Discussing the technical elements of automation, it can be easy to forget its profound human impact. But for Maryvonne Hassall, head of Digital and Transformation at Aylesbury Vale District Council, people are at the absolute heart of the issue.

As digital lead at the council, which covers a large area in Buckinghamshire, Hassall’s role has seen her take on numerous tasks: getting rid of legacy IT systems, for example, upgrading networks and streamlining older programmes. She’s also been responsible for the slow roll-out of automated services, part of the ‘innovation’ of her digital strategy.

This has taken some unusual forms. One project saw the council developing an Alexa Skill, which allows customers to ask their Alexa information about the council – ‘how do I pay my council tax?’ or ‘who’s my MEP?’. There are also a few transactional elements, Hassall explains – booking an assisted waste collection, for example – and the app’s most popular feature is ‘find my bin day’. Hassall notes that it’s easier than using an app, which opens up options for partially sighted people or those who struggle to use technology.

“We’re conscious that it’s quite a small market,” Hassall says. “But it was actually more to do with just having a go, finding out what works. Do people like it, can they engage with it, do they like using a different medium? Knowing the answer to these questions is important.”

Automation is now an important part of the council’s customer service offering, too: AI has been implemented across email and webchat. The system scans its records for an answer to the customer’s question, which it then presents to the agent with a percentage: “I’m 95% sure that this is the answer”. The agent then simply presses send – a much quicker system than having to manually search for templates.

The agents like it too, she says: because there’s one customer service team across all council services, workers don’t always have direct expertise across every area. The technology assists them in answering these difficult questions.

It also learns. “If it’s a question we don’t often get – do I need a license for my parrot? – it will try to find an answer, looks for the closest thing and is corrected by the agent. It learns from that, and it will go up in certainty.” The team are now automating any answers over 90% certainty, meaning that the council can now do out of hours work too.

Hassall is also proud that there have been no job losses; the business case, instead, was that it meant the council had to take fewer people on. Staff now spend their time working on higher-level cases, often bringing higher job satisfaction: “they feel it removes the mundane stuff,” Hassall says.

“Who really wants to answer the same question over and over again? And if you don’t have templates and you’re ad libbing it, are you really going to give a good answer every time? As a person, that’s hard to do.”

“The more difficult cases, where you need empathy and you need to delve more deeply into the issue – then you absolutely need a person to be able to help with that.

It’s important to note that, as a council, there is no profit motive. Cuts to government services have led to a need to save money and increase efficiency, but there’s no money-making aspect, giving greater flexibility when it comes to keeping staff and helping them move into new roles.

But Hassall believes that employers have a “responsibility” to protect staff.

“If you look at history, this kind of thing has happened over and over again in different fields,” she says. “The thing is – this doesn’t happen overnight across the board. There are going to be initial opportunities for staff to move into different roles.”

“For me, it’s about helping individuals work out what they might like to do. There is something incumbent on the employers to think about helping people work out what it is they would like to do – a different field they’d like to work in, or taking the good bits out of their current job and expanding that into a different area.”

“We really need to try to look after people.”