There is currently considerable excitement within government about the potential of artificial intelligence to improve public service productivity through the automation of complex but repetitive bureaucratic tasks, freeing up the time of skilled staff. Here, we explore the size of this opportunity, by mapping out the scale of citizen-facing bureaucratic decision-making procedures within UK central government, and measuring their potential for AI-driven automation. We estimate that UK central government conducts approximately one billion citizen-facing transactions per year in the provision of around 400 services, of which approximately 143 million are complex repetitive transactions. We estimate that 84% of these complex transactions are highly automatable, representing a huge potential opportunity: saving even an average of just one minute per complex transaction would save the equivalent of approximately 1,200 person-years of work every year. We also develop a model to estimate the volume of transactions a government service undertakes, providing a way for government to avoid conducting time consuming transaction volume measurements. Finally, we find that there is high turnover in the types of services government provide, meaning that automation efforts should focus on general procedures rather than services themselves which are likely to evolve over time. Overall, our work presents a novel perspective on the structure and functioning of modern government, and how it might evolve in the age of artificial intelligence.

翻译：政府目前对人工智能通过自动化复杂但重复的官僚任务来提升公共服务效率、解放专业人员时间的潜力充满期待。本文通过梳理英国中央政府面向公民的官僚决策流程规模，并衡量其AI驱动自动化的潜力，探讨了这一机遇的范围。我们估算英国中央政府每年在约400项服务中处理约10亿次面向公民的事务，其中约1.43亿次为复杂重复性事务。我们评估这些复杂事务中有84%具有高度可自动化性，代表着巨大的潜在机遇：即使每项复杂事务仅节省平均一分钟，每年即可节约约1200人年的工作量。我们还构建了一个模型来估算政府服务的事务处理量，为政府避免进行耗时的事务量测量提供了方法。最后，我们发现政府提供服务的类型存在高更替率，这意味着自动化工作应侧重于通用流程而非可能随时间演变的特定服务本身。总体而言，本研究为现代政府的结构、运作及其在人工智能时代可能的发展方向提供了新视角。