Public sector organizations are increasingly interested in using data science and artificial intelligence capabilities to deliver policy and generate efficiencies in high-uncertainty environments. The long-term success of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector relies on effectively embedding it into delivery solutions for policy implementation. However, governments cannot do this integration of AI into public service delivery on their own. The UK Government Industrial Strategy is clear that delivering on the AI grand challenge requires collaboration between universities and the public and private sectors. This cross-sectoral collaborative approach is the norm in applied AI centres of excellence around the world. Despite their popularity, cross-sector collaborations entail serious management challenges that hinder their success. In this article we discuss the opportunities for and challenges of AI for the public sector. Finally, we propose a series of strategies to successfully manage these cross-sectoral collaborations.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.
Despite the current popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) and a steady increase in publications over time, few studies have investigated AI in public contexts. As a result, assumptions about the drivers, challenges, and impacts of AI in government are far from conclusive. By using a case study that involves a large research university in England and two different county councils in a multiyear collaborative project around AI, we study the challenges that interorganizational collaborations face in adopting AI tools and implementing organizational routines to address them. Our findings reveal the most important challenges facing such collaborations: a resistance to sharing data due to privacy and security concerns, insufficient understanding of the required and available data, a lack of alignment between project interests and expectations around data sharing, and a lack of engagement across organizational hierarchy. Organizational routines capable of overcoming such challenges include working on-site, presenting the benefits of data sharing, reframing problems, designating joint appointments and boundary spanners, and connecting participants in the collaboration at all levels around project design and purpose.
The scarcity of empirical evidence surrounding the organizational challenges and successful approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) deployment has resulted in mostly theoretical conceptualizations. By analyzing policy labs and offices of data analytics across the US to understand organizational challenges of AI adoption and implementation in the public sector as well as to identify successful management strategies to address such challenges, our study moves from speculation to gathering evidence. Our findings show that most challenges are found during the implementation stage and include challenges related to skills, culture, and resistance to share the data driven by data challenges. Further, our results indicate that long term strategies and short term actions need to be put in place to address these challenges. Among the first ones, leadership and executive support and stakeholder management seem to play an important role. Data standardization, training, and data-sharing agreements also seem to be successful specific shortterm actions.
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