“It’s just like a big black hole,” one applicant said after months waiting for a call back. “You have no response. You would have thought by now they would’ve figured out how to handle it better." The most recent numbers show 33,745 phone numbers waiting on returned calls from the IDES.
A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.