Spending more than \u00a31m on artificial intelligence (AI) could stop up to 256 families being made homeless each year, a council says.<\/p>\n
Somerset Council’s cabinet has agreed to invest \u00a31.56m in AI and data analysis in a “radical rethink” to fight rising demand and costs.<\/p>\n
Some of the money will go towards creating a system which collects and collates residents’ data currently held by different parts of the council into a “single view”. It is hoped this will identify people and families at risk of homelessness sooner.<\/p>\n
Councillor Theo Butt-Philip, the council’s lead member for transformation, said the move would help it “do things differently and do things better”.<\/p>\n
“With demand and costs for services continuing to rise, we know we need to radically rethink how we operate to put more focus on prevention,” said Mr Butt-Philip.<\/p>\n
He said the “long-term investment” would “build capability across the whole council” and help “make the most of the opportunities provided by better use of data and AI”.<\/p>\n
The council believes the increased use of AI will allow staff to identify gaps in support for people who need the council’s help.<\/p>\n
The money, which has come from the council’s capital funding pot, will also go towards adding 1 new staff to the council’s AI and data team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spending more than \u00a31m on artificial intelligence (AI) could stop up to 256 families being made homeless each…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-206546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}