Britain's Ministry of Justice just signed up to ChatGPT Enterprise

OpenAI sweetens the deal with data residency

OpenAI has signed up the UK's Ministry of Justice as the latest public sector customer for ChatGPT Enterprise.

The agreement will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise on the desktops of 2,500 employees for use in "routine tasks," such as writing support, compliance and legal work, data and research processes, and document analysis.

It doesn't appear that it will feature in lawmaking, but neither OpenAI nor the Ministry of Justice gave us any more details regarding specifics, beyond what has already been made public, nor did we get a response about timelines or how much the deal is worth.

OpenAI is also introducing UK data residency on October 24, thus easing some regulatory concerns. OpenAI calls it "Sovereign AI," although true sovereignty means considerably more than where data is stored. Processing must also be considered.

According to OpenAI, the MoJ is the first to take advantage of UK data residency under the agreement.

The UK is an important market for OpenAI, ranking among the top five globally for paid subscribers and developers. CEO Sam Altman said: "The number of people using our products in the UK has increased fourfold in the past year.

"It's exciting to see them using AI to save time, increase productivity, and get more done. Civil servants are using ChatGPT to improve public services and established firms are reimagining operations. We're proud to continue supporting the UK and the government's AI plan."

ChatGPT is already used in several tools, including "Humphrey" – an AI assistant designed to take some of the administrative load off civil servants – and "Consult," which sorts public consultation responses to speed up the public consultation process.

The government last week issued a release that attributes impressive time savings and efficiency gains to the use of the Consult tool. The software took two hours to categorize more than 50,000 responses to a government-commissioned review of the water sector. Experts needed a further 22 hours to check the results.

UK government said "the work of 'Consult' was compared to two groups of experts. It agreed with one or both of the groups almost 83 percent of the time, while the two well-practiced human groups only agreed with each other 55 percent of the time."

It was also deployed to support analysis by the Scottish government and to sort responses to the Digital Inclusion Action Plan.

OpenAI is not the only AI with its claws in the British administration. The Department for Health and Social Care reported productivity improvements during a trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot covering 30,000 NHS staff across 90 organizations. According to Microsoft, an average of 43 minutes per person per day was saved.

The figures were then extrapolated to 400,000 hours of staff time being saved every month – "amounting to millions of hours annually."

A trial at the Department for Business and Trade showed little or no discernible gain in productivity, however. Some tasks such as writing emails or summarizing meetings were improved. Other tasks like data analysis did not go so well, with quality and accuracy poorer when using the AI tools.

The Register asked OpenAI and the Ministry of Justice how quality would be assured with the rollout of ChatGPT Enterprise, but we have yet to receive a response.

The addition of data residency will remove a barrier to the public sector's use of OpenAI's technology. Given the variable results of trials using Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT is poised to make further inroads as the UK government drives its AI agenda forward. ®