AI tool saves time and puts staff back on the frontline
Staff are completing tasks quicker and getting to spend more time with residents who need their support thanks to a collaboration between Lancashire County Council and Microsoft.
The council's Digital Innovation team and representatives from Microsoft have supported staff in Adult Services and Education and Children's Services to use tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot to speed up everyday tasks.
So far, more than 1,400 social workers, educational psychologists and support officers have been trained to use responsible AI across these services.
Early estimations indicate that the targeted use of AI will free up more than 200,000 staff hours per year on routine tasks.
AI has massively reduced the time taken to produce complex assessments such as social circumstance reports, which provide information about a person's living situation and their support system.
These reports used to take up to two days for social workers to complete, but with the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot and prompts, which are a set of simple instructions that allow the report to be generated, that time has reduced to around three to four hours.
The prompt creates a first draft of a report which the social worker checks and amends, and they still meet with the person involved and speak to relatives for the report.
Brett Aspden, who's a Mental Health Social Care Lead in Adult Services, is clear that the technology doesn't replace human judgment or the recommendations of social workers.
He said:
"It really is efficiency at its finest. The social worker is still responsible for the report that's submitted, but Copilot puts the information into the right format and is a great place to start.
"The social worker will then cross-reference it and add details about the person and any professionals they have spoken to. Our teams have found it really useful.
"People are getting time back, so they can spend more time with the people of Lancashire that we support, and it also means they can do more engaging work with people."
Emma Burt, who is also a Mental Health Social Care Lead in Adult Services, agrees that it's made a significant impact.
She said:
"We are completing around 60 of these reports each month which was taking a lot of time; it was the equivalent of the workload of two full-time social workers every month, which is a considerable cost and time to us.
"We use Copilot for duty rotas and in supervision meetings, which means we don't need to have anybody taking notes and we can concentrate fully on the discussion with our team.
"It's also been a really useful tool for tracking our service spends and trends. By doing this we can not only have an easy overview of our budget but also this helps us highlight gaps in provisions in localities and this has been really positively received."
Councillor David Dwyer, cabinet member for Data, Technology, Customer and Efficiency, said:
"Microsoft 365 Copilot has empowered our staff to embrace new technology, supported us in improving the quality and timeliness of our services and is already making a real difference for residents in Lancashire.
"This technology doesn’t replace professional judgment and our staff remain fully responsible for every decision, but it gives them a strong starting point and removes unnecessary bureaucracy, which means better use of public money, more efficient services and, most importantly, more time with residents.
"Our collaboration with Microsoft is showing how innovation can strengthen frontline services and deliver real value for communities across Lancashire."