Raghavendra Pratap Singh, 33, Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh
Raghavendra Pratap Singh, a civil servant in Uttar Pradesh, uses AI to draft official letters for policy implementation. Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft.
Raghavendra Pratap Singh’s job title is Review Officer in the state government of Uttar Pradesh. Essentially, he reviews and analyzes new policies then helps disseminate them to the local officers responsible for carrying them out.
He writes a lot of letters…seven or eight each day. A few months ago, his job got easier with AI tools.
Singh used to pick up a highlighter pen and go through perhaps 25 pages of dense policy to pick out bullet points. He then typed letters to various officers, details varying by relevance, printed each and put them in a file which was then hand-delivered to higher-ups for approval before being sent out.
A few months ago, Singh attended a one-day digital skills course run by Microsoft together with the state IT agency. There he learned tools like Microsoft Copilot and Copilot for Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Since then, he has started using AI tools to summarize documents and draft letters. A letter that might have taken one hour to draft now takes 40 to 45 minutes, he said. After all, he still has to bring his own analysis and expertise to the table.
“AI makes it a better letter,” he said. In the past, he might sometimes miss a minor point. “Now AI is getting the exact pointers,” he said.
He also uses AI to translate court orders in English to Hindi so he can understand them better and communicate them to other officers.
The digital skills course facilitated by Microsoft and the Uttar Pradesh Development Systems Corporation (UPDESCO), the agency in charge of IT, and run by a social enterprise called AISECT, covers AI, digital productivity and cybersecurity – in a single day.
“We have kept this very purposefully on how government officers can use it,” said trainer Ateet Dixit. More time is spent covering AI for drafting letters and documents, rather than, say, AI for creating videos, which a government officer might have less use for.
“Some people don’t even know what AI is. We have to introduce from the start,” Dixit said. “They love it when they see the result. It’s useful for them. They save so much time.”
Singh said he likes the AI tools so much he has started using them in his personal life. Recently, he typed the prompt “wedding day wish message for friend.” The message read: “Congratulations on your wedding day! Wishing you both a lifetime filled with love, laughter and endless happiness,” which he sent to the happy couple.