Julius Segole, CTO, BoxFusion

The 2024 election delivered a clear message: South Africa’s citizens want their politicians to work together to deliver better services. Transformative technologies like AI and others associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) offer a way for the Government of National Unity to achieve this goal.

“While many countries have made great strides in digitalising government services, many others, including South Africa, continue to grapple with the challenge of governing ICT properly to ensure it is an enabler rather than a risk,” says Julius Segole, CTO of BoxFusion, a software developer focused on automating and digitalising the public sector. “4IR technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance governance, improve service delivery, and foster transparency and accountability.” AI, combined with robotics, the Internet of Things, blockchain and big data can integrate digital, physical and biological systems to help government deliver on its promises despite its financial and human constraints:

Digital transformation enhances service delivery by automating administrative processes, freeing up skilled public servants to concentrate on more important tasks and delivering faster turnaround times.

For example, BoxFusion helped the eThekwini Municipality implement a WhatsApp chatbot powered by Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services for Language Processing. Trained by machine learning, the chatbot can deal with many of the most common queries with no human intervention, reducing wait times at the overstretched call centre.

Increased transparency and accountability can help rebuild citizen trust by enabling smarter, more efficient and effective public administration. AI can help policymakers make better decisions, and develop proactive strategies to address emerging challenges. It can also help detect patterns of fraudulent activity in real-time, enabling swift action to prevent financial losses and protect public resources.

4IR Technologies such as Blockchain and AI, can help strengthen governance in areas like procurement, which are particularly prone to corruption.

BoxFusion helped the Gauteng Department of Education use Microsoft AI services to analyse and verify the numerous documents submitted by parents in support of school admission applications. The result? Long queues at school are eliminated, and the admission process is now transparent, reducing unfair practices and improving parent satisfaction.

Another challenge for government entities is applying an increasingly complex body of HR, finance, supply chain and other policies. Officials spend large amounts of time dealing with colleagues charged with applying these policies. BoxFusion has built an AI policy advisor solution called Botsa to process and respond to queries on Teams, thus reducing the workload of key officials and enabling quicker turnaround on queries relating to operational policy.

Improved citizen engagement thanks to more channels to communicate with government, combined with reduced administrative burdens for frontline staff. 4IR technologies can gather information from citizen interactions and ultimately begin to enable the delivery of personalised services.

Smart infrastructure management via AI-enabled analysis of IoT data can help government maintain its infrastructure proactively. The destruction of South Africa’s infrastructure over the past decades has been profound, and as efforts to replace or repair it begin to ramp up, AI has a big role to play not only in the build phase but also in the subsequent maintenance phase.

“Integrating AI and other 4IR technologies into the public sector is imperative to improving governance and unlock new levels of efficiency, transparency and responsiveness, ultimately leading to better outcomes for citizens,” concludes Segole. “Improving service delivery and spending tax monies more wisely have never been more important.”

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