Hello from GOV.UK AI Studio
Future public services are personalised, proactive, and joined-up. They are less overwhelming and time-consuming to use, and deliver more personal value to people.
AI can help us get there, because it can translate complex policy and fragmented service journeys into interactions that make sense for individuals, based on their circumstances. Services mediated by AI can be different from the ones that we are used to: they can be generative, conversational, multi-modal, autonomous. It presents new opportunities for public services and that’s why at GDS, we are exploring how AI can help users, and we are building new products like GOV.UK Chat.
AI is also a new material to build with, and there’s so much to learn. There are a lot of questions that we need to answer about what interacting with the public sector will feel like if it’s enabled by AI:
- How should interactions look?
- How should interactions feel?
- How do we ensure they really make lives easier and reduce burden?
- What kinds of product categories should exist that previously didn’t?
- What should a relationship between the government and the public be like?
- What happens to trust?
- What principles, practices and patterns do we need to use when designing?
We need shared answers to these questions in government to make sure we deliver on the promise of AI in public services. This is why we have set up our GOV.UK AI Studio team. This is part of a dedicated programme of work on citizen-facing agentic AI and how it can help us to deliver the next-generation of public sector services. AI Studio is a design-led, multidisciplinary team, all working towards the goal of exploring the opportunity that this technology presents for citizens.
We are:
- testing new interactions needed for a world of AI
- supporting other teams working on GOV.UK AI
- inventing new product propositions
- documenting patterns and principles to use in AI-enabled experiences across government
- creating patterns to protect privacy and trust in data-rich experiences
There’s so much to learn about how to use AI positively, helpfully, and responsibly. Just over the last month, we have been prototyping hybrid interfaces, agents that access government APIs, service typologies, data permission patterns, and more. We’ll be sharing much more detail about our work in these areas on this site over the next few weeks and months.
This work must be collaborative to succeed as we invent new ways for government services to function. We’re looking to partner with departments to explore use cases and apply design patterns we develop. We want this to be useful for everyone in the public sector, so we want to share our insights and platform capabilities for the wider benefit
You can follow along with our work and discussions on this site, where we will regularly publish work.
If your team is working on conversational AI or personalising services and want to collaborate, you can email us at govuk-ai@dsit.gov.uk.
We believe sharing early and frequently is vital for driving systemic change. We look forward to working with you to harness the power of AI for the public good.