In a bid to save millions, the government built 'Humphrey', a bundle of AI tools designed to speed up the work of civil servants and cut back time spent on admin, and new AI tool 'Consult' is part of that.

Consult has now been used to speed up analysis of what the public and experts told the Scottish Government in a recent consultation.

Scottish Government experts also manually looked at the 2,000 consultation responses - and the results were almost identical.

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said: "No one should be wasting time on something AI can do quicker and better, let alone wasting millions of taxpayer pounds on outsourcing such work to contractors.

"After demonstrating such promising results, Humphrey will help us cut the costs of governing and make it easier to collect and comprehensively review what experts and the public are telling us on a range of crucial issues.

"The Scottish Government has taken a bold first step. Very soon, I’ll be using Consult, within Humphrey, in my own department and others in Whitehall will be using it too – speeding up our work to deliver the Plan for Change."