White Mail The DWP's automated letter reader

When your mailbag brims with 25,000 letters and emails every day, deciding which to answer first is daunting.

- Robert Booth

When lurking within are pleas for help from some of the country's most vulnerable people, the stakes only get higher.

That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants - of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first - including handwritten letters.

Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting too long for help. But White Mail is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for human officials to get to first.