ACTS investigation capabilities help governments achieve transparency goals

The foundational mission of ACTS, Microsoft’s Advanced Cloud Transparency Services initiative, is to help governments mobilize the power of data and technology to proactively identify risk signals for corruption and improve transparency. Every solution area that ACTS offers has an investigations component. The ability to bring together data sets, once isolated, in transformative new ways, offers a lot of flexibility to governments.

Our solutions use advanced technology like AI to enable governments to make better use of their available data and offer capabilities to gain insights more easily from different types of data. Now, emails, SMS messages, documents, images, videos, sound files, and more—which were previously very time-consuming to analyze manually—can automatically be examined quickly and efficiently.

As a result, governments can more quickly assess risk signals and conduct more thorough investigations. And employees do not need to be data scientists to deliver these outcomes.

New technology transforms investigative work

Data in organizations is often stored in different departments or systems, making it difficult for investigators to access and analyze. And while there is often valuable information in emails, voicemails, text messages, videos, and documents, this kind of unstructured data does not always line up neatly in the databases that traditional computing requires.

The new tools and processes developed by ACTS can help governments apply advanced data analysis to uncover suspicious patterns, identify potential risk signals sooner, and resolve investigations more quickly. ACTS solutions are designed to mitigate some of the problems that can hamper investigations.

Advanced technology like AI in our solutions enables better use of the available data from diverse sources and in multiple formats. New capabilities for query and analysis allow government employees to accelerate investigations, expand their data field of view, and do more in less time.

There are multiple ways ACTS solutions transform government investigative work:

Decrease data silos. The ability of ACTS solutions to use and digest different types of data from diverse sources allows investigators to discover and analyze more information that they previously may not have been able to easily access.

Intuitive query capabilities open new investigative opportunities. The technology allows investigators to query data in ways that are more intuitive than having to learn specific ways of working with data. Data searches and queries can be typed into a chat-type interface using natural language, which returns results driven by an AI large language model trained on the organization’s own data. And the answers are framed in context or use visualizations so that investigators can gain insights without advanced data science expertise.

Investigations can be faster. The AI and machine learning components of our solutions enable direct use of multiple forms of data like emails, pictures, videos, or documents. As unstructured data no longer needs to be searched through manually or converted into suitable formats for traditional databases, the pace of investigations can increase dramatically.

Investigations can be more comprehensive and proactive. Providing the ability to work with multiple sources and types of data expands the field of view, so investigators can search through all available data thoroughly to gain insights they would not otherwise have. Dashboards and reports constructed to identify risk signals or suspicious patterns in data enable more proactive investigations.

The ACTS initiative’s solutions enable governments to achieve better transparency—more quickly and thoroughly.