Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what (a) artificial intelligence and (b) machine learning projects are being (i) undertaken and (ii) considered for her Department.

The Department will make use of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning technologies where it is appropriate across many areas of work.

· Identity, Trust & Verification - Robust identity verification and authentication provides us with the confidence that people interacting with us are who they say they are. This is essential to our ambitions in enabling self-service and to safeguarding the public purse and to reduce verification demands where it is unnecessary.

· Process Automation – We incrementally utilise robotic automations on some existing processes to remove the need for routine administrative work and to speed up the processing of claims and changes to be timely, with less backlogs.

· Signposting & Support Offers for Citizen Outcomes– We are exploring how to provide a more relevant non-financial support offer for customers, more tailored signposting to provision, more preventative interventions for the individual and more effective place and sector-based interventions.

· Countering Fraud, Error and Debt – We are developing our counter fraud and error risk services to help prevent and reduce fraud and error losses. Our aim is to increasingly prevent fraud and error at the point of contact with customers and to reduce costs of interventions.

· Cyber Security – This means continuously evolving our cyber security and resilience to detect rapidly moving security threats as we increase our on-line presence.

In all cases our own data experts assure these results, learn at scale and iteratively improve.