FCDO Correspondence Triage — the UK Foreign Office's AI Classifier for Consular Enquiries

The FCDO receives roughly 100,000 written consular enquiries a year from British nationals abroad — lost passports, deaths overseas, marriages, emergencies — and manual triage meant response times of several days. Correspondence Triage combines Microsoft AI Builder models (entity extraction, category classification, language detection), GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini prompts (summarisation, theme detection, sentiment) and robotic process automation that logs the result into the FCDO's case-management system, eCase.

The tool assigns a case type and predicted fields for each incoming email; caseworkers can overwrite any prediction, and the system explicitly does not draft or send responses — every reply still goes through human review. Data is held for 60 days then deleted.

The FCDO's published Algorithmic Transparency Record reports task-level accuracy from user-acceptance testing: 73.33% for auto email classification, an F1 score of 0.8512 for extracting geographical names, and 0.90-0.95 accuracy for case-type and 'no response required' determinations. Separately, FCDO officials told public-sector press that written enquiries fell by around 80% and phone calls by up to 50% within three months of the March 2024 go-live, with the mailbox since averaging roughly 30,500 emails a month.

Those outcome figures are self-reported by the department rather than independently audited, and the ATR itself flags real risks: dependency on the system if it goes offline, and Microsoft's content-moderation layer filtering some sensitive inputs, with flagged cases going to manual review. The team deliberately avoided a free-form generative interface in favour of matching enquiries to pre-approved, human-written content.