Department for Science, Innovation and Technology permanent secretary Sarah Munby has told MPs she believes Whitehall doesn't need to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to the application of artificial intelligence.
Munby told a session of parliament's Public Accounts Committee yesterday that she expects different departments to go at varying paces in their adoption of AI – with the exception of the "Humphrey" suite of tools announced by her department last week.
Her comments came in response to a question from committee member Mark Charters, who asked how government could ensure there would not be "significant amounts of divergence" between departments.
Munby, whose department is now the home of the Government Digital Service, said most work on AI-adoption would need to be led at department level because the technology would be addressing specific needs.
"I don't think we have to have a completely symmetrical and consistent approach," she said. "There are going to be departments who should and can be moving faster because of the nature of what they do. But what we do need is consistency on leadership and sponsorship, consistency on governance, consistency on effectiveness."
Munby said ongoing work to ensure that departments have an AI leader, an AI governance setup and the right level of AI training was important – as was consistency for some products and technical architecture.
"We talk a lot, for example, about making sure that all of the data is increasingly built to have APIs available to make it easier for things to connect," she said. "But I don't think our goal is to move as one on all of this."
Munby said the "Humphrey" suite of AI tools for officials that was announced last week by technology secretary Peter Kyle is likely to be something that all departments are expected to use.
The package, named in honour of Sir Humphrey Appleby from classic BBC comedy Yes, Minister, will include tools designed to rapidly analyse consultation responses, help prepare briefings, search through parliamentary debate records, and securely transcribe minutes of meetings.
"That is something [where] I'd expect we will drive adoption for all of the relevant customer groups right across the civil service rather than doing it individually in departments – although implementation will look slightly different, according to people's underlying systems," she said.
Government chief technology officer David Knott told the session that the arrival of AI tools could herald a "significant shift" to the working patterns of officials – of similar magnitude to the arrival of desktop computers in decades past.
"I think we'll be in a future before too long where people have AI assistance as part of their desktop that helps them with drafting documents, writing emails etc," he said. "In some way it's a shift about as profound as when we first started putting PCs with graphical interfaces and mice and things on, and we had to go through a big change-management process."
Skills shortages
In the autumn of 2023, the Sunak administration set an aspirational target for 6% of all civil servants to be members of the digital, data and technology profession by 2025.
MPs used Thursday's PAC session with Munby, Knott and Cabinet Office perm sec Cat Little to ask for a progress report.
Knott said the current proportion was "about 5.4%" but noted that the staffing is not evenly distributed. He said that "outliers" like the Met Office and the Office for National Statistics had figures as high as 15% but other parts of government were significantly lower.
Knott also stressed that the 6% figure in itself was out of step with the private sector and "not enough" for government's needs.
He repeated some of the themes from the State of digital government review, which DSIT published last week against the backdrop of secretary of state Kyle's call for government's £14.5bn-a-year spending on IT consultants to be redirected towards in-house capability.
Knott said that even within the government digital and data profession too many civil servants had "non-technical" roles.
"As well as dependence on third parties and outsourcing organisations, our analysis also shows that even within that percentage, our distribution of roles is not quite right," he said.
"We would like to see many more proper deep technical roles – engineers, data-scientists, model-builders etc. Our split at the moment is too skewed to people who are in the digital and data profession but doing less of the technical roles because the technical roles tend to be the ones that have been most heavily outsourced.
"Looking at how we bring those back into the civil service will be a key priority."
DSIT's Blueprint for Modern Digital Government, which was also published last week, includes a commitment to "assess the overall package for digital and data professionals, including remuneration, with a view to ensuring our offer is competitive within the market, making the UK public sector an attractive and viable place for digital specialists".