Image source: istock.com/Nuttapong Puna
The Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) is planning to pilot its Caddy customer service assistant in a number of government departments.
This follows an initial roll out in six local offices of Citizens Advice, whose CASORT (Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford) group helped to develop the tool.
Caddy has been developed to help customer advisers in the public and third sectors to quickly locate and share information from reliable sources.
Andreas Varotsis, head of AI capability at i.AI, said the early trials found that 80% of responses to enquiries run through Caddy were of good enough quality to passed directly advisors without revisions, usually within four minutes, and that advisors using the tool were more than twice as likely to say they were confident given advice than those in a control group.
They were also one-and-a-half times more likely to say they were able to resolve the issues raised by the client. The results come from over 1,000 calls in which Caddy was used for support.
Excited by results
“We're really excited by these initial results,” Varotsis said in a blogpost. “While not perfect, they suggest that Caddy works, producing quick, high quality answers that seem to improve advisers' confidence and resolve public queries.
“That's why in the coming months, we're going to continue rolling out Caddy and looking for opportunities to evaluate and build our evidence base for how and why AI works in improving public services.”
He added: “We're looking to deploy Caddy in the government itself. In the coming weeks, we'll be piloting Caddy in a range of government departments, talking to partners to find the very best use case to help Caddy transform public services.”
Varotsis added that that original CASORT prototype was built on the concept of always passing generated content to a supervisor to verify, and this has been retained in the way it is now being used.
“By building in these ‘humans in the loop’, we’re trying to mitigate AI hallucination and risk,” he said.
i.AI now works within the Government Digital Service following the recent reorganisation of the ‘digital centre for government’.
https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/dsit-sets-out-blueprint-for-digital-government/
