Innovating with AI: Monitor the hype, be driven by value and build justifiable trust
We find ourselves hurtling towards Summer 2024, close to 18 months since ChatGPT caused us to reconsider – or at the very least ponder – what it means to be intelligent and creative, opening up a new world of possibilities on our journey towards improved Government Services.
It’s all extremely exciting, but it can feel like we’re still in the age of hype rather than the era of adopting next generation applications, where moving from experiment to AI-enabled Government digital products is still a little out of reach. The reality sits somewhere in the middle.
For many businesses, it is possible that by carefully monitoring the horizon (the hype), focusing on value and establishing a scaffold of justified trust, we can realise the benefits of this technology sooner rather than later.
Monitoring the hype
It is crucial for Government to remain curious and aware on AI. However, the pace of change in AI will naturally introduce the sort of weariness that organisations experience when they attempt to implement too many (however well intentioned) change activities at once; change fatigue.
Consider instead maintaining an innovation function that can trial new developments adjacent to and on behalf of Product Teams and regularly share findings, as GDS and i.AI have done (working in the open – top marks!). This helps to maintain excitement and curiosity, develop DDAT talent, and ensure we all learn from each other. Remember that there’s plenty of great content available to help with your own AI experiments, including this extremely helpful resource from David Knott’s team within CDDO on Generative AI.
And for maximum points, perhaps there are more opportunities for cross-departmental innovation teams or events (e.g. hackathons) to combine talent and solve challenges together. As we know, being a key element of the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, diversity of thought is a catalyst for success.
Driven by value
With the exciting capabilities on offer, you could be forgiven for thinking that AI is a solution looking for a problem; the antithesis of the goal and value-driven development approaches many of us have come to recognise and passionately adopt. Perhaps instead we need to again assume our curious mindset and – recognising some common groupings of capability such as Image Recognition, Speech Recognition, Search, Predictions, Understanding, and Content Generation etc. – look at Live Digital Products. We should be incorporating the User-Centered Design techniques and feedback loops that are commonplace in the development of Government Services to identify where the service and experience could be improved.
There are some natural candidates which appear to be valuable ‘low-hanging fruit’ and could dramatically improve users’ experience (be it citizens or Civil Servants) with Digital Services. For example, content search is often a torrid experience despite accomplished search architectures and tooling existing for decades. What they often lack that AI neatly steps in to address is Natural Language Understanding. Through the implementation of a modern Generative AI solution architecture (like Retrieval-Augmented Generation), it’s possible for users to interact effortlessly with search.
Our Cyber Threat Intelligence Portal (CTIP) for example, which provides our customers with the most accessible and up-to-date threat intelligence, has AI-enabled search to help our user community make faster and more informed decisions. This innovative feature, powered by Azure Cognitive Services and OpenAI's API, came as a result of our strategic relationship with Microsoft and was one of the first production implementations of this approach. But this is starting to happen in Government too. For example, the FCDO recently launched its AI-enabled search function in private beta. This new service will ensure that citizens abroad can gain access to critical information faster than ever before. Awesome.
Building Justified Trust
One of the most remarkable releases of 2024 comes from Viscount Camrose’s team in DSIT, an “Introduction to AI Assurance”, which effectively elaborates the March 2023 Pro-Innovation whitepaper by providing a toolkit for assurance (Measure, Evaluate, and Communicate). It also illuminates the existing regulatory landscape and coins the phrase “Justified Trust”.
Justified Trust is a lovely term and can be expressed as the intersection between trust and trustworthiness, where “a person or group trusts the use of an AI system based on reliable evidence”. Achieving this of course is no mean feat. Together we will need to prove that our solutions are safe, secure, explainable, transparent, fair and ethical – and that we have the relevant governance in place to monitor the development and delivery of AI solutions through life. This will rely on a collection of things being in place including:
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Excellent data hygiene (as AI is only as good as the data pipeline feeding it)
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Robust security controls
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New (and exciting) testing techniques
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The generation of synthetic data (e.g. to address bias in source data)
BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, like many of our customers across Government, has been on a journey of experimentation and incremental adoption of new AI capabilities into production, with a focus on justified trust. To help our internal adoption, we developed our AI Assessment Service which covers the topics outlined above as well as referencing key components of the NIST AI RMF and ISO42001.
The AI Assessment Service is also available to our partners across Government, providing a posture assessment against the AI assurance landscape considering all phases of the AI development lifecycle ensuring our customers can build justified trust.
So, in order to make sure that as a collective we are building innovative next-generation applications that are right for businesses and the people using them, we must remain curious and carefully monitor the hype, find the most valuable use cases (recognising that many may already exist in our live digital products), and ensure we are all building justified trust.
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Rory joined techUK in June 2023 after three years in the Civil Service on its Fast Stream leadership development programme.
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Rory Daniels
Rory Daniels
Rory joined techUK in June 2023 after three years in the Civil Service on its Fast Stream leadership development programme.
During this time, Rory worked on the Government's response to Covid-19 (NHS Test & Trace), school funding strategy (Department for Education) and international climate and nature policy (Cabinet Office). He also tackled the social care crisis whilst on secondment to techUK's Health and Social Care programme in 2022.
Before this, Rory worked in the House of Commons and House of Lords alongside completing degrees in Political Economy and Global Politics.
Today, Rory leads techUK's emerging technologies activity across everything from immersive, web3, AI and robotics to space, gaming & metaverse.
This involves co-running techUK's flagship Innovation campaign, managing four series (including the 'Meet the Innovators' interview series), and launching 4-6-month 'sprint campaigns' on transformative technologies and sectors.
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Rory Daniels
Rory Daniels
Rory joined techUK in June 2023 after three years in the Civil Service on its Fast Stream leadership development programme.
During this time, Rory worked on the Government's response to Covid-19 (NHS Test & Trace), school funding strategy (Department for Education) and international climate and nature policy (Cabinet Office). He also tackled the social care crisis whilst on secondment to techUK's Health and Social Care programme in 2022.
Before this, Rory worked in the House of Commons and House of Lords alongside completing degrees in Political Economy and Global Politics.
Today, Rory leads techUK's emerging technologies activity across everything from immersive, web3, AI and robotics to space, gaming & metaverse.
This involves co-running techUK's flagship Innovation campaign, managing four series (including the 'Meet the Innovators' interview series), and launching 4-6-month 'sprint campaigns' on transformative technologies and sectors.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- LinkedIn:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorydaniels28/
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Laura Foster
Laura Foster
Laura is techUK’s Associate Director for Technology and Innovation.
She supports the application and expansion of emerging technologies, including Quantum Computing, High-Performance Computing, AR/VR/XR and Edge technologies, across the UK. As part of this, she works alongside techUK members and UK Government to champion long-term and sustainable innovation policy that will ensure the UK is a pioneer in science and technology
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Rory Daniels
Rory Daniels
Rory joined techUK in June 2023 after three years in the Civil Service on its Fast Stream leadership development programme.
During this time, Rory worked on the Government's response to Covid-19 (NHS Test & Trace), school funding strategy (Department for Education) and international climate and nature policy (Cabinet Office). He also tackled the social care crisis whilst on secondment to techUK's Health and Social Care programme in 2022.
Before this, Rory worked in the House of Commons and House of Lords alongside completing degrees in Political Economy and Global Politics.
Today, Rory leads techUK's emerging technologies activity across everything from immersive, web3, AI and robotics to space, gaming & metaverse.
This involves co-running techUK's flagship Innovation campaign, managing four series (including the 'Meet the Innovators' interview series), and launching 4-6-month 'sprint campaigns' on transformative technologies and sectors.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- LinkedIn:
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Tess Buckley
Tess Buckley
Tess is the Programme Manager for Digital Ethics and AI Safety at techUK.
Prior to techUK Tess worked as an AI Ethics Analyst, which revolved around the first dataset on Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), and then later the development of a large language model focused on answering ESG questions for Chief Sustainability Officers. Alongside other responsibilities, she distributed the dataset on CDR to investors who wanted to further understand the digital risks of their portfolio, she drew narratives and patterns from the data, and collaborate with leading institutes to support academics in AI ethics. She has authored articles for outlets such as ESG Investor, Montreal AI Ethics Institute, The FinTech Times, and Finance Digest. Covered topics like CDR, AI ethics, and tech governance, leveraging company insights to contribute valuable industry perspectives. Tess is Vice Chair of the YNG Technology Group at YPO, an AI Literacy Advisor at Humans for AI, a Trustworthy AI Researcher at Z-Inspection Trustworthy AI Labs and an Ambassador for AboutFace.
Tess holds a MA in Philosophy and AI from Northeastern University London, where she specialised in biotechnologies and ableism, following a BA from McGill University where she joint-majored in International Development and Philosophy, minoring in communications. Tess’s primary research interests include AI literacy, AI music systems, the impact of AI on disability rights and the portrayal of AI in media (narratives). In particular, Tess seeks to operationalise AI ethics and use philosophical principles to make emerging technologies explainable, and ethical.
Outside of work Tess enjoys kickboxing, ballet, crochet and jazz music.
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Usman Ikhlaq
Usman Ikhlaq
Usman joined techUK in January 2024 as Programme Manager for Artificial Intelligence.
His role is to help techUK members of all sizes and across all sectors to adopt AI at scale. This includes identifying the barriers to adoption, considering solutions and how best to maximise AI's potential.
Prior to joining techUK, Usman worked as a policy, government affairs and public affairs professional in the advertising sector. He has also worked in sales and marketing and FinTech.
Usman is a graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science (MSc), BPP Law School (GDL and LLB) and Queen Mary University of London (BA).
When he isn’t working, Usman enjoys spending time with his family and friends. He also has a keen interest in running, reading and travelling.
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