Government Reads 50,000 Public Comments in Two Hours
Quick Summary
The UK government built a tool called Consult that reads free-text responses to public consultations and sorts them into themes for analysts to review. In a live test it processed more than 50,000 responses in about two hours for £240, work that previously took weeks.
The Use Case
When a government asks the public for comment, tens of thousands of written responses come back and officials spend weeks reading and categorizing them by hand. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology built Consult to do the first pass. It ingests the responses, groups them into themes, and hands the organized set to human analysts who review and correct the grouping. In the test, the AI and human analysts agreed 83% of the time. Two human analysts working independently agreed with each other only 55% of the time.
Real Example
- A consultation closes with 50,000 written responses
- Consult reads every response and proposes a set of themes
- Each response is tagged to one or more themes
- Analysts spend 22 hours reviewing and correcting the tags instead of weeks reading
- Disagreements are resolved by the analysts, whose decisions win
- The themed summary goes to the policy team
Why It Matters
- 50,000+ responses processed in about 2 hours for £240 in compute
- Human review took 22 hours instead of weeks
- Projected savings of 75,000 staff days a year, about £20 million, if rolled out across government