2016/10/17/white-house-messenger-bot.aspx. View in article

    6. Material Handling & Logistics, September 1, 2001, http://mhlnews.com/technology-amp-automation/postal-automation-delivers-1. View in article

    7. Darryl K. Taft, “Dept. of Veterans Affairs taps IBM Watson for help with PTSD,” eWeek, December 16, 2014, http://fw.to/E0FZzQV. View in article

Show moreShow less

Topics in this article

Deloitte Center for Government Insights

View
Download Subscribe

Related

img Trending

Interactive 3 days ago

William D. Eggers

William D. Eggers

Executive director | Deloitte Center for Government Insights | Deloitte Services LP

William D. Eggers is the executive director of Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights, where he is responsible for the firm’s public sector thought leadership.

  • weggers@deloitte.com
  • +1 571 882 6585
David Schatsky

David Schatsky

Managing Director | Deloitte LLP

David analyzes emerging technology and business trends for Deloitte’s leaders and clients. His recent published works include Signals for Strategists: Sensing Emerging Trends in Business and Technology (Rosetta Books 2015), “Demystifying artificial intelligence: What business leaders need to know about cognitive technologies,” and “Cognitive technologies: The real opportunities for business” (Deloitte Insights 2014-15). Before joining Deloitte, David led two research and advisory firms.

  • dschatsky@deloitte.com
Peter Viechnicki

Peter Viechnicki

Manager | Deloitte Services LP

Peter is a strategic analysis manager and data scientist with the Deloitte Center for Government Insights, where he focuses on developing innovative public sector research using geospatial and natural language processing techniques.

  • pviechnicki@deloitte.com
  • +1 571 858 1862

Share article highlights

See something interesting? Simply select text and choose how to share it:

Email a customized link that shows your highlighted text.
Copy a customized link that shows your highlighted text.
Copy your highlighted text.

How artificial intelligence could transform government has been saved

How artificial intelligence could transform government has been removed

An Article Titled How artificial intelligence could transform government already exists in Saved items

Invalid special characters found 
Forgot password

To stay logged in, change your functional cookie settings.

OR

Social login not available on Microsoft Edge browser at this time.

Connect Accounts

Connect your social accounts

This is the first time you have logged in with a social network.

You have previously logged in with a different account. To link your accounts, please re-authenticate.

Log in with an existing social network:

To connect with your existing account, please enter your password:

OR

Log in with an existing site account:

To connect with your existing account, please enter your password:

Forgot password

Subscribe

to receive more business insights, analysis, and perspectives from Deloitte Insights
✓ Link copied to clipboard

Deloitte Insights delivers proprietary research designed to help organizations turn their aspirations into action.

Deloitte Insights

  • Home
  • Topics
  • Industries
  • About Deloitte Insights

Spotlight

  • Weekly Global Economic Outlook
  • Top 10 Reading Guide
  • Celebrating Earth Month
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Resilience
Deloitte logo

Learn about Deloitte’s offerings, people, and culture as a global provider of audit, assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services.

  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy
  • Privacy Shield
  • Cookies
  • Legal Information for Job Seekers
  • Labor Condition Applications
  • Do Not Sell My Personal Information