Report

AI and the productivity revolution

Think tank: Reform

Author(s): Sean Eke; Joe Hill

February 3, 2025

This report from UK think tank Reform presents a set of policy ideas for enabling this cultural transformation and identifies four cross-cutting opportunities.

Adopting AI more widely across the public sector can make public services significantly more efficient and effective. And yet AI’s deployment throughout the public sector remains patchy and slow, insufficient to meet public expectations for modern, responsive services they can interact with digitally. To fully realise AI’s potential a cultural transformation needs to take place in how the public sector operates.

This paper was informed by four roundtables with senior figures at the leading edge of AI adoption within government. It presents a set of policy ideas for enabling this cultural transformation, and identifies four cross-cutting opportunities: Mindset: fostering an innovative mindset geared towards AI’s potential. People: identifying the right skills, leadership, practices and approach towards trust and ethics. Processes: streamlining governance, operational guidance, funding and procurement. Plumbing: fixing the underlying problems of legacy systems and data quality and access.

This report was kindly sponsored by Newton.