Jerry Barnett, Digital Marketing Manager

It hardly needs stating that AI is the most significant and exciting trend of 2023. It isn’t a new field; in fact, it has been a hot topic – on and off - for decades, with areas like natural language recognition, genetic algorithms and knowledge-based systems often creating excitement. But the technologies have taken time to mature, and the required computing power for serious applications has only been available in recent years.

The field has finally begun to offer commercial solutions in the past couple of years, and in the past few months almost nobody, even those outside the tech industry, could have missed the excitement and numerous controversies around AI.

On 18th October, Microsoft’s Envision event came to London’s ExCel centre, having initially launched in New York in September. I spent the day there, and what became immediately clear is that AI is on the verge of transforming business – and the public sector - from top to bottom.

AI in the public sector

One of the niche sessions examined “Accelerating AI Adoption in government”. The panel comprised Julia Mixter, the Director of Transformation at Raven Housing Trust, and KPMG’s Head of Healthcare Data and Analytics, Janak Gunatilleke. Janak is also head of KPMG’s internal AI and ML (machine learning) group.

Janak called for a structured approach to implementing AI in the public sector, building requirements for each application and business area. He stressed that AIimplementation should be driven by selecting genuine business problems and use cases, and should start with quick wins that would in turn free up funding for more ambitious projects.

Julia agreed with this business-led approach, saying that organisations should avoid creating an AI strategy, and instead explore how AI might fit into the core business strategy. She also stressed the need to ensure compliance, and to maintain strong ethical principles.

AI-powered low-code tools

Perhaps the most impressive session of the day demonstrated features that will shortly be rolled out to Microsoft’s Power Platform (PP) app development suite. The session was presented by Microsoft’s Richard Riley, and focused on integrations between Microsoft’s Copilot AI chat tool and the PP suite.

Live demos were given to an impressed audience. Particularly impressive was a “natural language to app” capability that will shortly be available in Power Apps, allowing apps to be swiftly created from text prompts. Similarly, Power Pages will soon allow websites to be created from text descriptions. These features (and more) are to be made generally available by the end of 2023.

AI is set to sharply accelerate app and web development; to the extent that same-day development of apps and websites may soon become the norm. We look forward to the release of these new tools with interest.

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