The Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence in Serbia for the period 2020-2025 defines three key areas in which artificial intelligence can significantly contribute to the public good and the provision of better and higher quality services. These are public administration, health and medicine, traffic, road infrastructure and mobility in urban areas.
Public Administration
Within the implementation of public administration reform, progress has been made in establishing user-oriented eGovernment by providing an adequate legal framework, necessary infrastructure and interoperability, optimization and digitalization of administrative procedures and services. For the further development of electronic services, the application of innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence is necessary.
Advanced solutions for business analytics and prediction (so-called business intelligence) provide a more comprehensive and objective insight into the situation and contribute to more rational use of resources, better and more efficient planning and management and better informed strategic decision-making. The implementation of conversational user interfaces and virtual assistants (so-called chatbots) on national portals will provide citizens and businesses services in a way that better suits their specific needs, at any given moment.
Intelligent solutions provide personalization of services, customer support, simplify the process of filling out electronic forms, and the implementation of feedback mechanisms provides further refinement of the model. The use of artificial intelligence accelerates multiple times many routine procedures in which the party's request is decided solely on the basis of objective facts such as attached documentation or data already stored in registers and records, especially in cases where the fulfillment of the criteria for making a positive decision for the party is clear and unquestionable.
During the design, development and implementation of public sector services based on artificial intelligence, the reliability of the applied solution, protection of privacy and user data, as well as multi-channel access will be enabled, i.e. the user will be enabled to interact with the employee, i.e. will be provided with human-mediated service delivery.
Health and Medicine
Artificial intelligence in the healthcare system significantly improves early diagnosis, provides better availability of all resources and equipment, optimizes their use and contributes to improving the quality and efficiency of health services.
Traffic, Road Infrastructure and Mobility in Urban Areas
Application of AI significantly improves traffic planning and flow, enables optimization of traffic signalization and real-time traffic management and, taking into account real-time conditions, provides a quick response to traffic situations that could not have been foreseen.
Examples of good practice in the public sector are the Electric Power Industry of Serbia and the Tax Administration.
For Electric Power Industry of Serbia, a public enterprise engaged in the production, supply and distribution of electricity, as well as trade in electricity in our country, a precise assessment of the demand for electricity is very important. In order to improve the consumption forecast, i.e. power demand, the company is implementing a new solution combining Microsoft Azure Machine Learning with Power Apps and Power BI. Thanks to this approach, data entry and visualization is simpler, as is the ability to predict electricity demand in the long run. In this way, Electric Power Industry of Serbia managed to reduce the time for prediction and margin of error beyond all expectations.
The modernization of the work of the Tax Administration will be carried out in cooperation with the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the University of Novi Sad through the research project “Detecting the risk of evading personal income tax based on appropriate methods using artificial intelligence”.