Artificial Intelligence and the Public Sector—Applications and Challenges

TLDR

Artificial intelligence has attracted significant attention and offers many opportunities for the public sector, yet prior studies examine its applications and challenges in isolation, creating a need for a comprehensive, holistic overview. The study aims to compile and analyze literature to produce an integrative overview of AI applications and challenges in the public sector. The authors conduct a conceptual literature review, compiling insights to create an integrative overview of AI applications and challenges in the public sector. The review identifies ten AI application areas with specific public use cases, four major challenge dimensions, and offers implications for theory, practice, and future research.

Abstract

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have attracted great attention from researchers and practitioners and have opened up a broad range of beneficial opportunities for AI usage in the public sector. Against this background, there is an emerging need for a holistic understanding of the range and impact of AI-based applications and associated challenges. However, previous research considers AI applications and challenges only in isolation and fragmentarily. Given the lack of a comprehensive overview of AI-based applications and challenges for the public sector, our conceptual approach analyzes and compiles relevant insights from scientific literature to provide an integrative overview of AI applications and related challenges. Our results suggest 10 AI application areas, describing their value creation and functioning as well as specific public use cases. In addition, we identify four major dimensions of AI challenges. We finally discuss our findings, deriving implications for theory and practice and providing suggestions for future research.