FEATURE
AI tools while putting appropriate governance, assurance and training around their use.
FWC’ s internal deployments provide an early indication of how that approach could work operationally.
Public-facing agents next
Having initially used internal systems as a proving ground, the Commission is now preparing to expand Agentic AI into services used directly by the public. A contact centre agent is already under development.
Pope initially expected frontline employees to be concerned about automation entering this part of the organisation. Instead, he said employees were interested in removing the routine work involved in triaging enquiries so they could concentrate on helping people with more complex problems.
“ Those at the frontlines said, no, triaging calls is the last thing they want to be caught up with,” he said.“ They wanted to focus on actually helping the people they connected with.”
For Pope, this highlights an important distinction in calculating the return on AI investment.
“ Your better ROI comes from removing friction points in people’ s day jobs, not from where you think you can see cost savings,” he said.
FWC is also participating in the development of Workato’ s Data Genie, with Pope acting as a design partner and providing feedback on government requirements ahead of wider availability.
The Commission’ s experience suggests that deploying Agentic AI rapidly in government does not necessarily require bypassing governance or compliance. Instead, its approach has been to establish those requirements early, train teams before implementation and prioritise applications that can be configured and reused.
“ Find what you can reuse first,” Pope said.“ Don’ t get stuck researching where your internal ROI is and commissioning a bespoke solution every time. Research where you can pick something up and just configure it for your use case.”
For government organisations still weighing how to introduce Agentic AI safely, FWC provides an interesting test case. Its most significant achievement may not be that an hour-long process can now be completed in two minutes, but that it has demonstrated how AI applications can move into production quickly while retaining human oversight and governance. •
Pope argues that AI productivity projects need to go further than simply calculating the number of employee hours saved.
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