NHS Shared Business Services and Salesforce have unveiled an AI-driven digital platform intended to overhaul finance and procurement support across the NHS, in a move the partners say will cut administrative friction and speed up routine queries.
The new service, SBS One, acts as a single digital help centre for staff and suppliers dealing with invoice and procurement issues. Built on Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 for Public Sector, it combines automation, self-service function...
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s and AI agents in one system, with the aim of directing straightforward requests to software and sending more complicated cases to specialist teams with the relevant context attached.
At the heart of the platform is “Agent Murphy”, an AI assistant designed to interpret natural language and deal with common requests without human intervention. NHS SBS says the tool can provide immediate responses for simple enquiries, helping reduce waiting times and allowing staff to spend more time on higher-value work.
The company says the platform forms part of a wider multi-million pound investment in a unified finance and procurement service. NHS SBS, which says it handles hundreds of billions of pounds of NHS funding each year, has long promoted digital transformation as a way to reduce duplication, improve visibility and make purchasing and accounting processes more efficient.
Salesforce said the launch marks a shift from experimentation with AI to larger-scale deployment in public services. Zahra Bahrololoumi, chief executive of Salesforce UKI, said the project showed how data, automation and AI agents could be brought together to support frontline services more effectively.
NHS SBS said the new system is already handling most initial contact digitally, with 84% of queries from NHS staff now starting on the platform. It said average handling times have fallen by 20%, while the time needed to raise a query has dropped from 12 minutes to three. Most issues are now resolved within 24 hours, according to the organisation.
The company also said only a small share of invoices it processes generate queries, but that the platform is intended to make those interactions faster and clearer for suppliers and NHS teams alike.
The launch builds on NHS SBS’s broader move towards standardising financial operations. In March, Oracle said NHS SBS was using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to support financial management across the NHS, describing the organisation as a major processor of NHS transactions. Separately, NHS SBS says its finance and accounting services already use cloud-based tools to automate much of the repetitive work associated with purchase-to-pay processes.
John Murphy, head of customer excellence at NHS SBS, said the project showed that a contact centre could be redesigned as a harmonised service that works for all users while still advancing AI adoption across the organisation. He said the service is now outperforming its targets.
NHS SBS said it plans to extend AI into more service areas, including supplier query handling, email management and case workflows. It expects AI agents could eventually manage as much as half of service demand.
Source: Noah Wire Services
