Welcome to the i.AI

Who are we?

Last year, the Deputy Prime Minister established the ‘Incubator for AI’ or ‘i.AI’ - this is us! We are a team of technical experts sitting at the heart of government in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Our mission is to harness the opportunity of AI to improve lives, drive growth, and deliver better public services.

The early work of the Government’s AI incubator has already proven that it is possible to make effective AI tools for use in the UK Government, and that building these in-house represents strong value for money.

This team was initially established with 30 technical experts, working under the leadership of Dr Laura Gilbert, CBE, Director of Analysis and Data Science for No10. In February, the Deputy Prime Minister announced an expansion of the team with an additional 40 staff who will focus on bringing these technical products to scale across government.

What are we working on?

As an incubator, we know that good ideas can come from a wide range of sources. This means that our current projects are a mixture between in-house ideas from our team, Ministerial and Senior Civil Servant’s priorities, and the ideas of others.

For example, our first AI project to open source is called Redbox, and came out of a Hackathon hosted by the Number 10 Data science team, with the idea originating from a Civil Servant who attended the hack. Thank you!

You can see more about our projects here: https://ai.gov.uk/projects. Watch this space for more coming soon!

What does this blog cover?

We want to work in the open, and share regular updates about what we are working on. We hope to create a community of people interested and committed to our mission of delivering AI for the public good, and this blog gives us a platform to share what we’re working on with that community.

This blog is a space for the i.AI team, and our friends, to share information about what we are up to. You can expect to see a regular stream of interesting and impactful short blogs, including things like:

• Updates on some of our projects and examples of early stage innovations, including from the Number 10 Downing Street Innovation Fellows

• Events and external engagement opportunities, including sharing what we have learned when meeting others

• Guest blogs from our collaborators, to share their perspective on delivering AI for the public good

• Our early stage thinking about some of the big questions that our team are working through, such as on evaluation, assurance and prioritisation

• How we’ve solved some problems including the technical solution