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.