World business leaders gathered this month in Davos heard the stark message that artificial intelligence (AI) could spark more inequality and a financial crash. Caution appears to be the watchword.
But delegates at the Local Government AI Summit last week heard a much more upbeat assessment of AI’s potential for the sector. To cite one example, local authorities are becoming aware of how AI could streamline the production of education, health and care plans (EHCPs) – the statutory plans for children with special educational needs. Transformation would be game-changing as demand for EHCPs reaches new highs.
The virtual summit heard that Outcomes Matter Consulting is working with Writer AI to test and develop EHCP Plus. This uses AI to write a first draft EHCP report aimed at saving time and freeing up professionals to focus on the child. Outcomes Matter is embarking on a series of pilots with several local authorities and is looking for more councils to take part.
Principal educational psychologist at North Somerset Council, Guy Clayton, can see the advantages. He told the summit: ‘We in North Somerset have something like 60 EHCPs a month [to complete]. We have a number of people writing those plans. There are going to be some human differences within that. And that matters for some families.
‘I think quality and consistency are really key to me, and I think AI would be really efficient in that.’
He believes saving time on the administrative aspects of writing an EHCP would enable ‘more time to go into schools to talk to families and I think that would be really positive’.
Swindon BC is a council with a firm focus on the possibilities opened up by AI. Leader Cllr Jim Robbins’ view is that ‘AI is really cool and there are some good bits about it, but there are some issues…. so we need to be careful’.
He said when Labour took control at the council last year ‘we were really lucky to inherit an amazing team in our emerging tech department who’ve done some brilliant projects’.
Robbins said the team is ‘doing some amazing work around learning disabilities and getting people to be able to improve their independence – making sure documents are translated into really easy to understand language so that we can support them with their independence’.
Bristol City Council residents also benefited from the expertise of Swindon’s team. ‘Members of our team helped out at an incident in Bristol where the council had to, at very short notice, evacuate a large tower block. A lot of the residents speak in different languages and the emerging tech team was able to use a translation tool we’ve been looking at to make sure everyone could get the right information translated into a language they could easily understand very quickly. This worked really well.’
The translation software allows documents to be translated in real time, and the cost savings are very significant.
The council has spent time considering the impact of AI on jobs. He said there is clearly a jobs implication for translation staff. ‘But we don’t want AI to come in as a way of making us have fewer people working in this space.’
According to Robbins, the administration is ‘really conscious of services where we’ve made cuts over the last few years because of the financial situation we find ourselves in’.
He continued: ‘We want to use AI to be able to build up some of those services, and get much more into the preventative area so we can stop demand growing on our really acute services.
‘So there’s a lot of transformation work we’re looking at to try to see where we can use technology to make sure that we can build on our staffing and free people up to be able to do more things rather than think of this just as a cost saving method.’
For Robbins, the big issue is whether the AI is good enough. ‘Is the quality of service there for us? Are we putting the human first and using these models to make sure the service is as good as it can be and are we making sure we’re not causing problems by using AI?’
Sarah Peña is head of emerging technology, business improvement and web at Swindon BC. She said: ‘What we do is look at combining the strengths of people and the tech to enable us, connect us and allows us to do good, so implementing technology with a human touch is absolutely vital.’
Her message is to ‘dream big, start small, move fast and never forgo good governance’. And to use tech to solve real problems, while tracking benefits and positive impact. That sounds like a recipe of interest to those Davos delegates too.
