Governments should look for the best solution to a specific problem, not view AI as the answer to everything. That’s one of the main lessons shared by Dr Laura Gilbert CBE, previously Director of the Incubator for AI at No 10 Downing Street. Laura tells Sheena Thompson, Government and Infrastructure AI Co-leader, how the Incubator built trust through “competency and intent”. That meant sharing code, evaluations and failures, along with use cases to show it was acting in citizens’ best interests.

The conversation also covers the ethical implications of LLMs that are trained on data informed by local cultural norms. And Laura shares her aim of using AI to make the experience of government more human.

This is the fourth episode of AI Pioneers, a miniseries featuring speakers from pioneering government organizations identified in EY’s data and AI reports. Listen in for practical lessons from peers who have successfully moved from ambition to impact – scaling AI to transform their organizations and how they serve citizens. 20 mins

At the South African Revenue Service (SARS), AI-powered fraud and risk detection have stopped 100 billion rand in impermissible refunds and recovered 20 billion rand in revenue by dismantling illicit schemes. SARS also uses third-party data to auto-assess almost six million personal income tax returns, with a 99% acceptance rate.

Carl Scholtz, Deputy Commissioner, Strategy Enablement and Modernisation at SARS, tells Thomas Erwin, EY Global Government and Infrastructure Co-leader, how his organization designs digital services so that “tax just happens”. It also combines experimentation with world-leading governance and an ethical-by-design approach – for example, testing AI bot responses for relevance rather than deterministic consistency. The North Star: making sure taxpayers and employees have a great experience.

This is the third episode of AI Pioneers, a miniseries featuring speakers from pioneering government organizations identified in EY’s data and AI reports. Listen in for practical lessons from peers who have successfully moved from ambition to impact – scaling AI to transform their organizations and how they serve citizens. 26 mins

For Shen Hwee Chua, Chief Data Officer at the Energy Market Authority in Singapore, the biggest hurdle to implementing a GenAI productivity tool has been human resistance.

As she tells Thomas Erwin, EY Global Government and Infrastructure AI Co-leader, hosting the organization’s GenAI platform on a government-approved cloud was key, as was democratizing access and skills. Codesigning the tool with important stakeholders and continually gathering their feedback gained buy-in. And automating the process of making documents machine-readable saved many hours of manual effort.

In future, Shen Hwee believes AI technologies will not only make governments more efficient but also allow them to collaborate more dynamically – across departments, agencies and borders.

This is the second episode of AI Pioneers, a miniseries featuring speakers from pioneering government organizations identified in EY’s data and AI reports. Listen in for practical lessons from peers who have successfully moved from ambition to impact – scaling AI to transform their organizations and how they serve citizens. 16 mins