In 2018, IBM published a report about the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the public sector titled, “The Future Has Begun.” Today, the report would be titled, “The Future is Here.”
- In the report, 77% of federal managers said their agencies will need to use AI over the next five years to keep up with the increasing pace of work. Two years later, the world was rocked by a pandemic that completely altered how work is done within the public sector.
- The report estimated that AI could save governments up to $41B+ annually. Since then, new advancements in AI like Generative AI (GenAI) have emerged with the potential to save governments up to $1.8T annually.
AI is being rapidly embraced by governments and has plenty of supporters on Capitol Hill. The Pentagon requested $1.8B for AI-related efforts in fiscal 2024, an increase from $1.1B in 2023 and $874M in 2022. The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) continues to take more of an AI-enabled approach, most recently publishing a GenAI acquisition resource guide for federal buyers to “responsibly and effectively deploy [GenAI] technologies to benefit the American people.” Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration announced the first-ever consortium dedicated to AI safety, further cementing the impact of AI on the public sector.
The contact center: The no. 1 source of AI-enabled cost and efficiency savings
AI is revolutionizing contact centers in the public sector by enhancing efficiency and enabling more personalized interactions with citizens. By leveraging AI, agencies can analyze larger volumes of inquiries in real-time, ensuring quick and accurate responses that meet the ever-evolving expectations of the public sector.
Here are just a few ways the industry is moving forward with AI in the contact center for demonstratable business performance outcomes:
GenAI across 40 department programs: In 2023, as a part of solicitations seeking innovative ways to use GenAI, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) said GenAI would help its administration of more than 40 tax and fee programs better respond to 800,000 taxpayer inquiries each year. By crunching vast amounts of reference materials, GenAI would enable them to respond to taxpayers faster via phone and live chat.
A 23% increase in calls handled: In 2021, the City of San Jose, California deployed virtual, conversational agents in its 311 call centers to assist citizens faster and speed up response times. With AI, the center went from handling 165,000 service tickets annually to 215,000. It’s worth noting that Gartner also estimates the implementation of Conversational AI will reduce agent labor costs by $80B by 2026.
2,500+ hours saved in patient wait time: To demonstrate the value of AI in healthcare, a winning project of the MIT Hacking Medicine Brazil competition was implemented in an urgent care service for healthcare professionals at a São Paulo-based hospital during the pandemic. AI was able to automate 92% of medical care registrations and the wait time for medical care dropped by 12 minutes, creating a total time savings of 2,508 hours annually.
These outcomes are amplified when you consider the turbulent state of the public sector’s workforce. Just 8% of the current U.S. federal workforce is under the age of 30, and the number of federal retirees doubled during the pandemic. AI can be a lynchpin of agency success by filling these vacancies while simultaneously driving efficiency, saving money, and improving quality of service.
Clearing the hurdles of AI in public sector contact centers
We would see AI in every government agency today if it weren’t for two big challenges: security and budget.
Security is without question the No. 1 barrier to AI adoption in public sector contact centers. Think about your own sensitive, personally identifiable information. For me, I think about the time my wife and I bought a car for our son when he went off to college.
We didn’t realize that where his college was located, there was a property tax on vehicles. The car was in my name, and suddenly I was getting hit by a wave of charges related to the car. I logged into my online portal and the first form of authentication requested was a verification of my Social Security Number. As you can imagine, I wasn’t comfortable just handing this out – let alone typing it into an online platform.
Personal information like this must be guarded, maintained, and secured at all costs. Imagine the responsibility of securing this information for thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, etc. people, plus so much more. That’s the pressure government agencies face.
Other security-related issues include the fact that not all agencies share their data internally and every agency has different security protocols and practices. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t have the same security needs as the FBI. There’s no standardization, which means agencies need to be able to customize security within their AI implementations.
This creates an entirely new challenge regarding a lack of proficiency. There’s a select number of people who understand how to set up this customization and bear the responsibility of continuously monitoring and maintaining it. A positive look at the retirement boom in the federal space is that it freed up funds that can be reallocated for investments with demonstrated AI partners who can expertly handle these aspects of AI operations.
This segues nicely to the second challenge of AI adoption: funds. AI is being embraced across the board – as the Pentagon’s year-over-year budget increase wishes – but government funding isn’t awarded as easily as it used to be. Some agencies will take creative pathways to secure necessary funding, while others are hopeful that AI spending will be shielded from future cuts. For example, lawmakers who are convinced of the technology’s potential are advocating for the Defense Department’s AI spending, even as they look to trim spend elsewhere.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially as solution providers like Avaya offer the ability to implement AI over the top of existing architecture in lieu of rip-and-replace strategies – changing the game entirely in terms of cost and system disruption.
The future of AI in public sector contact centers
The future undoubtedly points to cloud. Right now, it’s estimated that roughly 20% of government systems are on the cloud. In 5-10 years, it’s expected this number will double or even triple. There will always be groups that can’t maintain their security posture in the cloud – otherwise, we are going to see a huge shift to cloud to meet evolving user and business needs. Most agencies simply don’t have the funding or manpower to continue operating on-premises. It’s also worth noting that some EIS contracts can’t be bid on if you are not already in the cloud, which only accelerates this push.
As digitization continues to explode and the contact center grows as the mecca of business and customer experience, the need to innovate without disruption is paramount. Avaya’s innovation without disruption approach is a revolutionary method unlike anything ever done, nor anything other vendors are doing today.
Our hyper-flexible cloud-based platform, Avaya Experience Platform™, acts as an integrator of innovation, enabling us to work with agencies of any kind – regardless of what infrastructure they have in place – and leverage their existing investment to add new AI capabilities while maintaining their security posture. A lot of competitors will say “either, or.” The fact that Avaya does both makes all the difference in the world.
