Civil Service: Artificial Intelligence
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, with reference to the Answer of 30 July 2024 to Question 920, on Civil Service: Artificial Intelligence, what trials have taken place on AI and public service productivity.
Answered by Ian Murray
The Government has delivered a range of trials on AI and public service productivity. The Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) tested Consult, a tool to analyse consultation responses, on seven live consultations during 2025, saving around 8,000 hours of administrative time and over £250,000. Other examples include the Ministry of Justice's Justice Transcribe tool, which reduced note-taking time for probation officers by 75 per cent. The Government also conducted a cross-government pilot involving 20,000 civil servants using Microsoft Copilot, which found average time savings of 26 minutes per person per day. Trials of AI coding assistants found that public sector engineers reported average time savings of 56 minutes per day.
Early estimates suggest that AI is more likely to augment than replace many public sector roles. This is supported by Department for Education analysis which suggests that 10–30 per cent of UK jobs are highly automatable over two decades, but that net employment effects remain uncertain, with many roles more likely to be enhanced by AI than replaced.
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