127 PUBLIC SECTOR In Estonia, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications has implemented an open-source, AI assistant named Bürokratt to give citizens access to secure information about vital government services in seconds rather than days. Now, rather than filling out paperwork or visiting different government offices to resolve their queries in a process that could take up to two days, citizens simply ask a question via Bürokratt and it is automatically forwarded to the relevant state organisation. Bürokratt, which was developed for the ministry by the Information System Authority of Estonia, Microsoft Industry Solutions Engineering and Net Group, has been rolled out to six institutions and is likely to be expanded to others in future. “Citizens have one single point of contact for the entire government, making it quicker and easier for them to access the information or services they need,” says Ion. “This increases citizen engagement and satisfaction rates. This implementation also shows the crucial role AI plays in enabling fast and secure data sharing across different public finance and other government agencies.” Having access to AI-powered business intelligence and real-time data insights also improves forecasting and decision-making. This is particularly beneficial for budget and treasury agencies, which are responsible for disbursing public funds in ways that measurably drive economic development. “These organisations must allocate the right financial support to the right beneficiaries at the right time, and they can achieve this much more easily by using AI to automate and streamline payment, bid management, budget distribution and other processes,” says Ion. One organisation using AI to streamline grant management is the Rural Payments Agency (RPA), an executive agency of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which distributes agri-environment payments to thousands of farmers, traders and landowners in England every year. Working in partnership with Hitachi and Microsoft, Defra migrated RPA to the cloudbased Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance platform and integrated Power BI and Power Apps to create a customer portal, automate the claims entry process and facilitate realtime reporting. Now, RPA can handle up to 50,000 claims per day and within the first three months of the new platform going live, it had processed 111,000 payments totalling nearly £2.5 billion ($3.3 billion). This amounts to more than 40 per cent of its annual 250,000 payments. “Moving to Dynamics 365 for Finance has made it easier for farmers and others to access public funds, while cutting RPA’s operational costs and significantly improving productivity and efficiency,” says Ion. “The solution can be easily scaled to incorporate future payment schemes, which will drive economic development.” To capitalise on the many advantages of AI, organisations must modernise their data estates. “They need to migrate from legacy systems to the cloud, integrate multiple internal and external data sources to eliminate silos, and classify their data to ensure it is high quality,” explains Ion. “Once they have the right foundation in place, organisations can easily leverage AI to re-engineer and automate processes, democratise business intelligence and analyse their data to derive real-time insights and operate more productively, efficiently, cost-effectively and proactively.” Microsoft and its “strong” ecosystem of partners continually develop innovative solutions to support organisations with everything from tax revenue collection to customs and trade facilitation, grants management, procurement and “ We anticipate a future where humans collaborate with multiple AI agents across agencies”
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