Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News.
I'm joined by Alex Burkhart, UK Cabinet Office Minister leading on AI in the public sector. I want to start out with your role in artificial intelligence. This role wouldn't exist even as two or three years ago, and need to live in the United Kingdom. We've seen this government, led by the Prime Minister Richie Sunek, really want to invest and hone AI even within the government. I know
you're in the beta mode of this red box. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing, what you're focused on, and how the government could potentially harness this.
Thanks Amory, thank you for having me on and it's great to be in New York to talk about the work we're doing in the UK government at the moment. As you said, the Prime Minister is really passionate about AI. We held the first AI safety summit that the world
seen last year, very very productive. But the work that I'm doing is on how we can deploy AI for the public good and that means how we can you know, it's about eighteen months ago we sat down and said this new technology is emerging potentially one of the great leaps forward. How are we going to harness it to improve the quality of public services and drive down costs for the taxpayer. And there's a number of ways in which that's emerging. And the first is that you can
now automate tasks like never before. And I have you mentioned Red Box, which is named after the you know, the red ministerial box that British ministers carry around.
I still hope they'll do that for show and the Yeah.
Absolutely. But what we now have, what we've been building is a tool that can summarize huge documents very very quickly, that can relate them to what's been going on in Parliament, what's been going on in the press, and can pull out kind of key points that ministers need to focus on. And that's saving my Private office hundreds of hours. But it's also starting to build a tool that is going to create institutional memory. Recreate institutional memory in our government departments.
So you know, when we're starting out on a project, we'll be able to ask, how we tried something like this before, why didn't we carry on with it? You know what was good about it? It's a huge resource of documentation that's currently lying unused in government is going to come back into play.
So two questions immediately come to mind, one talent and the other security.
Let's start with talent first.
If you work in AI, you can get paid handsomely going to say open AI. How do you attract that talent to say, come work as a civil servant.
It's a great question. We were really worried about this at the start because we can't pay that money. And you know, I've got a really great head of the program, Laura Gilbert, who's out in New York with me at the moment, and she said, as long as we can pay something, but more than we pay our normal civil servants. What we have is data. We have really good data,
lots of centralized data. And if you are, you know, an AI addict, if you're one of these super smart, crazy CLIs people who wants to get involved, the thing you want to play with is data. And so we've we've been looking at huge quantities of data and things like public prescriptions health service, looking how we can improve the quality of prescriptions, drive down costs. We've been looking at how we can eliminate fraud and error in the
benefit system. We have two hundred and eighty billion pound benefit and pension system, and we currently employ thousands and thousands of people to check for fraud. We think we're going to be able to vastly reduce that and improve.
So attracting the talent hasn't been an issue.
No, No, we've we've been really pleasantly surprised that loads of people have applied and they passed our very very stringent tests to get in.
The one concern as well as security.
You put all of this now, documents that live in a cloud, you're working more with AI.
How do you safeguard that to say adversaries?
Yeah, it's a central question and we have a very effective security service in the UK and we're constantly learning from partners. I was outing talent in Estonia right on the fringes of NATO a few weeks ago, learning from them because they were party to some enormous cyber attacks a few years ago and have become very very resilient.
So it's uppermost in our mind when we're vetting people, but also when we're building systems to make sure that they're not you, that they can't be attacked by enemy operator.
If you use AI in the defense sector in the UK government, how important is it that all that technology comes.
In house, not out of house. Well because of these concerns.
No, no, I think it's not just defense. Right when we were starting out, we could easily have gone and picked a number of big companies, big UK companies have fantastic a sector in London. But we wanted to understand this technology ourselves. So we've hired this cracked team of thirty people going up to seventy who are going to
be able to build bespoke systems for us Now. In the future, I think there'll be a case of some stuff we will build ourselves and use many times, some stuff we will build bespoke for particular departments, perhaps like defense, and some things we will buy in. But having people who actually know how it works and know what government's needs are I think is central to getting this revolution right.
I know you're in New York, so you're missing all the morning press in the UK after a critical election last night and you saw the Bellwether parliamentary seat that the Conservatives lost, do you honestly think the Conservative Party if the elections are going to be held this year? At some point I know the Prime Minister said at the second half of the year, do you think the current conservaives will be able to hold onto power.
I do think they will be able to and I'll tell you right, look, we've had a tough night. The truth is that in twenty twenty one, when this cycle of elections was last on, we had a vaccine bounce that was a very good year for us. We always suspected we might come down. But there is a silver lining to this cloud, and it's the fact that Ben Houchin are mayor in Teesside, in the northeast, traditionally quite a deprived part of the country, which under the Conservatives
is now flourishing. He's won, he's held on, He's done a very good job there, and I think when it comes to the election and people actually have to make a choice about who they want to see in power for the next five years. Is it going to be the Prime Minister and the Conservatives that has got us through COVID, that has seen off inflation and the energy crisis and has a plan for the future, or is it going to be a Labor party that really has
no plan and no agenda. I think they're going to come with us.
Do now regret though potentially removing Boris Johnson. Just from an electability point of view, No.
I don't because Boris certainly had his strengths, but things weren't working out and he made some mistakes and we couldn't have that those mistakes haven't happened.
Besides Ai, which I know the Prime Minister is really focused on, but a lot of that has feels a little bit like it's not tangible yet to voters and the electorate. What does Rischie Sunak need to do. Number one thing he needs to do going into this election.
So I think there are some really good stories to tell. I mentioned t side up in the Northeast when I was the Minister for Skills. I was lucky enough to be part of this great piece of work where Ben Houchin, the mayor, persuaded the energy companies to come and build hydrogen plants on the condition that they offered training courses
for young boys and girls in the local colleges. So you have, you know, the government setting up a free pot and tea side, the mayor bringing in the business, and then the business securing the training places so that young people get those new jobs in their community. And that is what we call leveling up in the UK. And we're starting to see the fruits of it, you know, new business in towns which have been left behind, and local people getting those jobs and adding to the prosperity
of the places where they live. That's something that didn't happen under thirteen years of labor. It's happening under the Conservatives and I've been proud to be part of it.
Do you want to break some news. Do you know when the election will be?
Well, i'd love to tell you about the primary.
I don't know yet. I don't know yet. Okay, all right, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for your time.
That was Alex Burghart, UK Cabinet Officer Minister leaning on AI in the public sector.