What has Chat GPT done for you lately? If you’re like me, you’ve played around with it at least a little. I used it to help me plan a family trip to Banff and it did pretty well! But does generative AI have value for government and public service agencies, an area that is not known for early adoption of technology, and where the stakes are high for data privacy and accuracy?

Absolutely. In fact, generative AI brings an unprecedented opportunity for public agencies. The technology can quickly amp up processing power to produce insights, ideas and information that can help government workers and citizens. And without an upfront investment in infrastructure.

Avanade has been working with Microsoft on OpenAI since 2021, so we’ve had some time to explore the potential benefits—and the risks—of generative AI. We firmly believe the benefits outweigh the risk, especially when generative AI is approached thoughtfully and with an eye toward partner with humans rather than replacing them.

Generative AI can improve efficiency, drive faster and more accurate decision-making, and even spark creativity when used as a prompt. Within the public sector, it can help with fraud detection, planning effective responses to disasters and crises, deploying public safety resources according to crime data analysis and using natural language processing to identify trends and sentiment.

The key to unlocking the power of generative AI for use in the public sector is applying it to a specified knowledge base within an organization. Right now, apps like Chat GPT scrape the entirety of the Internet to respond to a prompt (it’s truly mind-boggling when you think about how fast that happens), and it uses the prompts and results to keep refining its abilities. Generative AI can be applied to specific use cases. So, if a citizen goes to a government site to find information on building permits, the response would only come from that agency’s knowledge base, not the entire World Wide Web. That keeps the responses relevant and protects the information within the knowledge base.

When considering how to apply generative AI within a public agency, you’ll want to factor in the availability of quality, diverse data for the domain, and the ability to have knowledgeable humans involved—AI ambassadors—to help refine and retrain the model quickly.

Collaboration is key
Consider the amount of information within your agency and how valuable it would be to access it for bespoke needs using natural language prompts—in whatever language you choose. Pretty powerful, right? Now think about how that power expands when you connect with knowledge bases from related agencies. Just like that, the activity changes from connecting the dots to coloring a well-defined picture. Say a citizen is receiving aid from a municipality as well as from an NGO and perhaps another government agency at the county, state or federal level. Having a full view of that citizen’s needs can create a coordinated response that has a better chance of addressing root causes and preventing fraud or redundancy.

Better information from across agencies improves the ability to serve citizens. So does collaborating directly with citizens themselves. Private sector companies have set high bars for standards of service, now generative AI can help agencies be more accessible and responsive. Gathering input—either by explicitly asking or analyzing usage trends inform where an agency focuses its resources.

Finally, while interfaces like ChatGPT make generative AI feel intuitive and easy to you, there is an art of setting parameters for a generative AI function to create meaningful results. That’s why collaboration with a trusted partner is vital. Not only can a partner bring expertise that many agencies can’t afford to keep in house, they also come with a variety of experiences, best practices, and considerations around digital ethics. The wave of enthusiasm might wash over some of the human-centric ethical concerns; a good partner will proactively raise them before they become a problem.

Much of the fear around generative AI is that it will replace humans in the workforce. We don’t see that happening anytime soon. Instead, we find the value of generative AI to be its ability to take on some time-consuming tasks like data processing, trend spotting, and even providing prompts or a good start for grant writing. This can not only free up time that people can spend connecting with each other, it can lead to more informed, targeted and meaningful interactions between government agencies and the citizens they serve.

Avanade is helping clients navigate the complexities and harness true organizational transformation with generative AI.