CW+ Premium Content/CW Asia-Pacific

Services Australia and Capgemini have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) engine in a pilot project to classify and extract information from documents submitted by citizens who are applying for Centrelink, Medicare and Child Support payments and services. Built on open-source natural language processing and optical character recognition (OCR) tools, the AI engine has enabled Services Australia to cut down the time it takes to process citizen documents – which can go up to 25,000 per day – from weeks to seconds. Olaf Pietschner, CEO and managing director of Capgemini in Australia and New Zealand, said through the use of progressive scale expansion networks and regression-based neural networks, the project has achieved an accuracy rate of 95%. Work on the project started in August 2019 when Capgemini was asked by Services Australia to demonstrate how intelligent technology could be used to classify documents uploaded by citizens in their payment claims. At the time, the backlog for classification was thought to be around ...