City officials looking for DeepSeek help

As the world is wowed by the meteoric rise of DeepSeek, a Chinese private artificial intelligence startup, cities in China are moving quickly to integrate its large language model into government services, offering a peek into the potential of AI to revolutionize public administration duties and responsibilities.

A batch of DeepSeek-powered "AI civil servants" recently rolled up their virtual sleeves and got to work in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. According to the city's Futian district, the 70 intelligent government "digital employees" are responsible for 11 major tasks, covering 240 government service scenarios, including document processing, emergency management and investment promotion.

Their efficiency is remarkable, document format correction accuracy exceeds 95 percent and review time is reduced by 90 percent, the local government said, adding that the AI assistants can instantly draft initial versions of law enforcement documents.

Shenzhen is not alone. Since the beginning of the year, Beijing and provincial authorities in Guangdong, Jiangsu, Liaoning and Jiangxi have scrambled to embrace DeepSeek.

Wang Lei, chairman of Beijing Wenge Technology Co Ltd, a Chinese AI startup, said: "DeepSeek performs exceptionally well in Chinese language processing, excelling in writing, conducting written dialogues and handling simple administrative tasks. Deploying DeepSeek marks the first step in promoting the wide adoption of AI in government services."

Wang said: "However, the real efficiency gains in government services are not achieved by merely deploying the model. Instead, they require a deeper integration of the model with local policies and measures. This involves creating an intermediate application layer that aligns with specific government needs, followed by extensive testing and feedback mechanisms to ensure high accuracy and reliability."

For example, in Beijing's Zhongguancun high-tech zone, Beijing Wenge Tech has developed such an intermediate application layer that helps the local government create a customized AI assistant named "Guanxin" to streamline administrative tasks. Guanxin primarily helps government staff with community inspections, administrative document drafting and meeting minutes. It also assists citizens and businesses with government-related inquiries and provides service guidelines.

Meanwhile, the integration of DeepSeek into the 12345 public service hotline has brought significant improvements. Previously, citizens often complained about busy lines, slow processing and lack of feedback.

With DeepSeek, the 12345 hotline system in Liaoning province has seen a 20-fold increase in data processing efficiency, automatically generating high-frequency questions and response strategies to improve call handling speed and accuracy, the local government said.

Zhang Shijia, head of the technical department of Liaoning's 12345 Hotline Platform, said DeepSeek has significantly enhanced work efficiency.

"For instance, when a citizen raises an issue that spans multiple departments, the first step is to identify which department should take primary responsibility. In the past, this identification process was done manually, with an accuracy rate of only about 85 percent. However, with DeepSeek, the accuracy has improved to over 95 percent based on its analysis of previous data," Zhang said.

But can "AI civil servants" replace human workers? Gao Zeng, deputy head of the government services and data management bureau in Futian district, Shenzhen, said AI cannot make independent decisions and may sometimes produce biased results based on training data. To mitigate ethical risks, each of Futian's 70 digital employees has a "human guardian" to ensure accountability, even if the AI makes a mistake.

So, for grassroots civil servants, AI assistance is like having an "electronic pen" and "electronic assistant", significantly improving work efficiency, experts said.

Wang Peng, associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said: "Futian district's move is a proactive attempt at intelligent government transformation, with significant innovative and practical value. In the future, more government departments and institutions will introduce AI technology to achieve intelligent and automated public services, improving work efficiency and service quality."

Wang from Beijing Wenge Tech said while AI models like DeepSeek offer significant potential, their deployment in government services faces challenges.

For instance, traditional AI models are static knowledge bases, meaning they cannot automatically incorporate new or dynamic data. There is a need to establish data engineering processes to integrate real-time and dynamic data with the model's capabilities.

Meanwhile, deploying AI large language models requires significant computational resources, which can be expensive. For example, deploying models like DeepSeek can cost millions of yuan, making it a high-barrier investment for some local governments or small and medium-sized enterprises.

To solve these problems, Beijing Wenge Tech is working to develop a better application powered by Deep-Seek. "Directly deploying DeepSeek is like having a Windows system. We still need applications such as WeChat and Word to connect with friends and to write documents."

A bigger industry challenge is that AI models can sometimes produce inaccurate or misleading results, known as "AI hallucinations". Additionally, opening the AI model to public use raises security concerns, especially when handling sensitive government data, experts said.

Despite these challenges, the integration of DeepSeek into government systems offers a potential for true "human-machine collaboration", bringing public services closer to the needs of the people and ensuring that government responses align with public needs, said Wang, the associate researcher.