Introduction

Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS) has a vision:

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“Digital public services are designed around the people who use them and are simple, secure, and convenient.”

We believe that automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are powerful technologies that, if used correctly, could help contribute to this vision. 

We partnered with the Chief Digital Officer for Local Government to understand attitudes, practices, processes, and skills around these technologies across local authorities and arm’s length bodies across Wales. 

We analysed our findings to identify how to further help and support our users to benefit from these technologies. This report details that work. 

Problem statement 

To provide further support, which is meaningful and of value, we need a clear understanding of the public sector’s existing automation and AI attitudes, practices, processes, and skills, to shape what future support could look like. 

At the end of 2023, CDPS and the Chief Digital Officer for Local Government worked together to explore the maturity and readiness for automation and AI across the Welsh public sector.  

This was to better understand what further help we can provide to ensure this technology is used to improve public services in a secure, ethical, and transparent way. 

Definitions 

For the purpose of this discovery, we defined what we meant by automation, robotic process automation and artificial intelligence and shared these definitions with respondents at the start of each research interaction so that participants were aligned on the terms and concepts. 

Automation 

Use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human involvement. 

Robotic process automation (RPA) 

A subset of automation that uses software robots to perform simple and rule-based tasks through user interfaces.  

RPA can be combined with an AI "brain" to enable more complex tasks. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) 

An umbrella term for a range of technologies and approaches that often attempt to mimic human thought to solve complex tasks.  

Approach 

Research methods 

Interviews 

We spoke to representatives from 11 public sector organisations. These consisted of local authorities, arm’s length bodies and 1 housing association. The locations of these organisations provided excellent geographical coverage across Wales. 

Each organisation took part in a qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interview. 8 of these interviews lasted 90 minutes and 3 of them 60 minutes. The same topics were explored in each interview, with the 90-minute ones allowing more detail to be gathered.  

The interviews were conducted with between 1 and 4 representatives from each organisation. A range of roles were involved, covering expertise in information technology, digital, data, transformation, and customer experience. Respondents included both leaders and practitioners.  

The interviews took place over video calls. Each call was recorded for later analysis. 

Survey 

We created an online survey to allow us to reach a wider audience. This contained a subset of the questions covered during the interviews. 

Analysis 

Thematic analysis was conducted by extracting verbatim quotes from all interview transcripts and placing them on a digital white board. Comments submitted through the survey were added to this board, along with insights from the conversations. This data was sorted into recurring themes.  

Findings were aggregated and anonymised to encourage frank responses from research participants. 

Respondents 

We’d like to thank all those who generously contributed to this research.  

Interviews 

We completed interviews with: 

7 local authorities: 

  • Caerphilly 
  • Cardiff 
  • Carmarthenshire 
  • Gwynedd 
  • Neath Port Talbot 
  • Pembrokeshire 
  • Powys 

3 arm’s length bodies: 

  • Careers Wales 
  • Natural Resources Wales 
  • Welsh Revenue Authority 

1 housing association: 

  • Anonymised 

Surveys 

We received completed survey responses from: 

4 local authorities: 

  • Ceredigion 
  • Isle of Anglesey 
  • Monmouthshire 
  • Vale of Glamorgan 

5 arm’s length bodies/other: 

  • Bridgend College 
  • Cadw (2 submissions) 
  • Gower College Swansea 
  • Senedd Cymru 
  • Transport for Wales 

Research limitations 

We acknowledge the following limitations of this research: 

  • Due to time constraints, we didn’t speak to representatives from health and social care but are aware of the work being undertaken by the AI Commission for Health and Social Care into understanding the specific challenges and opportunities associated with ethical AI implementation. 
  • More than half of respondent organisations were local authorities, meaning our data is more heavily weighted towards them.