A new AI tool, called ‘Consult’, was used on a live consultation by the Scottish Government for the first time.

Consult is part of the suite of AI tools created by the UK government under the umbrella name ‘Humphrey’ designed to speed up the work of civil servants and cut back time spend on admin and money spent on contractors.

The tool was used on a Scottish Government consultation seeking views on how to regulate non-surgical cosmetic procedures – like lip fillers and laser hair removal – as use of the treatments has risen.

Reviewing comments from over 2,000 consultation responses using generative AI, Consult identified key themes across six qualitative questions.

As this was the first time Consult was used on a live consultation, experts at the Scottish Government manually reviewed every response too. Identifying what an individual response is saying, and putting it in a ‘theme’ is subjective, as humans don’t always agree.

Consult was found to agree with the human reviewer over the majority of the themes, and any differences in their results were found to be negligible.

Consult and the Humphrey AI tool bundle forms part of the UK government’s plan to make better use of technology across public services, in a bid to target the £45 billion in productivity savings that it offers.

“Using the tool was very beneficial in helping the Scottish Government understand more quickly what people wanted us to hear and our respondents’ range of views,” the Scottish Government’s public health minister Jenni Minto said.

“Officials were reassured through the process that the AI was doing a good job, supporting us to undertake the analysis that will inform our next steps.

“Using this tool has allowed the Scottish Government to move more quickly to a focus on the policy questions and dive into the detail of the evidence we’ve been presented with, while remaining confident that we have heard the strong views expressed by respondents.”

While these early results were promising, Consult is still currently in trial, and is due for more evaluation covering the accuracy and efficiency of the tool to ensure it is working properly ahead of final rollout decisions.

Across the 500 consultations the government runs annually, the tool could help save officials from around 75,000 days of analysis every year, which costs the government £20 million in staffing costs.

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Officials who worked with Consult from the Scottish Government on this first live test commented that they were “pleasantly surprised” that AI analysis provided a “useful starting point” in its initial analysis, with others noting that it ultimately “saved [them] a heck of a lot of time” and allowed them to “get to the analysis and draw out what’s needed next”.

They also added that the use of Consult “takes away the bias and makes it more consistent”, by removing opportunities for individual analysts to “project their own preconceived ideas”.

“No one should be wasting time on something AI can do quicker and better, let alone wasting millions of taxpayer pounds on outsourcing such work to contractors,” technology secretary Peter Kyle said.

“After demonstrating such promising results, Humphrey will help us cut the costs of governing and make it easier to collect and comprehensively review what experts and the public are telling us on a range of crucial issues.

“The Scottish Government has taken a bold first step. Very soon, I’ll be using Consult, within Humphrey, in my own department and others in Whitehall will be using it too – speeding up our work to deliver the Plan for Change.”

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