The emergence of robotic automation, machine-to-machine communication and artificial intelligence (AI) across local government should come as no surprise. Data volumes are growing exponentially and by deploying these technologies to navigate and manage it, there is the potential for councils to significantly speed up service delivery, reduce human error and free-up employees to focus on front-line services, which are under increasing pressure from budget constraints and citizen demand.

Adoption is well underway. Councils are trialling chat bots that use AI to handle basic customer service queries and a growing number of authorities are looking to implement robotic process automation (RPA) across their back-office services. In a survey of 134 local and central government decision-makers, carried out by Arvato in collaboration with iGov last summer, over half of the respondents said their organisations had started to explore using RPA.