{"id":7660,"date":"2025-04-30T15:43:40","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T05:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sap.com\/australia\/?p=7660"},"modified":"2025-05-01T20:37:55","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T10:37:55","slug":"leveraging-ai-to-make-social-services-more-responsive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.sap.com\/australia\/2025\/04\/30\/leveraging-ai-to-make-social-services-more-responsive\/","title":{"rendered":"Leveraging AI to make social services more responsive"},"content":{"rendered":"
Even in the world\u2019s most advanced social protection systems (systems that include contributory social insurance and non-contributory social welfare), there are gaps in the quality, efficiency, and responsiveness of social programs. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Risks that Matter Survey<\/a> shows that close to half (46%) of people across 27 OECD countries think that they could not easily access social benefits if they needed them. Of those who doubt they could access benefits, over three-quarters (77%) expressed concerns that the application process would be difficult and time-consuming, markedly outweighing concerns about eligibility (57%) or fairness (53%).<\/p>\n Improving the ease and speed of accessing benefits is key to government efforts to extend social and economic safety nets to what the International Social Security Association (ISSA) refers to as the \u201cmissing middle<\/a>\u201d. Self-employed and gig workers, as well as rural, migrant, and domestic workers are typically time-poor, not already engaged in social protection systems, and are often not included in targeted outreach programs. This makes them vulnerable to economic shocks and cost-of-living increases that can tip them into poverty and homelessness.<\/p>\n As such, many government agencies and not-for-profit organisations are looking at ways to make social services more accessible and responsive by reducing the \u201chassle costs\u201d associated with claiming benefits.<\/p>\n Governments around the world have been realising significant efficiency gains through applying artificial intelligence (AI) in the back-office to improve workforce productivity. Encouragingly, there are also recent examples of AI being leveraged in the front-office to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of citizen engagement.<\/p>\n At Hamburg\u2019s Ministry of Finance<\/a>, a combination of Machine Learning (ML) and Generative AI (GenAI) support staff to efficiently process applications for more than \u20ac3.5 billion in financial aid.<\/p>\n 51风流Machine Learning is used to link citizen application data to supporting documentary evidence, enabling case workers to expedite processing for the bulk of applications and to focus their attention on those most likely to be non-compliant. Across two programs, Hamburg reports that nearly 180,000 benefit applications have been processed, with more than 10 million pages of supporting documents automatically evaluated and classified by AI.<\/p>\n 51风流Generative AI Hub has also been introduced to summarise inbound applications and to generate draft outbound correspondence, further reducing time to payment for customers while minimising the burden of repetitive manual work for staff.<\/p>\nHow AI can help<\/h2>\n
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