UK Government Unveils 'Humphrey' AI Assistant to Streamline Civil Service Operations

UK government workers soon to be supported by AI named after a sitcom

Humphrey will be looking to enhance the speed that civil workers do their job. AI is taking over the world. We all know it. The latest instance of the technology creeping into our daily lives comes in the form of a new service being offered to UK government workers, a tool that aims to improve the speed they work at. Pretty typical stuff, right? Yep, except that this AI is named after a sitcom character who is described as "devious". The tool is going by the name of Humphrey, with the name chosen to reflect the character of Sir Humphrey Appleby from the show Yes, Minister. Appleby is regarded as a scheming official, basically serving as the stereotypical Parliament worker, which is why it's ironic that he was chosen as the naming inspiration for the AI that the government (as per the BBC) claims will reduce spending that would otherwise be used on consultants and also "speed up the work of civil servants". The irony of the name and the purpose of the AI has been an issue that COO of the UK's AI trade body UKAI has commented on, with Tim Flagg adding that it could "undermine" the tech being embraced by the government. Regardless of this worry, the AI is on its way, meaning the government might just be a little more productive going forward...

Yes, Minister character is government's new AI assistant

Government workers will soon be given access to a set of tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI), named after a scheming parliamentary official from the classic sitcom Yes, Minister. The government says the assistants - called Humphrey - will "speed up the work of civil servants" and save money by replacing cash that would have been spent on consultants. But the decision to name the AI after Sir Humphrey Appleby, a character described as "devious and controlling", has raised eyebrows. Tim Flagg, chief operating officer of trade body UKAI, said the name risks "undermining" the government's mission to embrace the tech. Science and technology secretary Peter Kyle will announce more digital tools later on Tuesday, including two apps which will store government documents, including digital driving licenses. The announcement is part of the government's overhaul of digital services and comes after their AI Opportunities Action Plan announced last week. "Humphrey for me is a name which is very associated with the Machiavellian character from Yes, Minister," says Mr Flagg from UKAI, which represents the AI sector. "That immediately makes people who aren't in that central Whitehall office think that this is something which is not going to be empowering and not going to be helping them." Most of the tools in the Humphrey suite are generative AI models - in this case, technology which takes large amounts of information and summarises it in a more digestible format - to be used by the civil service. Among them is Consult, which summarises people's responses to public calls for information. The government says this is currently done by expensive external consultants who bill the taxpayer "around £100,000 every time." Parlex, which the government says helps policymakers search through previous parliamentary debates on a certain topic, is described by The Times as "designed to avoid catastrophic political rows by predicting how MPs will respond". Other changes announced include more efficient data sharing between departments. "I think the government is doing the right thing," says Mr Flagg. "They do have some good developers - I have every confidence they are going to be creating a great product."

A British Sitcom Character is Now the UK Government's AI Assistant

The department for science, innovation and technology of the government of the United Kingdom has announced a new package of AI tools to streamline public services and eliminate delays. The AI suite of tools will be named after Sir Humphrey Appleby, a character on British television series 'Yes, Minister'. The Humphrey package of AI tools will be available to civil servants in an effort to modernise tech and deliver better public services. Consult, one of the many tools in the package, is said to analyse "thousands of responses" received by government consultation, and is then presented to policymakers to help understand what the public is saying. The government has also revealed that work like this is performed by external consultants who bill the taxpayer "around £100,000 every time". Other tools include Parlex, which helps policymakers analyse decades of debate from the Houses of Parliament for the betterment of decision-making skills. Another tool called Minute offers AI-enabled transcription service for meetings, along with summaries. Similarly, Redbox helps civil servants with day-to-day tasks, and Lex helps officials efficiently research the law. However, questions on whether the government is trivialising the matter has come to fore. As per BBC, Tim Flagg, COO of UKAI (UK AI), said that the name Humphrey risks undermining the government's mission to implement AI. Notably, the character Sir Humphrey is often regarded as a "master of obfuscation and manipulation". "That immediately makes people who aren't in that central Whitehall office think that this is something which is not going to be empowering and not going to be helping them," Flagg said. Last week, the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced an 'AI Opportunities Action Plan' to create over 13,000 jobs and modernise critical infrastructure to support AI growth. This is said to leverage £14 billion in private investment commitments from companies like Vantage Data Centres, Nscale, and Kyndryl. The government also said that it will increase the compute capacity twentyfold by 2030, with the construction of a new supercomputer capable of processing AI tasks at an unprecedented pace. That said, the UK joins a list of governments that have been using AI for public services. This includes countries like India, Brazil, Italy, Estonia and Finland, among others. In September last year, Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla announced the use of AI to improve the accessibility of parliamentary proceedings in the Indian parliament. The initiative planned to digitise over 18,00 hours of proceedings footage dating back to 1992. Notably, many governments deployed AI assistants well before it became popular. For instance, back in 2019, Singapore deployed an AI assistant called 'Ask Jamie' across 70 of its government agencies. In 2023, the country also introduced a project called Virtual Intelligent Chat Assistant (VICA) project, an AI-enabled citizen assistant platform. In 2020, New Zealand developed SAM, an AI chatbot that engages with citizens on political issues and understand feedback. In 2023, the Romanian government unveiled an AI advisor called Ion to analyse the opinions of the country's citizens.

'Humphrey' AI assistant to be introduced to slash UK public sector red tape

Artificial intelligence will help save £45 billion in lost productivity every year In an effort to improve efficiency across its department and the public sector, the UK Government has shared details of its upcoming Humphrey assistant. The Department of Science, Innovation and Technology confirmed in a press release that Humphrey - named after a character in the 'Yes, Minister' TV series of the 1980s - will help cut back on consultant spending. More broadly, Humphrey forms part of the government's efforts to make the UK a leading AI nation and tackles outdated systems like telephone calls and written letters that plague HMRC and DVLA systems. All in, the Technology Secretary wants to claw back £45 billion in productivity savings every year. The deployment of its artificial intelligence systems promises to reduce inefficiencies across the NHS, automate processes for the DVLA and enhance data-sharing between departments to improve services. Science Secretary Peter Kyle said: "My department will put AI to work, speeding up our ability to deliver our Plan for Change, improve lives and drive growth." Kyle added: "We will use technology to bear down hard to the nonsensical approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves." Key to Humphrey's offerings are Consult, which summarizes consultation responses quickly; Parlex, for searching and analyzing parliamentary debates; meeting transcription tool Minute; policy summarization and briefing preparation tool Redbox; and Lex, a system for researching and analyzing laws. In other news, public sector organizations must also publish their APIs in order to facilitate the sharing of data. The government also wants to explore public sector pay and rewards to make working there more competitive compared with the private sector. Kyle concluded: "Sluggish technology has hampered our public services for too long, and it's costing us all a fortune in time and money."

UK to unveil 'Humphrey' assistant for civil servants with other AI plans to cut bureaucracy

A week after the U.K. government announced a sweeping plan to make big investments into AI, it's laying out more details around how this will take shape in the public sector. On the agenda: AI assistants to speed up public services; data sharing deals across siloed departments; and a new set of AI tools -- dubbed "Humphrey" after a character on an old U.K. TV political sitcom -- to speed up the work of civil servants. The plans will be formally unveiled at a press conference Tuesday headed up by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), along with two other departments, Work and Pensions and Health/Social Care. If you navigate to the U.K. government's AI site to check out the progress of some of the projects, you'll see that most of the efforts so far appear to be in very early stages, either in limited trials or a testing phase; others are even more nascent. For example, a plan to bring more AI services into the customer-facing side of the NHS are only at the stage of a "charter" committing to the concept. Some include links to Github repositories to check out some of the work to date. It's not clear how many people in total are working on these projects, nor what third-party tools (such as LLMs) are being used. (We have asked these questions and will update when we learn more.) At their heart, the projects are all about efficiency. The government, DSIT said, currently spends some £23 billion annually on technology, and the idea will be to redeploy that money in a more modern way. "Sluggish technology has hampered our public services for too long, and it's costing us all a fortune in time and money... Not to mention the headaches and stresses we're left with after being put on hold or forced to take a trip to fill out a form," said Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for DSIT, in a statement. "My Department will put AI to work... We will use technology to bear down hard to the nonsensical approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves." The plans include a new team within DSIT to head the projects, a little like DOGE in the U.S. but conceived of and run by government people rather than tech moguls. DSIT is honing in on three areas initially: 1. The work of government employees. Humphrey, named after the wry, clever assistant played by the late Nigel Hawthorne in "Yes, Minister" and then "Yes, Prime Minister," is a set of apps aimed at reducing the typical daily workload of civil servants, specifically around the vast amount of data that they are required to read and process as part of their work. "Consult" is designed to read and summarise "thousands" of responses to consultations in hours (responses, which can be lengthy and numerous, are a central part of how the government takes feedback from stakeholders and the public into account). "Parlex" will let them query and read conversations in Parliament relevant to bills or other policy documents they are working on. "Minute" is a secure transcription service to take notes from their many hours of meetings. "Redbox" helps them prepare briefings and policy documents. And "Lex" lets them consult relevant legal data. 2. Another strand of the efficiency push will be around speeding up public-facing services. The idea here is to take aim at legacy bureaucracy, of which there is a lot in the U.K., such as the 100,000 calls that the tax authorities get daily, or the need for people to appear in person to register a death, or (bizarrely) posting ads in local papers as part of the process of getting a license to drive a truck. DSIT's thinking is that overhauling processes like these with more AI-fuelled automation could save £45 billion annually. (It's not clear if that estimate is before or after deducting the cost of building and running the AI services.) 3. A final area will be focused on more collaboration between departments in aid of sharing data to speed up how services are procured, and then how they work. Taken together, the various projects are a signal that the government does seem to mean business on their new AI push. But they also raise a number of questions. For example, in the case of data sharing, DSIT for now says that the operating idea here will be "a common-sense approach to sharing information." Central government departments, like HMRC (revenue and customs) and the Department for Business and Trade, could for example share data with each other and local councils in fraud investigations, or to better understand how businesses are doing and what programs might help them. But what happens to data protection for individuals when data is shared in ways that you might not have intended for it to be? Another possible question is around Humphrey: right now, DSIT said that some of the early apps are in testing phases only, but the big question will be, how far will the government go in trusting some of the AI's conclusions? There will also be more human challenges. As one former civil servant (who now works for an AI company) notes, past efforts to create programs that cut across departments have not always worked. Collaboration, money and authority are ultimately the levers that will make or break any of these plans.

UK aims to fix government IT with help from AI Humphrey

Ring a bell? Suite of tools named after Yes Minister's master of manipulation The UK government is striving to end its checkered record in managing large-scale projects with a "plan to put technology to work across public services." The plan will see a newly created team within the Department for Science, Technology & Innovation work across central government departments to "join up public services" to avoid citizens telling dozens of public sector bodies the same information. At the same time, the government intends to introduce a training program to help civil service technologists become "AI engineers." It also promises a new package of AI tools it nicknames Humphrey, in homage to the classic British satirical TV comedy Yes Minister, through which fictional civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby became a byword for the art of obfuscation, manipulation, and filibustering. The proposal follows a review of government IT, which claimed dire government systems meant that tax collector HMRC received 100,000 calls a day, while the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency processed 45,000 letters daily. The subsequent report, set to be published today, claims that publicly funded services including the NHS, local councils, and central government are missing out on a potential £45 billion ($55 billion) in productivity savings through old or poor use of technology. In a prepared statement, science secretary Peter Kyle said the government's application of technology had hampered public services for too long. "We will use technology to bear down hard on the nonsensical approach the public sector takes to sharing information and working together to help the people it serves," he said. "We will also end delays businesses face when they are applying for licenses or permits, when they just want to get on with the task in hand - growth. This is just the start." The government is publishing what it calls a "blueprint for a modern digital government." It aims to show how the administration can also overhaul how it delivers digital services and spends £23 billion ($28 billion) a year on technology. It starts with a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence. This will aim to help public sector organizations negotiate costly contracts together to save money, and open opportunities for smaller UK startups and scale-ups to drive economic growth and create jobs as part of the Prime Minister's Plan for Change. The civil servant Humphry AI package promises several products that are ready to roll out. For example, the "Consult" tool analyses "the thousands of responses any government consultation might receive in hours, before presenting policy makers and experts with interactive dashboards to explore what the public are saying directly," the government said. Currently, this process is outsourced to consultants and analysts who can take months to consolidate responses, before billing the taxpayer around £100,000 each time, it said. Other tools include search, minute-taking, and task management. However, to reach its goals, the latest initiative must overcome the public sector's track record in delivering modernization programs, which spending watchdog the National Audit Office said last week has accumulated at least 29 years in delays and more than £3 billion in cost increases. Previous research found that nearly half of the £4.7bn government spent on IT in 2019 was dedicated to "keeping the lights on" activity on "outdated systems". There is ample reason to question whether the government will succeed this time. But as Sir Humphrey once quipped: "I don't think we need to bring the truth in at this stage." ®