Smartbots for Citizens: The Government of the Future

Booking a vacation? Most of us will use next-generation web tools and virtually intelligent personal assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to easily research and book flights, hotels and activities. But what if your vacation is turning into a staycation and you’re looking for fun and free things to do in your community’s background? Meet the problem solver at Booz Allen Hamilton helping to bring next-generation services to the government. Meet Sumeet Vij.

Consumer technology continues to advance at a rapid pace. In today’s digital world, the insatiable demand for this advanced technology is making government agencies rethink the way they provide services to its constituents.

“Today there is a gap between the experience of Amazon, Netflix, and Google compared to government services when it comes to finding, discovery, and recommending useful information,” says Sumeet Vij, Chief Technologist at Booz Allen. “At its core, citizen service is about finding information and completing transactions with the least amount of friction, but the expectation for that has changed dramatically in recent years.”

While some government agencies are currently offering the capabilities that rival those of top tech companies, there’s more to be done. Vij argues that there is a solution. “Rapid advances in analytics and its availability via open source solutions is empowering deep personalization, natural language search, and virtual assistant capabilities,” he says. “We’ve taken a lot of that technology and embedded it in our own platform called DEXi that lives on top of existing services and applications.”

Consider benefits.gov, for example. After implementing DEXi, benefits.gov page views increased by 33 percent while bounce rates decreased by 25 percent. In short, the site became more engaging “Benefits.gov now uses past user behaviors, content recommendations, and ‘people who viewed this, also viewed’ to dramatically increase citizen engagement,” reports Vij. “Now with a continuously learning system and more personalized content, the website is better positioned to address the agency’s mission.”

This new system could have a massive impact on many government agencies. Technology like DEXi can enhance the user experience, improve efficiency, and reduce costs to citizens. In fact:

• DEXi can answer a variety of citizen questions and direct people to useful information, freeing up human operators for more complicated work.
• Like Amazon’s popular Alexa assistant, DEXi can connect citizens with information and services they need from government sites, quickly and easily.

“With this encouraging technology, we’re helping government and commercial clients leapfrog to the front of the line, making their digital experiences smarter, better, and more natural for concerned, interested, or previously unfamiliar citizens,” concluded Vij.

Booz Allen has piloted and is now deploying DEXi for defense, federal, and commercial clients—everything from enabling smart search on websites to creating chatbots for helpdesk support.

To learn more about how Booz Allen is preparing the government for today’s Digital Citizen, visit: boozallen.com/expertise/digital-solutions