The Incubator for AI unit in the Cabinet Office has developed an “AI powered co-pilot for customer service” in collaboration with Citizens Advice.
It said the AI assistant, named Caddy, can help customer advisers quickly locate and share information from reliable sources.
The organisations are beginning to implement the service at two Citizens Advice centres in Greater Manchester, following which they will publish the code as open source and look for partners to explore where it can be applied elsewhere.
The initial prototype was developed by i.AI and Citizens Advice Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford (CASORT), and has now been evolved into a scalable framework suitable for integration across government and into other sectors.
Open source and cloud
i.AI said it can be integrated with existing chat environments, uses open source technology for back end operations and employs infrastructure as code to support swift deployments across cloud platforms.
It bases its advice on documentation provided to it, which can include training materials. Citizens Advice has used a range of its own resources and those from GOV.UK.
A "human in the loop" validation system is employed to mitigate any risk from its use.
This is the third of i.AI’s early projects, following the development of consultation layer for central government bodies and a product to interrogate and summarise huge volumes of material going into ministerial redboxes.
