It is currently a moment of digital government flux in the UK - as in all areas of the public sector - after the general election in July this year, which saw the Labour government coming back to power after 14 years.

One of the first announcements of the new administration was to bring two of the UK’s central digital bodies, Government Digital Service (GDS) and Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

This is only one of several ongoing efforts within the UK Government to better use advanced technologies within the government, whether in domestic policy or diplomacy.

When Andrew Moore wrote last year about the potential for emerging technologies to revolutionise foreign policy, he imagined AI-driven trade negotiations and digital twins of nuclear sites – but in the UK, much more practical efforts are already starting to bear fruit.

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AI-driven tool for consular support

David Gerouville-Farrell is at the centre of one of these efforts as an AI Solutions Architect working on the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s (FCDO) new “Correspondence Triage” service.

*David Gerouville-Farrell shares with guest writer Luke Cavanaugh's on the development of the UK's new Correspondence Triage service. Image: David Gerouville-Farrell*

Gerouville-Farrell worked as an associate with Caution Your Blast Ltd (CYB), which built the AI-enabled triage service that manages enquiries from British nationals who need information about living and travelling abroad, under the broader umbrella of “Find Information 24/7”.

Currently, the FCDO contact centre receives some 500,000 enquiries a year from people in situations such as having lost their passports or needing emergency documentation to get married.

The new service, one of the first in the UK government to include an AI function, suggests resources for users to access or communicates when topics are beyond the scope of the Foreign Office.

With the potential to reduce the response time for a query from 10 days to five seconds, scaled up to half a million enquiries a year, the impact for both the inquirer and the contact team is potentially enormous.

For the inquirer, it can mean having urgent requests resolved quickly, and for the contact teams, it allows them to focus on citizens in crisis and providing 1:1 support.

Creating a user-driven AI solution

When asked where the inspiration came from for creating a service like “Correspondence Triage”, Gerouville-Farrell says: “You have to be obsessed with the field of AI at the moment to keep track of changes…collecting a library of good and bad practice.”

Correspondence Triage is not the first FCDO service that Gerouville-Farrell has worked on, having helped develop Travel Advice and Overseas registration before. As we talk about these services, there are two key lessons Gerouville-Farrell raises that stand out.

First, he talks about having “a real understanding of success criteria”. For travel advice, “success is helping people find the information they need quickly to reduce risk,” such as what the visa requirements are.

Tangential to this is the notion of perceptive user signalling. “Making a security map green carries a certain signal … that an area is completely safe”. Designers have to be perceptive to such signals, especially when misunderstandings could be costly for those using them.

This sort of user understanding is central to the “Correspondence Triage” service. Despite being “one of the first government AI services,” Gerouville-Farrell is keen to stress that the project was not built around AI but set up to solve a real user problem.

“We recognised that a team in a contact centre could be excited about this or feel threatened by it – we had to take the user on a journey with us”.

He adds: “There was lots to learn from the product perspective around the appropriate trade-offs for what you can and should do as a designer. The technology is not the interesting part … helping people get their problems solved is the interesting part of the service”.

In the end, “we traded off the generative aspect of the AI solution to remove risk – you cannot put a ChatGPT interface into the FCDO website without worrying about hallucinations, citizens getting in harm’s way, and prompt injections that could create embarrassing situations”.

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The supporting role of a central government digital office

While “Correspondence Triage” is one of the first concrete use cases for AI in the UK government, the foundational principles that underpin its use are by now more than half-a-year-old.

In January 2024, the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) issued 10 rules for using Generative AI (GenAI) in government, rules “which are your friends as a designer”.

The guidance itself – helping service designers “thread a needle in allowing government to take advantage of cutting-edge technology” – allows those creating services “to make creative decisions while knowing [they] are doing so in a safe way”, Gerouville-Farrell says.

The role of a Central Digital Office in government is very much a live debate in digital government circles.

Talking about the role of CDDO in this particular project, Gerouville-Farrell says, “They were really interested in what people are doing … playing a friendly challenging role with their early principles and asking the hard questions”.

Providing a safe space to challenge the FCDO design team, CDDO hosted show-and-tells, and Gerouville-Farrell was able to interact with a broader community of interest within UK government circles.

It is too early to tell what the new home of GDS and CDDO will mean for UK digital service design, but its ability to “empower other parts of government” - as Gerouville-Farrell puts it - will surely remain.

AI-driven services here to stay

As for the “Correspondence Triage” service, its early results have been promising with 95 per cent of the time that people have followed the service through to speaking to contact staff after being suggested a resource or link to follow, they found that the AI had suggested them the correct answer.

The majority of users – between 85-95 per cent - who have interacted with the service have exited via a conversion, such as clicking on a recommended link, he says.

While FCDO’s new service may be one of the first to use AI, it won’t be the last.

“Lots of work that involves human beings reading and understanding what is going on has been closed off to technological support for a long time”, he finishes our interview by noting, “and it is not closed off anymore”.

“There are a lot of problems waiting to be solved, and AI is going to help a lot of people along the way”.

The message is clear - AI-driven services are here to stay.

Luke Cavanaugh holds a Master’s in Global Affairs from the Schwarzman Scholars programme at Tsinghua University, Beijing and is a graduate of the University of Cambridge. He has recently worked for StateUp, as part of the ITU Team working on GovStack, and sits on the Global Visionaries Board of the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union.

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