Automation and artificial intelligence introduced to procurement

Hansel is an active participant in a cooperation group for the utilisation of artificial intelligence in central government and is also planning the introduction of automation to develop its own operations.

Government Shared Services Centre for Finance and HR (Palkeet) was the main controller of the central government AI network in 2018. Hansel was involved in the cooperation group, providing a procurement perspective. The network convened several times, discussing the status of Proof of Concept (POC) projects and examples of the practical application of AI. Interesting events were arranged in the offices of the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela), the Finnish Tax Administration and the OP Group, for example. Ethics in the utilisation of AI and problems connected to the Finnish language will be the focus areas of the network in 2019.

One of the cooperation projects in which Hansel is involved is called Joint Service Point for Group Services. The project studies whether there is a genuine need for a centralised, shared service point for the service providers of government agencies. The study will be completed during the first half of 2019. The implementation method will be specified later, provided that such a service point is considered necessary. Utilising robotisation is one option. A separate agreement on the schedule will be made in the cooperation group for service providers of government agencies.

In 2018, Hansel studied the opportunity to automate its customer support processes. The priority was to determine the benefits of the automation process for our customer service and the opportunity to offer the MiniKisaPlus service or the entire service process to our customers in a more rational and efficient manner with the help of modern software solutions. The final result is a road map that we will use to start our first experiments in the automation of our services in 2019.