Why Reason Group CEO believes AI can bring back traditional customer service

William Scheer, CEO and founder at Reason Group explains how they’re introducing AI to government agencies.

AI can bring back passion within organisations as it removes parts of the “drudge work”, according to William Scheer, CEO and founder at Reason Group.

Speaking to CRN Australia at the ServiceNow World Forum in Sydney earlier this year, Scheer said AI can reduce pushing paper around and help people focus on the company’s core mission.

“If you can reduce that [work] and you let people see the mission again clearly and connect to it, there's a huge opportunity with AI to shorten the distance between someone in your back office and the customer,” he explained.

Scheer believes that when government agencies implement AI, it will bring back traditional customer service roles.

“In a public service context, it means you can put more people to the front line. That's where the magic happens,” he explained.

“We only have these big back offices because we've done all these big IT projects over time, and we're trying to make the thing more efficient.”

He added, “When you think about what the potential is pushing more stuff to the edge, smarter things at the edge, you can flip that back to what it used to be.

“Centrelink used to have offices in every town, and it was a part of the community. A lot of that is gone because of cost cutting and centralising systems. There's massive potential if you get this right, it's very human.”

Founded nearly 20 years ago, Reason Group is based in Canberra and focuses on the public sector.

They’ve worked on government agencies’ digital transformation, and only now are they working to build AI-based projects.

“In the last 12 months [it is] very much now how do we use AI in the public sector, which is good, before that it was stalled,” he said.

“In a public sector context [AI] is not a profit motive. It's how do you improve the services that the government provides.”

However, there is still some hesitation with government agencies using AI. One of the roadblocks for implementing AI is around human accountability.

“There's a paranoia around human accountability,” Scheer noted.

“You have probably heard things like ‘robodebt’ and some of these quite bad examples, and that has nothing to do with AI. It's bad governance.”

Scheer added, “The challenge with AI is things can go so fast all of a sudden that can scale a problem so quickly. That's definitely on our clients' minds. It's when it comes to core decision making for core services, it's a bit of a no go.”

The Reason Group CEO sympathises with his clients, noting adoption of AI is “always hard”.

He explained there is a technology first, humans second mentality.

"The difference with AI is that you can do smaller chunks, and so the change becomes more obvious quickly.”

Reason Group has some government clients like those in the intelligence realm and taxation who are used to AI-driven processes, and others not so much.

To help introduce those more nascent to the technology, Scheer is taking it day by day.

“It is eating the elephant piece by piece,” he explained.

“We are rolling out ServiceNow HR delivery service (HRSD) out for one client, that's got AI capabilities in it,” he said.

“Our customer had 12 inboxes of emails and haemorrhaging everywhere, and so that's now all in one system. It's all there's AI knowledge assistance, so people can self-serve.

Over the next year, Scheer and his team are focusing on automating more governance for their clients.

“For me, it's that providing that real-time view of the business to people so that they can see what's happening, they can see when things are going wrong,” he said.

“This technology you have to monitor it in the in the in the real world because it will start to wander, then you need to be able to pull it back.”