3 key ways AI can help drive human-centered government

Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) may seem counterintuitive to a “human-centered” strategy, but future-focused leaders have figured out how to leverage AI to design human-centered government services, at scale, and they’re reaping the benefits.

Every single time someone contacts their government, they leave a trail of data about their experience. Maybe they visited a website but couldn’t find the answer they needed. Perhaps they resorted to a phone call, just to be told they had to come in person. Every single one of these interactions generates data that could be useful for government leaders who are trying to improve their customers’ experiences. But most of the time, useful insights get lost in a sea of overwhelming data – stuck with the frontline agent who took the call or the website team who analyzed a sample of website traffic.

Like many industries, local, state, and federal governments are increasingly turning to AI as a pivotal tool for enhancing efficiency and reducing costs. But one of the most powerful applications of AI in government is helping them to better understand the people they serve.

At Qualtrics, our mission is to collaborate with government entities to leverage AI as a strategic ally to build more responsive and personalized public service. In short, we help governments across the world answer this question: How can we make government more human? And, ironically, AI stands at the center of a modern, human-centric approach to government.

Governments possess a wealth of data, full of invaluable insights for improving programs, policies, and services. Consider the phone call to an agent while struggling to pay a fee online, the online review after a visit to a state park, or the email comment following a customer service interaction.

Without AI, these insights often end up trapped within individual interactions or sequestered in leadership report-outs. Rarely are they analyzed at scale to pull out system improvement opportunities. Even more rarely do they make their way to frontline agents who could make a tangible difference in real-time.

With AI, government leaders are figuring out how to leverage their mounds of data to propel human-centered government with three key strategies:

#1. Monitor Performance in Real Time:

Too often, governments are data rich but insights poor: they have mounds of data at their fingertips – from population reports to millions of service emails – but limited resources to make sense of it. Our AI helps cut through to the most important human insights, and help governments catch customer concerns before they become issues by:

• Ingesting diverse data types into a unified platform, including existing data sets, solicited data, and unsolicited data.
• Leveraging AI models for rapid analysis to sort, categorize, and make sense of data, enhancing manual methods.
• Providing a centralized hub for everyone from executives to frontline agents to view insights, without relying on statistical expertise.

#2. Pinpoint Exact Friction Points and Their Impact:

Traditional data analysis in government is time and resource intensive – often siloed to specialized groups. The annual community survey common in cities, for example, often gets analyzed by a third party and delivered as a PDF report months after residents participated. Qualtrics' AI models automate this analysis, which has helped governments catch issues in real time, like a broken DMV scheduler or a faulty permitting workflow. Qualtrics AI analyzes diverse data by:

• Automatically categorizing data, including topics, intent, emotion, empathy, and actionability.
• Enabling government leaders to easily sort, filter, and drill down on their own data using natural language queries – just like a Google search.
• Swiftly identifying key takeaways, from trending topics in phone calls to root causes of digital friction.

#3. Act When It Matters:

Government leaders often get insight reports days or weeks after the point of interaction. While useful, the opportunity to turn around an individual experience is long gone, as is the opportunity to catch trending concerns before they become bigger issues. Qualtrics’ AI changes that by empowering governments to:

• Trigger real-time workflows or alerts based on any insight surfaced by AI automated analysis: spikes in emotion, trending complaints, and more.
• Enable every employee to act on customer insights with guided coaching and real-time feedback.
• Generate automated summaries from support interactions or feedback at scale.

That said, AI can only be an ally for human-centered government if applied responsibly. It is critical for governments to interrogate their AI use to ensure it meets ethical standards.

Navigating the future together

At Qualtrics, we work with governments to help them ensure proper controls over their AI use. We actively promote ethical AI use that is grounded in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility awareness by:

• Ensuring AI models go through Model Risk Management testing to mitigate unintended bias.
• Providing full transparency on how data is used and adding controls to protect individual privacy.
• Empowering customers to opt in or out of any AI features, enabling more control over usage.

Experience-driven AI will trigger a paradigm shift in how governments leverage data to drive human-centered improvements. Automated analytics ensure that insights reach those who can effect change promptly. Swift summaries of key takeaways give leaders the ability to direct strategic investments and be confident decisions impact what matters most for service recipients.

Qualtrics’ government customers are at the forefront of a movement that goes beyond AI for efficiency's sake. Our partners champion a future where government services are not just streamlined but are inherently human-centered and exceeds its customer’s expectations.