Councils Start Collaborative Project to Investigate the Impact AI can have at the ASC Front Door
Our latest council-led collaboration began this week with the project initiation meeting bringing together all the partners for the first time to discuss their aspirations and focus in terms of deploying AI to improve access to Adult Social Care information and advice. The project is being driven by Bradford City Council, Norfolk County Council and Wakefield Council with the technical partner, Bullet (and CC2i) and will design, deploy, test and evidence AI4ASC over the next 12 months.
Across the partners there is a clear priority to improve access for unpaid carers and enable their interaction with information and services in a more proactive, natural and intuitive way. Norfolk is keen to build the AI approach into their existing unpaid carer offer, which is part of their wider Tech Skills for Life programme, whilst Bradford is currently considering deployment on the website and via WhatsApp (promoted from call waiting messages) to manage the lower level information requests and free up front line staff for more critical issues.
Another key area for Bradford is the inbuilt potential AI offers in terms of translation. With 150 spoken languages in the city, the ability to engage and support a service user, carer, family member or someone making ASC enquiries in their preferred language, could deliver real impact. The AI model allows people to start an enquiry in any language – either by voice or text – and for the continuing conversation to be in that language.
Ideas emerging from the Wakefield camp are driven mainly around reducing demand on the front door, as well as the potential to support the earlier engagement with, and understanding of, financial information in terms of ASC and the costs of care packages.
Across all partners the ability to deploy a completely new user driven capability to interrogate and have a conversation with trusted ASC information, advice, directories and wider services, is exciting and offers real potential.
- How will users engage with it?
- What will the ability to offer 24/7 access mean in terms of demand?
- What will the impact be on the front door in terms of the AI translation capability?
- How will AI change the nature of communication and interaction when conversations take place on Whatsapp or on Facebook Messenger, rather than on the telephone or via the website?
- How can we drive people to use AI? Will they notice a difference?
- How will it be branded, promoted, what will its’ ‘persona’ be?
- How will it find its ‘voice’ and gain trust?
All great questions, which over the next 12 months we shall investigate and evidence.
Next steps for the group are to bring together the core information on which the AI will be trained, with the first prototypes emerging over the next few weeks. Alongside this we will baseline current demand and processes to define KPIs, as well as build in safeguarding systems to support people in crisis.
Once the core curated information is in the system, we will start to look at required prompts and questions to ensure the AI is as useful as possible, as well as build in feedback loops to automate follow up with people in terms of signposting, check their progress and/or gather wider feedback.
We are happy to discuss the project further with you should you have any questions, and will be hosting a webinar in the Autumn on the progress to date – please drop us a line if you would like to be added to the invite for that session.
