Government launches new model to speed AI adoption

The UK Government has unveiled a new evidence-based model that it said will drive AI adoption, productivity and boost the economy.

The new model, named ASO (Adopt, Sustain, Optimise) has been developed following the successful launch and scaling of Assist – the Government Communication Service’s (GCS) bespoke generative AI tool designed to support communications professionals in government. 

In less than a year, the tool has been adopted by more than 70 percent of government comms staff across 210 government organisations, with those who use the tool reporting it saves them on average three hours per week.

In January Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced the AI Opportunities Action Plan, which aims to reap £45 billion in productivity savings for the public sector, using AI.

The ASO model looks to support business and public sector organisations to seize the opportunities of AI for their own workforces, saving them time, money and resources, and stimulating growth.

On the launch of ASO, Cabinet Office Minister, Georgia Gould MP said: “We know there are massive opportunities to use AI to improve public services, save public money and boost productivity and growth.

“But there is still a long way to go to open up these tools to every part of the public sector and economy and give people confidence to safely embrace AI opportunities.

“The Civil Service has developed a model to accelerate AI use at pace that can be used across companies and the wider public sector, putting government at the heart of accelerating innovation and growth.”

Three steps for implementation

The model outlines three key steps to ensuring AI implementation delivers its full potential for organisations.

• Adopt: Enabling people to adopt AI tools by understanding the different challenges they face to taking them up and creating targeted solutions to overcome these barriers.
• Sustain: Ensuring people have the support, guidance and that there is the right organisational culture to embed AI tools into their workflow and use them regularly and effectively.
• Optimise: Minimising the risks associated with using AI in organisations, using a tried-and-tested method to identify, monitor and mitigate unintended consequences that can emerge from AI adoption.

Alongside the new ASO adoption model, guidance has been released to support organisations to undertake the steps under “Optimise”. This focuses on providing a new toolkit to identify, monitor and mitigate the “hidden” risks associated with how people, teams and organisations interact with and use AI tools.

The new guidance identifies six categories of “hidden” risks that organisations can identify and mitigate upfront, including quality assurance challenges and negative perceptions and responses to AI implementation, which can impact the positive benefits AI can offer for organisations.