Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has in record time become a common tool and is reaching into public administration as well. From summarizing long documents to assisting on hotlines, it saves time and reduces stress for officials. Examples from Slovakia and the Czech Republic show that pilots are turning into real services.
Generative AI is changing the rhythm of government offices
Generative AI gained 100 million users in three months, whereas it took mobile phones 16 years to reach that mark. Such a pace suggests a technology that is rapidly permeating everyday practice, including within the state. For officials, it mainly means faster processing of information and less manual work where tasks can be automated.
The speaker likened the models to "a college student who has read all the books," but they need to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Even without special training, however, they can streamline the workload — for example, accurately summarizing a 60–80-page document and helping decide what deserves attention. Several offices already use them to filter out nonessential materials and shorten the time that would otherwise be spent on lengthy reading.
Copilot in the office: from summarization to presentations
In the Microsoft 365 environment, Copilot today reads a document, highlights the key points, and prepares working materials. For long strategies or analyses, it offers a concise summary that can be elaborated further. The goal is not to replace the expert but to shorten routine tasks and free up time for decision-making.
Another practical feature is creating presentations from materials or on a given topic; the output is not usually perfect, but experience shows it saves approximately 85 % of the time. In Excel, you can ask it to find data across multiple sheets without macros or knowledge of SQL. Similarly, in Word, Copilot proposes an outline, edits text, or pulls out the required information so that people can focus on the content, not the form.
Real deployments: Slovakia and the Czech Republic
In Slovakia, a Proof of Concept is running at the Supreme Audit Office, where AI prepares a draft of the final report from individual audit protocols. The aim is to significantly shorten work that currently takes about a month. The Financial Administration has deployed a methodological AI assistant that answers officials' questions about procedures in specific situations and makes it easier to navigate methodologies.
In the Czech Republic, the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is piloting a virtual assistant, Eva, who takes on the first line of communication and relieves the overloaded call center (previously up to around 60 % of calls ended as unresolved). The same ministry uses AI to convert hand-filled benefit applications into text, which saved the work of 15 people and shortened processing roughly from 52 to 32 days. Other examples include automatic sorting of mail in the mailroom or an assistant for investigators that prepares a draft report from an interrogation and suggests relevant sections of the law. The common denominator is pilot verification in real conditions and deployment where the benefit is immediately measurable.
