The Scottish Government has become the first administration in the UK to use an artificial intelligence tool to analyse public responses to consultations – with “promising results”.
Consult’, built by the UK government as part of the Humphrey suite of AI tools, has been used to speed up analysis of what the public and experts said in a consultation about regulating non-surgical cosmetic procedures.
Generative AI was deployed to analyse 2,000 responses to the proposed legislation to regulate treatments like lip fillers and laser hair removal – with the tool providing nearly identical results to officials.
The tool is now set to be used across UK Government departments in a bid to slash millions of pounds spent on outsourcing analysis to expensive contractors – helping to build a productive and agile state to deliver ministers’ ‘Plan for Change’.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: “No one should be wasting time on something AI can do quicker and better, let alone wasting millions of taxpayer pounds on outsourcing such work to contractors.
“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.”
Jenni Minto, the Scottish Government’s public health minister, added: “Using the tool was very beneficial in helping the Scottish Government understand more quickly what people wanted us to hear and our respondents’ range of views. Officials were reassured through the process that the AI was doing a good job, supporting us to undertake the analysis that will inform our next steps.
“Using this tool has allowed the Scottish Government to move more quickly to a focus on the policy questions and dive into the detail of the evidence we’ve been presented with, while remaining confident that we have heard the strong views expressed by respondents.”
Reviewing comments from over 2,000 consultation responses using generative AI, Consult identified key themes that feedback fell into across each of six qualitative questions. These themes were checked and refined by experts in the Scottish Government, the AI tool then sorted individual responses into themes and gave officials more time to delve into the detail 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 too. Identifying what an individual response is saying, and putting it in a ‘theme’ is subjective, humans don’t always agree. When we compare Consult to the human reviewer, we see they agree the majority of the time – with differences in view having a negligible impact on how themes were ranked overall.
‘Consult’ is part of ‘Humphrey’, a 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. It forms part of the government’s plan to make better use of technology across public services, in a bid to target the £45 billion in productivity savings that it offers while creating a more agile state that can more effectively deliver the Plan for Change.