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As emergency services face mounting operational pressures, automation and AI are fast becoming essential tools to improve efficiency and cut costs. Robiquity is working with forces including Greater Manchester Police and Durham Constabulary to reduce time-consuming manual tasks, streamline safeguarding workflows and return critical hours to frontline officers.

Ahead of The Emergency Tech Show, we caught up with Liam Gibson, Delivery Lead at Robiquity to explore how the company’s problem-led approach to automation is helping emergency services deliver faster, safer and more effective public protection.

1. You’re known for your strong AI and automation capabilities – how are you helping emergency services become more cost-effective and operationally efficient?

The cost and efficiency pressures being faced by emergency services have never been more prevalent, and we’ve seen first hand that intelligent automation, AI and low code solutions can dramatically move the needle on both metrics.

At Robiquity, we always take a problem statement led approach to opportunity identification and solution prioritisation. In practice, this means that we agree with the police force which of their end to end processes are seen as driving inefficiency and cost, we conduct end to end discovery across each problematic process and identify a suite of potential solutions with fully documented business cases that can then be prioritised for delivery in lock-step with our client.

One of the areas we’ve seen significant success with is Safeguarding, which is typically a very time consuming process requiring significant manual effort, drives significant cost for each force via the FTE requirement, and has a direct impact on that force’s ability to protect members of the public. The FTE requirement in safeguarding is driven by 4 key factors:

• Data to inform decision making needs to be manually retrieved from multiple systems
• Data needs to be manually reviewed by SMEs to come to a decision for each case in question
• Decisions and the data supporting them needs to be documented in a templated format for disclosure to the required members of the public
• Disclosure needs to be manually communicated to and discussed with the member of the public

Robiquity have built a solution for Greater Manchester Police which currently addresses the first two of these effort drivers, and will soon address the third also. In short, the required data to support decision making is now pulled automatically from core systems removing the need to do this manually.

It is then presented in a single pane of glass application to accelerate the SME’s review of the data collected and enable faster decision making. Discussions around the future scope of this solution centre on (a) using AI to better summarise data and pick out key records for prioritised review to accelerate decision making further, and (b) automate the population of templates used for disclosure to the member of the public.

Once the full scope of this solution is delivered, we believe the effort required to process Safeguarding cases across workflows such as Clare’s Law and Sarah’s Law can be reduced by well above 50%.

2. You’ve had significant success with Greater Manchester Police as well as Durham Constabulary – can you share insights into how these projects are transforming frontline policing?

Solutions delivered across our entire portfolio are having a significant transformative impact on frontline policing. The safeguarding use case above illustrates one example of this in terms of enabling much faster response times for members of the public by leveraging the available technology, to ensure the police can protect vulnerable individuals much earlier on than would otherwise be the case.

We’re also looking at a series of other solutions which aim at dramatically reducing the portion of time officers are spending on manual, back office activity and can spend more time in the community adding value and protecting the public.

One example of this is within Criminal Justice. We’re currently looking at solutions to significantly accelerate the creation of Charge Files for cases following criminal activity, a process which at present demands hundreds of thousands of officer time each year across the country. By using the automation and AI tools available, we can reduce the time it takes to create the documentation to take cases to prosecution by over half, giving thousands of hours back to front line officers to dedicate to their communities.

3. How do you ensure ethical and responsible use of AI in public sector environments, particularly in sensitive areas like policing?

The ethical angle on usage of AI is absolutely critical and something that Robiquity is very cognizant of.

Firstly, we always make sure at the outset of any engagement that we understand and align to the Forces’ own internal policies and ethical standards around usage of AI, and in many cases we recommend updates and additions to these standards to ensure the correct coverage. This drives internal alignment within each force in terms of how AI is to be used and what it will be used for.

The second component is around ensuring the technology is selected for the right use cases. AI is an amazing tool with almost limitless potential, but it is by no means perfect at this stage. Our expertise means we can be very clear with clients at the outset around which use cases are a good fit for AI technologies, and which should not be pursued.

Finally, we always take a risk based approach to AI based solutions. Some use cases such as Safeguarding are so critical in terms of the decisions made that very high standards need to be maintained around how technology is used and relied upon. For these solutions with such a high risk profile, we always recommend using AI as a supporting tool for human agents to accelerate their reviews and decision making rather than trusting AI as a silver bullet solution. In this case, we always recommend a ‘human in the loop’ type approach which allows a ‘fail safe’ mechanism for issues or errors in the outputs of AI to be caught and rectified before incorrect decisions are made which could potentially put members of the public in harm’s way.

4. With the evolving demands on emergency services, how do you ensure its solutions remain adaptable and future-proof?

The demands on emergency services are changing all the time, and this change is coming faster than ever before, so adaptable and future proof solutions are more critical than ever. Again, there are a range of ways that we provide this capability of adaptability and continuous improvement to our clients.

We often see that underlying business processes themselves need to change with the times and with regulatory / legal change, which often means solutions themselves need to be updated. Robiquity offer a dedicated Managed Service offering to all of our policing clients which allows these changes to be implemented as and when required, to avoid any service interruption and operational impact.

This Managed Service offering also proves especially valuable when process SMEs identify opportunities for Continuous Improvement of solutions already delivered, and provides each force with a way to quickly and easily implement improvements to existing solutions without needing to mobilise a brand new change programme to do so.

The technology landscape and key technology platforms are changing on a weekly basis. These changes provide new features and functionality that unlocks new value potential for forces and enables new solutions to be delivered that would previously not have been feasible. Through our relationships with key technology vendors such as Microsoft, Blue Prism and UIPath, we often get first sight of new technology capabilities which we can then feed into our clients to both improve on existing solutions and explore new value realisation opportunities.

The real benefit of the solutions we build is that by virtue of the low code technology platforms we use, delivery is very quick indeed. New solutions can typically be delivered within a matter of weeks, and this alone makes responding to any changing requirements or ‘future-proofing’ asks much quicker and cheaper than using more traditional development methods or attempting to customise the typically ridged out of the box Commercial Off the Shelf offerings.

5. How do your collaborations with Microsoft enhance your delivery of automation in high-pressure, critical public sector environments like emergency services?

Our partnership with Microsoft is invaluable in delivery for our emergency services clients. First of all, it gives us a really clear picture of the market in terms of solutions which have been delivered elsewhere (either by ourselves or other partners), which we can then bring to our clients to spark ideas for new opportunities. This means we can identify viable opportunities with significant ROI much quicker than most providers on the market today.

The second benefit this partnership brings us is a really intimate understanding of the capabilities of the Microsoft technology stack to address new problem statements. This allows us to become genuine strategic advisors to our clients by being really clear with which use cases are feasible, which are not, and to ensure that clients are dedicating their budget only towards initiatives which have a clear return on investment.

Finally, our partnership gives us very early sight of the Microsoft Product Roadmaps, meaning we are always clear on functionality and capabilities which are coming down the line. This allows us to help our clients structure their strategic transformation roadmaps by thinking about what can be sensibly delivered today, as well as what the emerging technology landscape will allow to be delivered in the medium and longer term. This is pivotal for us, as we want to be supporting clients to implement genuine strategic transformation to enable long term success, rather than delivering more tactical solutions that only provide benefit today.

6. How do you tailor your automation solutions for the broader emergency services landscape beyond policing, such as fire and ambulance services?

The real beauty of Robiquity’s delivery model is the problem-statement led discovery which informs our delivery roadmap with all clients. Whilst many of the challenges faced by Policing are relevant to fire and ambulance, these organisations face their own unique challenges that require more specific solutions.

Our Discovery approach means that we can align with the leadership of new clients around what their specific challenges are, and support the design of customised solutions which address their specific and prioritised problem statements, as opposed to forcing ‘cookie-cutter’ solutions upon them.

The real benefit here is that by starting with big problem statements that are seen as strategically important for the organisation, we always know that any solution delivered is much more likely to drive a more strategic benefit profile than by looking for tactical solutions as is often the case with a more ‘technology led’ approach.