AI plans for £2bn HMRC customer service overhaul revealed

Further details of HMRC’s project to modernise services and transform customer service experience have been revealed, including plans to support first-contact query resolution and introduce AI agents to reduce workloads.

The transformation is being delivered through a 15 year strategic agreement with software company Salesforce, worth up to £2 billion, which will supply a cloud-based customer relationship management platform to consolidate often fragmented legacy systems.

The agreement, awarded in September, covers capabilities spanning customer records, case management, messaging, marketing campaigns, reporting, analytics, and AI.

This comes as HMRC, which supports 34 million citizens and five million businesses, seeks to make 90% of routine customer interactions digital by 2030.

This week, Salesforce outlined how the technology will allow caseworkers to see a taxpayer's complete contact history across different channels, with this intended to permit the faster resolution of issues and prevent citizens from needing to repeat information.

The system will also use an AI agent platform, Agentforce, to automate routine administration and triage queries for staff, as well as to direct complex cases to the appropriate specialist. However, Salesforce emphasises that human oversight will remain integral to the process, and said that the platform will adhere to strict data protection standards.

Aside from Agentforce, Salesforce will also leverage Public Sector Solutions and Marketing Cloud, which are underpinned by its Data 360 platform.

UK AI data analytics and decision-making company Quantexa is also involved in the deployment, providing software to connect complex data and detect potential fraud. Its technology will provide HMRC caseworkers with real-time risk scores, and is aimed at helping to uncover hidden fraud networks.

Salesforce has pledged to allocate 15% of its professional advisory services work under the HMRC project to UK small and medium-sized enterprises, stating that this will “ensur[e] local businesses play a direct role in shaping and evolving HMRC’s digital platform.”

Featured Image Credit: Carlos Delgado via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)