Artificial Intelligence may be popular today, but it will be critical to the future of public services. This was the central theme delegates heard at Elastic’s flagship Public Sector Summit, held at County Hall in Waterloo.
The event brought together senior decision-makers from the UK government and public and private sector organisations, for insightful keynote talks that explored the use of AI for the public good, bridging the skills gap, and the wider geopolitical context of AI. Delegates heard first-hand from industry leaders who shared their AI and data deployment experiences and practical strategies for success, with open discussions between participants.
Speakers explored how government leaders can better leverage all types of data – structured and unstructured – as a strategic asset for AI insights to help improve public services for civilians, strengthen cybersecurity efforts, and drive IT monitoring efforts and cloud-first transformations. In the face of increasing cost pressures and a constantly evolving threat landscape, there is potential for AI to save £40bn in public spending while improving public services.
What was clear on the day is that businesses and government departments in the UK are using the Elastic Search AI Platform – which combines the precision of search and the intelligence of AI – to build transformative applications, proactively resolve observability issues, and address complex security threats – all with the power of Search AI.
For example, astute relevance and real-time insights help the NHS search and visualise data, improving care opportunities and reducing the time to solutions for patients. Meanwhile, banks, the Met Office and HMRC use Elastic’s search AI solutions to improve customer and business experiences.
Alex Richardson, chief technology officer, cyber & intelligence at Northrop Grumman, discussed how Elastic could help public sector organisations maintain regulatory compliance: “Elastic has become an integral element of our technology stack. The team’s open and collaborative approach has been instrumental in allowing us to identify and develop new use cases to address our unique requirements as we deliver critical services to the UK public sector.”
Efficiency, upskilling and innovation will be the ticket to realising further opportunities, bringing together human creativity and empathy with AI to tackle inefficiencies for public good, as shared by one of the keynote speakers at the event.
Max Vetter, vice-president of Cyber at Immersive Labs, told New Statesman Spotlight on the day, “How can we improve the outcome for the customer, whether that’s the government or the private sector? It’s not even about innovation or AI, it’s about what’s the fastest outcome you can deliver.”
Building trust in data and the future
Speakers highlighted the necessity for security in an uncertain future. Throughout the day, real-world case studies illustrated this, exemplifying how observability and security solutions are helping governments and education teams maximise value from vast amounts of data, while building a more resilient future in the UK.
Speakers agreed the need for certainty and trust when leveraging generative AI for security purposes. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a key component of building generative AI solutions that are fit for purpose. Because generative AI is only as reliable as its underlying training data, the inclusion of RAG adds an additional level of trust and security through context-based search. It allows for flexibility and the rapid detection of threats without total retraining of the model, which is a particularly expensive and time-consuming process. Using retrieval augmentation technology, Elastic is helping public sector organisations assess alerts holistically, with full context of their data, rather than as one-off events.
This simplifies work for security analysts and reduces the amount of deep technical knowledge required, added Michael Morris, senior director of Technology Alliances at Endace, in his discussion exploring always-on capture.
“We can feed metadata and flow data into Elastic to make customers more intelligent about what’s happening on the network,” Morris told New Statesman Spotlight on the day. “Customers can then pivot from Elastic to EndaceProbes for deep forensic investigations. Solutions like ours can scale to customer needs effectively, giving them historical visibility to what’s happening on the network. They may have identified an infected host, but was there lateral movement, or data exfiltration? Those are hard questions you don’t always get out of log data alone.”
Such solutions reduce the burden on security analysts as they investigate security events, simplifying the workflow for basic triage.
Upskilling the UK with AI
Upskilling strategies to leverage tools effectively and assess risk appetite were discussed in talks throughout the day. Max Vetter, from Immersive Labs, went on to highlight the quality of perseverance being key in the process of identifying transferable talent as well as in security training through their gamified training platform, which is delivered in partnership with Elastic.
“The reason hackers are successful is because they have multiple skills and motivations, and will keep going until they find a way to infiltrate,” Vetter told Spotlight, outlining how the Immersive Labs gamified training platform helps to identify talent parallel to a ‘hacker mindset’. “That’s what we see through the platform, then we can show that back to our customers to show that hidden talent.”
“We’re all here for national security,” Michael Morris from Endace said in his discussion on the event, reiterating the sentiment from all speakers in the public sector event, that while the future is uncertain, protecting national infrastructure will be critical, and technology is here to help. “The need for everyone to work together, sharing best practices and tools is really where it’s going to be,” Morris later told Spotlight. “It’s success for the good guys.”
Related
