The Consult AI tool government has built to analyse consultation responses is already popular enough to need a waitlist. Even artificial intelligence must first master the ancient civil service skill of waiting for an email.
Consult comes from the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence. It identifies themes across large volumes of public consultation responses. It also maps each response to those themes.
The aim is to free analysts to focus on insight rather than categorisation. That sounds promising, provided the insight can first pass through several rooms of people waiting for access.
The Consult AI tool government queue gets its own queue
Demand currently exceeds capacity. Access is managed through a waitlist before a planned full cross government rollout in 2027.
Departments can register their interest even without a consultation planned. This lets them secure a place in the queue before discovering what they wanted to ask.
The application takes no more than five minutes. The wait afterwards has no confirmed timetable for individual departments. That gives everyone something to discuss while the software analyses the pile of discussions waiting to be analysed.
A fictional civil servant from the Office of Nearly Available Technology said the department was delighted to join the waitlist. “We have spent years asking the public what they think. Now we can ask a machine to identify the themes we filed under miscellaneous.”
The Consult AI tool government plan is not an automated decision maker. It sorts responses and leaves analysts to consider what those responses mean.
The machine is not replacing the committee. It is helping the committee produce a more legible explanation for why it needs another committee.
A sensible tool meets a magnificent delay
There is a genuine administrative problem here. Large consultations can generate more responses than a team can comfortably classify by hand.
A system that spots recurring themes could make that work faster. It could give officials more time for interpretation, judgement and the delicate business of explaining why the popular option is not quite feasible.
For now, Consult offers a small lesson in government technology. The tool can process thousands of public contributions. Its users submit one form and wait to be processed themselves.
By 2027, Consult may be ready to analyse every opinion in the country, provided the country remembers its department, role type and government email address.
The queue has finally become intelligent. It still wants to see some identification.
Source: GOV.UK.
