The DfE's goal is to save schools £36m per year through better procurement by providing a service, staffed with procurement experts, that'll assist 7500 schools in getting better goods and service deals by 2031. Scaling that specialist human support to include every potential state school can be challenging, however. Over 6 weeks, Transform supported the DfE in experimenting how AI might help scale that specialist procurement service.
We started with a 2-week discovery to understand the end-to-end service and where we could improve efficiency. From there we identified an opportunity to improve triage of new cases, and to generate a first draft specification.
With both things being time-intensive for procurement experts, with frequent correspondence being exchanged between the school and the service, we focused on generating a first draft spec and formed a hypothesis that AI could save staff time by generating a first draft, using past cases and available school data.
Schools are not experts in procurement and so we wanted to make building a first draft spec as simple and accurate as possible.
We built a chatbot to identify information that was needed and that a school could answer immediately (for example, ’how many pupils’ rather than ‘provide a kitchen inventory’.) helping us generate specs instantly.
We used previous specifications as a ‘gold standard’ to teach the model. From this, we created 3 versions of prompts to create specifications: one using a template, one using previous specs, and one using both. We experimented to generate specs from each.
We generated an accurate and usable procurement spec in 46 seconds. This could lead to the procurement team potentially saving 1-3 hours of calls per case, and giving schools up to a 2-week head start to collect the additional data they’d need to complete a procurement spec.
We also found that human input was necessary – either because some data could not be generated by AI (it needed school input) or because there were significant risks with allowing a tool like this to be used by schools without supervision. This has informed DfE’s approach to AI usage in the future.
time saved per case
to generate a first draft procurement spec