The Workforce Impact of AI in Government
Use of intelligent automation can lead to a surge in
employee development but leadership must establish and reinforce the
expectation that automation will augment the workforce. Augmenting the
workforce will enable employees to spend more time on strategic initiatives
instead of mundane tasks. IA can allow for more opportunities for employees to
deliver tangible value.
However, AI technology can bring both optimism and anxiety
to the workplace. The process of reducing, or even eliminating, drudge work
such as inputting and processing is one reason why managers are enthusiastic
about new applications based on artificial intelligence.
With this, staff resources can be freed up to do other, more
important work, with people having time to focus on creative projects and deal
directly with clients and customers. However, this new labor and cost saving
technology can make everyone be on their toes – worrying that it will wipe out
categories of employment. Cognitive technologies are increasingly capable of
carrying out tasks once reserved for knowledge workers.
Technology, from farm equipment to factory robotics, has
always displaced low-skilled workers but it’s not until recently that it’s
threatened white-collar professionals. For the first time, knowledge workers
whose jobs once seemed secure are feeling endangered.
Conversations with government executives suggest that most
lack a clear vision of how AI applications might affect their staff and
missions. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics optimistically predicts the
government workforces will see almost no job losses between now and 2024. On
the other hand, a recent study by Deloitte-UL and Oxford University suggests
that up to 18% of UK public-sector jobs could be automated by 2030.
The key to planning ahead for
IA is to understand how much time cognitive technologies could save. Based on
Deloitte research, a new method of studying AI-based technology’s effects on
government workforces indicated that cognitive technologies could free up large
numbers of labor hours by automating certain tasks and allowing managers to
shift employees’ tasks to requiring human judgment.
Intelligent automation could save hundreds of millions of
staff hours and billions of dollars annually. It could free up to 30% of the
government workforce’s time within five to seven years and minimal investment
in AI would result in savings of just 2% to 4% of total labor time.
Most existing quantitative models rely on occupations as the
unit of analysis. This begins by tallying workers by occupation and predicting
which jobs will be replaced by technology.
Technology often substitutes for specific tasks, while
workers who previously performed them shift to jobs complementary to the new
technology. Recent history should that this has also been true for government
work. Deloitte has developed a new methodology for measuring the amount of time
government workers spend on the tasks that fill up their work days.
Deloitte estimates that the two workforces collectively work
4.3 billion (federal) and 108 million (state government) hours a year. Deloitte
grouped the tasks they perform into “generalized work activities” using the US
department of Labor’s activity framework. For both federal and state workers,
by far the most time-consuming activity is documenting and recording
information – a task capturing 10% of both federal and state government work
hours.
Learn the latest
information on Process Automation in Government at our event held in Washington
D.C. on May 29th. Access the
agenda: http://bit.ly/2SZHAnB