Capita is banking on Microsoft Copilot to help rescue the backlog of cases it has inherited in taking over the UK Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS).
Speaking to Parliament last week, Chris Clements, managing director of Capita Public Services, said Microsoft’s AI service was scanning initial contact forms and helping the outsourcer examine case documents.
Clements and Richard Holroyd, CEO of Capita Public Services, were questioned by MPs about the thousands of civil service pensioners hit by poor service or struggling to get payments made since the company took over.
Capita took over running the CSPS in December last year after winning a £239 million contract. Scheme members, including around 1.5 million current and former public servants, soon began to complain of unrecognized passwords and usernames, according to online reports. They were forced to create new accounts, which were also unrecognized. Broken and circular links in a portal that appeared unfinished and untested also frustrated users.
In January, Capita apologized, along with the Cabinet Office, which commissioned the service. Promising “interim support measures,” Capita said it was managing a backlog of 86,000 cases inherited from the previous provider, “a significant proportion of which was already overdue.”
Speaking to the Public Accounts Committee, a government spending watchdog, Clements said the service was already using Microsoft Copilot to assess incoming website messages and help staff handle queries.
“Caseworkers get a copilot [to] read all the attachments and documents for a case, and that gives them a summary at the start. You look at the end-to-end handling time of a case, and you go through and you evolve and improve every step along the way. That’s the process that we are starting to undergo now [and is a] core part of driving productivity.”
Retired civil servants in the UK have had their income slashed after payments from the system run by Capita failed to arrive, according to the BBC. Capita told the news outlet it was struggling with a bigger backlog of cases than had been agreed.
Clements told MPs that Capita was expecting to handle around 7,000 calls per week. At their peak, call levels reached 25,000 in a week, he said. He recommended that scheme members first contact the service using the online form, which is “read” by a Copilot agent, he said.
“Copilot automatically reads and understands, identifies priority cases, and puts them in the work queue. By doing it that way, the AI tool allows us to make sure we are instantaneously identifying those cases with the most detriment. That is a completely different solution from sitting in an unread email inbox, and it is part of the transformation we are making. I recommend that any member who wants to contact us use the ‘Contact Us’ form on the front page of the website, and that will be immediately read by AI and prioritized and then read by a human to get the work done.”
There has been a great deal of debate about whether AI agents – and the large language models on which they are based – understand anything. They are trained on a corpus of text from the internet, distinct from the embodied language people speak.
The high-profile use of the technology to solve a critical problem in the UK pension system might be an interesting test case. Whether scheme members who want their money or information about their investments see it that way is another matter. ®
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