The Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Enhancing Access to Public Services for All
Governments always seek to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their socio-economic circumstances or geographical location, have equal opportunities to benefit from public services. This goal is known as inclusive governance. To achieve this, governments are constantly developing the public sector through the use of advanced technologies such as generative artificial intelligence . Its use in many countries has enhanced how citizens interact with government services and improved access to them.
In this article, we will explain the role of artificial intelligence in promoting comprehensive governance goals.
Generative AI and Accessibility Improvement:
Generative AI facilitates access to public services by reducing barriers for marginalized groups such as people with special needs. Generative AI helps address such issues in several ways, most notably: chatbots and virtual assistants to provide ongoing support to citizens. For example, the German city of Heidelberg introduced a chatbot called Lumi to help citizens and visitors quickly get answers to various inquiries. Lumi uses publicly available city data and improves its performance over time based on user interactions.
On the other hand, translation tools powered by generative AI help remove language barriers, enabling anyone who speaks a foreign language to access important information and services in their own language. For example, the cities of Stockton and Fairfield in California have introduced a translation tool that residents can use via mobile phones or the web, allowing them to communicate with local governments in up to 71 different languages.
In India, the Jugalbandi project uses AI-powered chatbots on WhatsApp and Telegram to help rural residents access government services in their own dialects. These bots can respond with text and speech, and currently support 10 languages and cover 171 government programs.
On the other hand, the US Department of Justice has issued guidelines requiring state and local governments to ensure that their websites and mobile apps are accessible, and organizations are responding by developing AI-powered screen readers such as VoiceOver for iOS and TalkBack for Android, allowing visually impaired individuals to navigate government websites and access information independently.
Generative AI and holistic decision making:
Generative AI helps the public sector make inclusive decisions. Inclusive decisions are those that are fair and unbiased on the basis of religion, race, social or economic status. A prominent example of such decision-making in the public sector is the increasing use of automated recruitment processes powered by generative AI. This process involves screening resumes and applications in a way that minimizes human bias, by hiding personal details and focusing only on the qualifications and experience required for the vacancy, i.e. evaluating all candidates based on their merit alone.
For example: The UK Civil Service uses AI to filter applications and assess diversity, making the hiring process fairer.
Generative AI and Enhancing Citizen Engagement:
In addition to improving accessibility, generative AI helps enhance engagement with citizens. When citizens call to inquire, human employees often struggle to quickly find the required data, which can sometimes fall short of citizens’ expectations.
This is where AI-powered virtual assistants come in to address these challenges by providing personalized responses to citizens’ queries. For example, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) of the Department of Homeland Security has developed a chatbot called EMMA , which helps users with a range of services, including immigration, green cards, and passports, and supports both English and Spanish.
The Australian government also uses a chatbot called Alex to help individuals and businesses deal with tax-related matters, such as property rights, income, deductions, and filing tax returns. The bot efficiently directs users to the desired content, saving time and improving the overall user experience.
How can we ensure the responsible use of generative AI in the public sector?
Generative AI must be used responsibly in the public sector to ensure that all citizens benefit from it fairly. To achieve this, public sector institutions seek to formulate policies that address these challenges. These policies are based on a set of key principles, such as:
Transparency and interpretability:
Generative AI systems must be designed to operate transparently, meaning that they should be able to provide clear explanations of how decisions are made, and that their operations should be understandable to non-experts. This in turn helps build trust and allows citizens to understand how and why decisions are made.
Ensuring fairness and impartiality:
Generative AI systems can inadvertently maintain or amplify biases already present in the data they are trained on, and to address this problem, AI models must be regularly evaluated for potential biases and corrective measures taken to address any existing issues.
Prioritize data privacy and security:
One of the main challenges of using AI in the public sector is ensuring the security of sensitive data, so strict security measures must be taken to use generative AI effectively.
Promoting accountability:
Accountability is an important aspect of using AI to enhance overall governance, and this includes establishing independent bodies or committees to monitor the deployment and impacts of AI systems, and obtaining feedback from the public to ensure that necessary adjustments and improvements are made.
Conclusion:
The examples we mentioned in the article about the ways in which governments in different countries around the world are using generative artificial intelligence in public sector services indicate that we will witness broad developments in the future in how government transactions are conducted that usually take a lot of time and effort from employees and citizens.
These services will also become easily available to people with special needs in different countries around the world as all governments adopt automation programs, accessibility features, and virtual assistants on government services websites.