Big changes coming to the UK civil service as AI rewrites jobs
Ethical and transparent deployment of AI with appropriate guardrails must be the overriding principle of the British state.
This is the view of Dame Antonia Romeo who was delivering the Cabinet Secretary’s Annual Lecture at the London School of Economics on Tuesday (10 November).
Romeo cautioned that transition must be done carefully, drawing on the expertise of people, managing the impact of change on jobs, strengthening governance and trust, and testing and scaling the ideas that deliver.
“There are obvious areas where AI can help automate tasks, leading to increased efficiency and job augmentation. We need to equip civil servants with the most relevant frontier models for their work and find ways of sparking them into use.
“But AI won’t replace the need for human creativity, interaction, or decision making. In the age of AI it will be these human skills which will become even more valuable. And that is what the Civil Service is built on.”
She highlighted AI as the first of five pressures that she said demanded the most fundamental rethink of the Civil Service since its formation in 1854.
The other four are new global threats, declining public trust, falling public service productivity, and the Prime Minister’s ‘devolution by default’ agenda.
“AI presents us with the defining opportunities and challenges of this generation, and therefore also for the state. The sheer scale of that change is difficult to fathom: AI’s capabilities continue to improve at an exponential rate.
“But what is clear is that, from policymaking to direct service delivery, the use of AI will radically rewrite all of the domains in which the Civil Service operates.”
Romeo said that the traditional model of the state administering siloed services to the public is no longer sufficient.
“We are now delivering services to a public with tech-enabled tools and capabilities unimaginable to previous generations.
“Technology-driven expectations of, and demands on, the state are nothing new, but this is of a new scale and pace. The surge of automated, high-volume citizen demand is hitting operational desks today.”
A profound paradigm shift
AI potentially represents the most profound paradigm shift in modern governance, Romeo said.
“For the first time in history, the efficacy of public service no longer has to be artificially constrained by the limits of human bandwidth.
“As well as changing how we do things, AI will change what we do. From healthcare screening for types of cancer, to tackling the risk of homelessness, technology can enable us to be much more predictive, preventative, and personalised, under appropriate controls and guardrails.
“AI can help us make public services more human. This is about more than marginal improvements. It will make goals that were previously considered impossible, possible.
“But advanced technological development brings significant risks too: from economic disruption, to misinformation, or loss of agentic control. And the transition to an AI-enabled state could expand our domestic cyber vulnerability.”
Frontier teams and changes to jobs
Romeo confirmed that government departments will set up small ‘frontier teams’ with licence to recruit specialist talent quickly and redesign outdated processes.
“We must embed flexibility across our entire operating model, for example by small and agile ‘Frontier Teams’ within departments armed with an explicit licence to operate differently. Free to recruit specialist talent at pace and redesign outdated processes.
“They will allow us to model the Future Civil Service immediately – proving in real time what a faster, more flexible Service looks like in practice. A Service that makes it happen.”
The Fast Stream graduate scheme will expand and become more place-based and AI-focused under the plans.
The National School of Government and Public Services, which launched in October, now gives every civil servant access to digital, analytical and operational training.
Senior Civil Service pay gained a new performance element this year, which Romeo described as just the start of a new approach to performance management.
The government will publish a refreshed Civil Service Code in the spring, its first update in more than 10 years.
A wider review of the Civil Service, which began in July, will report to the Prime Minister before next summer.
It will examine whether current departmental structures still work and what AI and devolution mean for the boundaries of the Civil Service.
