NetApp seeing growth in policing, defence and healthcare

As the public sector faces mounting challenges, from rising crime rates to strained healthcare systems, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a critical solution to drive efficiency and innovation. According to Chris Roberts, director of public sector UK&I at data management firm NetApp, the company is seeing significant growth in AI-powered initiatives across key areas of the public sector.

“The big growth areas that we’re seeing at the moment are across policing,” said Roberts. “Something like 95 percent of crimes now have a digital footprint associated with them. The way in which police forces address crime has been completely transformed, with a huge explosion of data that needs to be managed and secured.”

Roberts also highlighted the defence sector as a key growth area, as modern warfare increasingly shifts towards cyber-based strategies.

“The way in which we give our military the right capabilities and ability to combat in those scenarios, data is a huge factor in that being able to make decisions based on fact and understanding,” he said.

Beyond law enforcement and defence, the NHS is also embracing AI to tackle its own set of challenges. “There is a significant digital transformation, and the ability to leverage things like AI to make diagnoses, to be able to improve the rate of diagnoses, but also be able to alleviate that workload on what is quite a time-consuming exercise for the surgeons,” said Roberts.

While the appetite for AI across the public sector is undeniable, Roberts acknowledged the unique challenges these organisations face in implementation.

“They have their data in lots of different silos across their organisation, and the power of AI is bringing all of that data together to make the right, informed decision,” he said. “If you drop AI into the way things have been done previously, you’re not going to get the results that you expect.”

To address this, Roberts emphasised the importance of getting data ready before deploying AI solutions.

“You need to understand where your data resides today, who has access to it. How accurate is that data? Is it old? If it’s data from five years ago, you probably don’t want to go and build an answer off it today.”

Crucially, Roberts stressed that AI should not be treated as a separate, siloed infrastructure, but rather integrated into existing processes and systems. “You need to actually leverage that to gain the efficiencies of the processes that you’re already leveraging and using it to accelerate those.

This approach is particularly important given the budget constraints faced by many public sector organisations. Roberts said that the vendors and IT providers who will succeed in the public sector will be those who can integrate AI into their existing solutions without additional costs.

“I think what you will see is, particularly in terms of the tenders that are coming out from a public sector perspective, future readiness for AI is being baked into those tenders,” he said.