Accenture’s Americas Public Service Data, AI & Agentic Lead, Eyal Darmon, explores its work with Missouri DSS and how it can impact the wider public sector
Around the world, a growing number of organisations are transforming benefit distribution using AI systems.
Accenture has been embedding AI into the benefit management process through its partnership with the Missouri Department of Social Services (DSS).
“Accenture and Missouri DSS have had a really strong partnership over the last few years,” says Eyal Darmon, Americas Public Service Data, AI & Agentic Lead at Accenture.
“We’ve been able to bring to Missouri experts in contact centers, experts in engagement with residents and experts in social services.
“We’ve been able to help improve the engagement with residents and help make sure that the benefits that those individuals so greatly need are able to be provided with ease.”
Building a connected digital ecosystem
Accenture has moved Missouri DSS away from 30-year-old legacy silos into an interoperable ecosystem of engagement with residents.
It tackles the difficulty of untangling state infrastructure to enable data flow between front-end citizen-facing solutions and back-end processing.
Eyal says: “The way Accenture helps shift DSS to a unified digital ecosystem is one that requires not just Accenture, but also other partners including Google, Hyperscience, ServiceNow and RedMane.
“When you have multiple vendors engaged in an organisation, it’s always critical to make sure that everyone has awareness and transparency.
“The core of the reason we do this is to make sure that we’re providing the best capabilities and outcomes to the residents of the state. When you have that as a central goal, everything else starts to fall in line.”
Ethical AI
Accenture works on deploying an ethics-by-design approach to resident engagement for benefit distribution.
Its solutions use predictive analytics and machine learning to support residents engaging with DSS.
This means that residents can improve interaction with DSS using new AI technologies while maintaining responsible AI principals.
“We’re always making sure there is a human in the lead,” says Eyal. “What we’re relying on AI to do is to make sure that we are able to create the right automation to support both residents and DSS staff.
“In many cases, people think of AI as an accelerator– something automated that works without any human intervention. In reality, that’s not the case. We want to make sure that, across the workflow of social services, there are the right checks and balances where humans are verifying and confirming, and there should never be a circumstance by which an AI is making benefit determinations.”
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