UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI

Meanwhile, civil services claims 75,000 days could be saved by the tech each year

Ignoring the skeptics and threat of an AI bubble, the UK government is pushing ahead with AI "sandboxing" and backing a raft of projects it claims could benefit from red-tape cutting.

The moves come after it claimed civil service adoption of AI tools would save about 75,000 days of manual work each year.

Reports have offered a mixed picture of returns for AI investment. On the one hand, research shows AI chatbots might make people work more while benefiting less from their labor; on the other Lloyds Banking Group claims its employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Investors, too, are increasingly likely to be sounding the alarm signaling a potential market bubble surrounding the trillion-dollar infrastructure-guzzling technology.

But the UK government is plowing on, in the belief that that AI will get it out of a fiscal tight spot. This week, it has announced that a slew of projects backing the tech will benefit from a more relaxed approach to regulation.

Providing an £8.9 million investment, through Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO), the government says it is supporting projects which benefit from direct engagement with regulators to understand how to reduce unnecessary red tape.

The 15 projects get between £100k and a £1 million each. For example, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) gets £1 million backing for a pilot AI assistants to help its experts assess clinical trials more efficiently and consistently. The British Board of Film Classification gets nearly the same figure to build an AI tool for age classification of videos streamed on demand. Milton Keynes Council has won a £781,817 portion of the pot to pilot the licensing of robots that could clean and de-ice pavements.

The government has also promised to let companies try out AI sandboxing: an idea that will allow individual regulations to be "temporarily switched off" for a limited period of time in "safe, controlled testing environments."

The UK's headlong charge into AI comes after separate study published earlier this month found 75,000 days of manual work each year might be saved with the adoption of an AI tool designed to speed up analysis of feedback from government consultations. Part of the "Humphrey" pack of AI tools announced at the beginning of the year, the Consult tool was tested by the Independent Water Commission (IWC) used to sort over 50,000 consultation responses in two hours, compared to the 22 hours humans might take.

Digital government minister Ian Murray said the trial showed huge potential for AI to make public services more efficient.

"By taking on the basic admin, Consult is giving staff time to focus on what matters – taking action to fix public services. In the process, it could save the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds," he said.

Any savings will not come a moment too soon, as UK finance minister Rachel Reeves will be struggling to balance a threadbare public purse, with unpopular tax rises and worrying borrowing in her Autumn Budget next month. Banking such expectations might create a hostage to fortune, though. The government's plans to save £45 billion through the application of AI lack clarity and are based on broad-brush assumptions, experts told MPs last week. ®