Using AI to Improve Constituent Experience
- By CDOTrends editors
- December 21, 2022
Government processes can often be slow and tedious, but artificial intelligence (AI) is helping to speed up the process. AI technologies are already being used in government operations to automate mundane tasks, enhance decision-making, improve security and optimize public services.
Document AI, a Google-developed platform, enables state, local and federal agencies to accelerate the time to delivery of critical services by decreasing the manual labor needed to process documents.
Document AI assists government workers by automatically extracting content from unstructured and handwritten documents and keying data into their existing system of record. This includes documents such as driver’s licenses, passports, taxes, or text in over 200 languages. The solution aims to address the unique challenges public sector agencies and their employees face.
"You need technology that can scale up easily and continue to be fast. The system now routinely handles 25,000 or more [documents] per day," Doug Murdock, chief information officer at the office of enterprise technology services for the State of Hawaii, said about Document AI, which they used to extract travel and health information from visitors to reopen to tourism safely.
Document AI for government includes pre-built document models for many widely used government document types. Google Cloud also offers Document AI Workbench, which enables government agencies to create custom document models that will extract fields from any document, image and form to accelerate and streamline almost any workflow that requires heavy document processing.
Government agencies can also use Document AI Accelerator, a lightweight workflow tool, to manage the flow of incoming applications by identifying and classifying documents, matching documents to a single constituent, and proactively reaching out if there is missing or inaccurate information.
Every year, government agencies are responsible for distributing services and benefits that require processing billions of documents, images and forms. These documents are often expected to be manually transcribed into an electronic system error-free by a government employee to support time-sensitive tasks such as application intake, verification, enrollment, vendor management, and procurement.
While agencies want to process these documents quickly to support their citizens, they’re often challenged with most applications requiring a variety of custom forms and verification documents (e.g., tax forms and utility bills) and received at different times and in other formats (paper, images, etc.), making it difficult to track and match documents to a single applicant.
Additionally, handwritten entries and those in multiple languages add to the challenges of understanding and entering data quickly. Document processing is also labor intensive when scanning, reading, data entry, indexing, and matching are all done manually
With AI solutions like Google Cloud’s, government agencies can now improve the speed and accuracy of their processes while also improving the constituent experience, serving as an effective solution for any government agency looking to modernize its processes.
Image credit: iStockphoto/dusanpetkovic