📖 Countering the AI hype

This is a re-publish of a thing that went on LinkedIn, my newsletter, and the Digital Leaders newsletter. I’ve backdated the published date on this post to reflect this.

Summary: all this tech called ‘AI’ is genuinely exciting. But the impact of it is unlikely to be felt for several years. Don’t expect quick results, and don’t expect them to come without a hell of a lot of hard, boring work first.

It’s hard to look at LinkedIn these days without being instantly confronted by AI enthusiasts, almost foaming at the mouth as they share their vision for how the public sector can save millions, if not billions, of pounds by simply using AI.

It sounds so easy! As a chief executive I would be reading this stuff and thinking to myself, ‘why the hell aren’t my people doing this already?’.

In fact, I am hearing from digital and technology practitioners in councils all over the country saying that this is happening. That the AI hype is putting pressure on teams to start delivering on some of these promises, and to do so quickly. I find this troubling.

It’s always worth referring to my 5 statements of the bleedin’ obvious when it comes to technology in organisations:

  1. If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one
  2. You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations
  3. There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan
  4. There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic
  5. Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that

How does this apply to using AI in public services? Here’s my take on the whole thing. Feel free to share it with people in your organisation, especially if you think they may have been spending a little too long at the Kool Aid tap:

  • The various technologies referred to as ‘AI’ have huge potential, but nobody really understand what that looks like right now
  • Almost all the actual, working use cases at the moment are neat productivity hacks, that make life mostly easier but don’t deliver substantial change or indeed benefits
  • Before we can come close to understanding how these technologies can be used at scale, we need to experiment and innovate in small, controlled trials and learn from what works and what doesn’t
  • Taking the use of these technologies outside of handy productivity hacks and into the genuinely transformative change arena will involve a hell of a lot of housekeeping to be done first: accessing and cleaning up data, being a big one. Ensuring other sources for the technology to learn from is of sufficient quality (such as web page content, etc) is another. Bringing enough people up to the level of confidence and capability needed to execute this work at scale, for three – and there’s a lot more.
  • The environmental impact of these technologies is huge, and many organisations going ham on AI also happen to have declared climate emergencies! How is that square being circled? (Spoiler – it isn’t.)
  • The choice of AI technology partner is incredibly important and significant market testing will be required before operating at scale. There’s an easy option on the market that is picking up a lot of traction right now, because it’s just there. This is not a good reason to use a certain technology provider. Organisations must be very wary of becoming addicted to a service that could see prices rocket overnight. More importantly perhaps is whether you can trust a supplier, or those that supply bits of tech to them, to always do the right thing with your data. There’s always going to be an element of risk here: but at least identify it, and manage it.
  • Lastly, the quality of the outputs of these things cannot be taken on trust, and have to be checked for bias, inaccuracies and general standards. Organisations need to have an approach to ensuring checks and balances are in place, otherwise all manner of risks come into play, from the embarrassing to the potentially life-threatening.

This ended up being a lot longer than I first imagined. But I guess that just shows that this is a complex topics with a whole host of things that need to be considered.

Just remember – any messages you see claiming that AI is a technology that takes hard work away for minimal investment or effort, is at best just guesswork and at worst an outright lie.

Related to this post is a set of slides I presented to a conference in Glasgow:

Daily note for 4 October 2023

I visited Newark and Sherwood Council, just over the Nottinghamshire border, on Monday, to give a talk to their digital champions network. I borrowed the ‘5 digital things everyone needs to know about’ frame for the talk from my Digital Essentials e-learning course, and it seemed to work as a 40 odd minute talk (although I was only meant to do 20, oops).

Am open to delivering this to other organisations – probably remotely rather than in person though. If this would be useful, drop me a line and we can have a chat about it!

Local Digital evaluation study: A snapshot of our initial findings – I have views, will write them up at some point.

People. Process. Product – Three lenses to improve your digital strategy.

How we’re opening up access to GOV.UK Forms – access isn’t being opened to local government just yet, which is probably fine for now. Beyond ‘free’ I’m not sure what else GOV.UK Forms would bring to the party at this stage in its development. One important consideration for me is what it spits out once a form is submitted – am guessing some kind of XML or JSON maybe. Organisations adopting these forms will need the in house capability to do something useful with that output, which isn’t usually the case.

Interesting links 25 March 2022

Things I’ve seen that are worth sharing.

Exciting next steps for Local Digital and Cyber – Local Digital Collaboration Unit

The Local Digital and Cyber teams are going to be making some exciting changes over the next few months, backed by multi-year funding to the tune of £85 million.

We’re developing an enhanced approach that will allow us to support the local government sector to achieve even more brilliant things, as well as fix the core problems.

Stockport Council announces ambitious Radical Digital Strategy – Holly Rae, Craig Hughes & Adrian Davies

Today we have announced our ambitious new Digital Strategy. It aims to provide residents, businesses and partners with an overview of our digital ambitions for the borough, based on three broad pillars: Digital Communities, Digital Place and Digital Council.

Community of Practice Kick-off Canvas (with Miro template) – Emily Webber

The Tacit community of practice kick-off canvas helps get your community started or reset using a canvas framework that guides you through six questions… It has been available for a couple of years on my company website as a printable pdf, and I have recently turned it into a Miro board template, which anyone can use.

Interesting links 18 March 2022

Things I’ve seen that are worth sharing.

The Policymaking / DDAT Divide – Jerry Fishenden

Despite politicians’ grand ambitions for DDaT since at least 1996, it’s had relatively little impact on radical government renewal and reform. Yet the political ambition has remained fairly constant during these 26 years: to ensure users are the focus, not providers; to design services more closely around people’s needs and lives; and to deliver more effective, and higher quality public services.

Think Links icebreakers a Miro board template that you can use – Emily Webber

These two quick lateral thinking icebreaker games will help participants flex their creative thinking muscles before jumping into your workshops. I love that they help get people checked into the session and open up new ways of thinking, particularly good if you want creativity in your workshop.

How we’re building our data platform as a product – Osian Llwyd Jones

While companies large and small have made considerable gains in building a scalable and sustainable architecture, we’re left with the uncomfortable questions: is what we’re doing truly providing value? Do we really know who our users are and understand their needs? If so, can they generate insights in a fast and reliable way? As long as users don’t complain and pipelines don’t fail, does that mean all is well? For all our investment in data, are we seeing the return?

The Birmingham Digital Approach – Peter `Bishop

As we enter this new phase, I am keen that we now move away from being seen as just an IT provider to the rest of the council to one where we can start to work more collaboratively in partnership with our service leads so that we prioritise, manage our demand, design and shape and build great digital services together; a place where we cultivate and nurture an environment of working in the open; grow our digital talent and become centres of excellence of good practice across our various digital and technology disciplines.

Sharing our new user research templates and guides – Helen Calderon

Today we’re sharing the first of our new user research templates and guides. We designed these for teams working within the council, and they can easily be adapted for teams working in other councils. You’ll find these on GitHub. Download them, make them your own, and let us know if we can make them even better.

Digital age operating models, with Eddie Copeland

One of the elements of the Loosemore definition of digital that doesn’t get as much coverage as the rest is the bit about business, or operating, models. That’s probably because it’s really hard.

So I loved having this chat with LOTI‘s Eddie Copeland about his 6 ideas for future operating models for local public services, which he wrote about a few years ago when he was at Nesta.

I think it is fair to say that this really is just the start of this conversation, but I really hope that folk can take inspiration from what Eddie shares in terms of thinking about how certain services could be completely transformed from the ground up.

As I explained in this post, it isn’t always going to be possible to be truly transformative, and sometimes less ambitious approaches are more suitable. But I think every council needs to have this kind of thinking in their lockers, ready to take the opportunities as they arise.