AI at the core: Public-private collaboration to transform UK public services

Strategic partnerships between government and industry are driving AI adoption – enhancing efficiency, improving citizen services, and shaping public sector innovation, as Rob Worsley, Head of Data, Analytics and AI at Hitachi Solutions Europe explains

The UK Government has made its ambition clear: artificial intelligence (AI) must become a core pillar of public service delivery. The AI Opportunities Action Plan and AI Playbook provide a roadmap for embedding AI into government functions, with a vision of improving efficiency, enhancing productivity, and freeing up humans for more strategic, citizen-focused work.

Achieving this transformation is no small feat. Implementing generative AI (GenAI) at scale requires more than technology alone – it demands strategic planning, ethical considerations, and deep expertise. This is where collaboration between the public and private sectors becomes critical.

The private sector brings cutting-edge innovation, infrastructure, accelerators, and AI expertise, while the public sector ensures alignment with policy, governance, and citizen needs. By working together, government and industry leaders can ensure AI is implemented and optimally deployed to create real value for citizens.

AI at the core: A smarter, more responsive public sector

New AI-driven approaches such as Agentic AI and GenAI workflows are redefining the future of service delivery. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicts that agentic AI will disrupt traditional back-end business applications, vastly increasing efficiency and productivity across sectors. The shift towards “AI at the Core” means integrating AI into the very fabric of public service operations.

With strategic implementation, AI has the potential to deliver efficiency gains that could add £47 billion annually to the UK economy over the next decade. AI is already accelerating disease diagnosis, predicting road maintenance needs, and streamlining administrative processes. At its core, AI fosters a more personalised government that prioritises citizen needs.

Examples of AI-powered transformation include:

• Automating document processing
  • – AI can process and summarise documents, files, and records in seconds, reducing administrative workload. The Alan Turing Institute estimates that AI could help automate 143 million government transactions. The UK Government is already exploiting this technology with their Redbox solution that allows civil servants to chat with Government Documents up to OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE level.
• Enhancing citizen engagement
  • AI-driven virtual assistants and chatbots can respond instantly to citizen queries. Initiatives like GOV.UK Chat aim to simplify information retrieval from more than 700,000 pages of content.
• Fraud detection and compliance
  • – AI analyses vast datasets to detect anomalies, improving fraud prevention and regulatory compliance across government agencies.

Generative AI in action

Hitachi Solutions is working with government partners to address complex challenges with GenAI, including:

• Hiring in the Civil Service.
  • HR oversees recruitment, but individual hiring managers – not recruitment specialists – lead hiring campaigns. We’ve developed AI solutions to automate job descriptions, recruitment packs, and job advertisements. Our AI-powered chatbot ensures compliance and provides instant responses to hiring queries, reducing HR workload and allowing managers to focus on selecting the best candidates.
• HR policy query management.
  • Civil Service HR teams manage thousands of repetitive queries related to policies like leave entitlements and flexible working. Our AI chatbot enables employees to find policy details quickly and provides nuanced interpretations for complex inquiries, reducing HR support demands and allowing teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
• Managing inquiries and Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.
  • Government agencies handle tens of thousands of inquiries annually, from complaints to FOI requests. Our AI-driven solution automates categorisation, detects sensitive information, and suggests responses. It prioritises urgent cases, aligns replies with official language guidelines, and ensures compliance – dramatically improving response times and accuracy while enhancing citizen satisfaction.

Addressing government concerns about GenAI

Despite AI’s promise, two key concerns stand out for government leaders. Firstly, the risk of incorrect information (hallucinations) – large language models (LLMs) sometimes generate misleading or incorrect outputs. To address this, the private sector can support government adoption through retrieval- augmented generation (RAG) and fine-tuning models on trusted datasets. These approaches ground AI responses in authoritative information, significantly reducing the risk of incorrect results.

Secondly, there is a lack of auditability and transparency – GenAI can provide citations, but users may not always verify sources. New reasoning AI models and multi-step research agents (such as OpenAI’s Deep Research) allow AI to “think” through complex problems more rigorously, producing answers with structured audit trails.

The private sector’s role is to help navigate these challenges by providing tools, methodologies, and expertise. We can also help with perhaps the biggest challenge for the government – keeping up with the unprecedented speed of AI evolution. The rate of improvement is astonishing – new models are emerging that outperform their predecessors by 20% within just a few months. Public sector teams simply cannot keep up alone, and private sector organisations have the skilled resources to help.

Public-private partnerships and the AI workforce of the future

Realising an AI-driven revolution demands investment in training, upskilling, and fostering AI literacy across the public sector – which cannot be achieved in isolation.

• Comprehensive AI skills –
  • AI reform requires a full range of expertise, from developers to change managers and data engineers to UX designers. Private sector partners can provide the specialised talent the government lacks.
• Scalable, cost-effective solutions –
  • beyond LLMs and chatbots, private sector expertise can ensure solutions are built with the right models, components, and UI for long-term impact.
• Empowered civil servants –
  • AI should enhance, not replace, human decision- making. Private sector-led training and upskilling programmes can equip government employees to work confidently with AI.
• Accelerated innovation –
  • AI Centres of Excellence, supported by private sector collaboration, can help government teams stay ahead of advancements and best practices.
• Faster AI deployment –
  • Prebuilt AI agents, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) frameworks, and other private sector accelerators can streamline adoption, cutting costs and risks.
• Secure, scalable infrastructure –
  • Private sector cloud providers can deliver cutting-edge, compliant, and sustainable platforms for AI deployment at scale.

Strategic partnerships with private sector AI leaders are essential to ensure the public sector has the capacity, speed, and expertise to succeed: AI at the core is not just a technological vision – it’s a partnership commitment to building a smarter, more innovative, and more responsive government for the future.

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