AI offers public sectors an opportunity to leverage the untapped potential of mathematical models and have efficient frameworks to address persistent issues.
Enterprises across the globe have been depicting maturity in adopting and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) to deal with problems that they believe they have still not been able to most appropriately address. With more and more impetus being offered to the application of AI, stakeholders are expecting tremendous benefits from complex mathematical applications which form the basis of AI.
While companies have been growing keen on fast infusing AI across their entire value chain to enhance operational performance and strategic efficiency, government agencies, too, have started following the suit. The application areas can be anything, ranging from intelligent automation-led administration, smart interaction with citizens, process anomaly detection to better decision-making process.
– Microsoft
Though there has been an increasingly growing awareness, only 4% of the public sector organizations have been able to leverage AI and achieve positive outcomes. The slow growth, however, doesn’t demean senior leadership’s growing intent to scale AI for achieving tangible benefits in short time.
Here we discuss six important public sector areas to highlight how AI can be a pathbreaker for government agencies.
Taxation
Public tax departments have always grappled with the inefficiencies caused by manual tax assessment, causing compliance complications and resulting in poor audits. To deal with such a pestering problem, countries like India have been making constant attempts to revamp their tax processing frameworks by erecting robust IT infrastructures. These transparent platforms are built upon artificial intelligence and machine learning, and streamline the process to identify tax evasion and detect fraud.
AI-led predictive analytics can enable tax agencies to adopt a suitable course and take preemptive action. In fact, the most common application of AI in taxation, now, happens to be that of predicting high-risk cases. This enables authorities to script customized approaches to reach the individuals and recover revenue. As AI models function dynamically, they help create maximum impact by offering flexible frameworks to come up with situational measures.
Public Transportation
Public transportation is the most favoured means of transportation across the globe. In the USA alone, public transport accounted for 9.9 billion trips in 2019. Though being the most preferred means of movement, operational inefficiencies keep hampering its performance. Traditionally, fleet scheduling has been a difficult problem for authorities. And as fuel prices continue to rise exponentially, optimizing the operational performance vis-à-vis increasing constraints, magnify the existing challenges.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can equip public transporters with automation-enabled systems for enhancing security systems that reduce the accident rate in real-time. Smart cameras can give insight into the traffic flow at stations and help authorities perfect their fleet scheduling. Predictive maintenance can change the overall maintenance tactics by triggering alerts to remind stakeholders from time to time. And by offering real-time insights into fleet movement, predictive analytics-enabled dashboards can help reduce turn arounds and facilitate excellent scheduling.
Citizen services
Smart citizens now demand smart services and are always averse to wasting their important time. May it be getting connected with a government contact centre or applying for an ID over a web portal, citizens now desire to have a hassle-free experience. In fact, an insight by Accenture shows that as high as 85% of citizens now expect public digital services to match those provided by commercial organizations.
The most common application of AI in citizen services happens to be that of conversational AI. The two-fold benefit they offer – uninterrupted support and feedback collection – while helping overcome the pitfalls of traditional support systems also minimizes customer interaction time. In US states like Mississippi, conversational AI is helping citizens with information on taxation and vehicle registration, optimizing the overall departmental efforts. Overall, this minimizes the use of public funds and helps create a favourable public opinion.
Public healthcare
In densely populated countries, where a majority of the population relies on public healthcare institutions, artificial intelligence (AI) can help create an ideal medical and healthcare system. AI-based automation and decision analytics can allow public healthcare authorities to invest the right efforts for erecting a robust ecosystem that offers excellent patient care.
To give an example, chatbots can reduce the pressure of patient registration by offering online counseling to patients with mild health conditions and help them rightly schedule their appointments. With the help of advanced analytics, healthcare staffers can always have important patient insights at their fingertips, significantly optimizing the treatment procedures. Similarly, computer vision-enabled medical imaging can allow radiologists to quickly arrive at logical conclusions.
Crime Management
The state of Punjab in India has its police department equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) enabled facial recognition system that offers features like face search and text search amongst others. Initially built on a record of nearly 100 hundred criminals, the mechanism leverages facial recognition and assists police staff to fast reach the culprit.
Through real-time insights, AI can help detect if an individual will commit a crime and thereby creates a scope for police to nab the individual in time. Similarly, real-time analytics can allow police to track and monitor high-crime zones and enable them to develop strategies for mitigating crime rates in such areas.
Conclusion
AI offers tremendous avenues to revolutionizing public machinery by removing common age-old hurdles. The domain is continuously evolving and when it will reach its maturity, it will bring not just a technological but a procedural revolution.
As public authorities across the world try to achieve operational excellence, they must be keen to shake their conservative stance on adopting AI. Indeed, AI implementation is the next game-changer for public sector organizations that are looking to surge ahead in terms of achieving profitable gains as well as trying to better their CX strategies.
How AIML Community can help?
AIML community is a vast network of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science professionals. If you are a public sector stakeholder looking to avail AI solutions or if you are an AI solutions provider catering to the needs of public sectors, then AIML Community is a one-stop platform for you to connect with the right audience.
References
https://deepomatic.com/en/benefits-of-ai-in-the-public-transport-industry
https://www.aitimejournal.com/@recogni/autonomous-vehicles-and-public-transportation
https://blogs.opentext.com/how-ai-is-helping-to-rethink-citizen-services
https://www.ey.com/en_gl/government-public-sector/why-ai-and-the-public-sector-are-a-winning-formula
https://analyticsindiamag.com/5-ways-ai-is-used-by-lawmakers-for-crime-prevention-in-india/
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