PD Newsletter #93: The Paris AI Action Summit; Uk's new digital centre for government

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Technology in government has dominated mainstream news this month, with the emergence of DOGE in the US sparking intense commentary.
In their webinar last week promoting the report on state capacity in the US, Andrew Greenway and Jen Pahlka emphasised the urgent need for radical state reform. At PD we’re united in believing effective reform means transformation for the public good.

Closer to home, this month has been defined by resets. In January we supported the launch of the UK’s new digital centre for government, and this week our founder Mike Bracken, one of President Macron’s Global Tech Thinkers, attended the AI Action Summit in Paris, which saw AI repositioned as a public asset. Read on for his insights.

Rosemary and Alex

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🌟 Introducing our guest editor

Alex Blandford joined us in January and works as one of our Principal Consultants working with clients in health, charities and higher education. He has worked in product management and user research for the past 15 years and is also working on an anthropology DPhil looking at civic technology groups in the 2010s.

“Joining PD has been fantastic, meeting so many experts and getting stuck into new bits of work”.

Latest from Public Digital

🍪 Register for Data Bites #53: hear about the exceptional work done by government and public sector institutions in harnessing data for public good.
📅 When: Wednesday 5 March, 6pm GMT
📍 Where: Broadway House, London or via YouTube livestream.
Watch the recording of Data Bites #52.

🏆 Thank you to the 330+ people who nominated a digital team, leader, open source creation, or an example of open source reuse for a Future of Government Award. Read the shortlisted nominees and register to attend the online ceremony on Thursday 20 March 8-9am EST / 1-2pm GMT.

🚀 We attended UK GovCamp 2025 in January. Read about some of our favourite sessions.

🇫🇷 The Paris AI Action Summit

Mike Bracken was in Paris this week at the AI Action Summit. Read his takeaways.

Among the summit’s big stories was the UK following the US in refusing to sign the summit declaration on ‘inclusive’ AI, inviting criticism - including from our network member Jeni Tennison - on its perceived stance as anti-governance.

But as Mike told Computer Weekly, that shouldn’t overshadow the summit’s progressive outcomes, which are pivotal in recasting AI as a public good, not an extension of big tech. As Mike told the Times, “resetting AI as a public asset is the only game in town”.

🇬🇧 The UK’s new digital centre for government

On 21 January the UK Government launched a new digital centre for government - reclaiming the GDS name - and unveiled a Blueprint for modern digital government outlining how it will use technology and AI tools to improve public services. The blueprint was released in tandem with the State of digital government review. You can read our CEO Ben’s live takes on Bluesky.

As Harry Metcalfe points out, we’ve definitely been here before. What’s different about this review is its clarity, focus, and obvious ministerial backing. In the words of Martha Lane Fox, this is “a new set of ministers who are taking the opportunities seriously.”
We’re fans of:
➡️ The initiative to bring GDS’s policy and delivery teams together with a focus on products that go beyond the infrastructure of government.
➡️ A renewed focus for GDS in overseeing digital procurement and spend controls - often a bellwether for how seriously government is taking digital.

The implications for local government are yet to be seen. Catherine Howe advocates for more emphasis on person-centred design, and Theo Blackwell has announced a project building on the review to “fix how central and local government work together on digital services.”

Ways of working

🧐 What should you look for in a designer? Katherine Wastell argues it’s experience in transformation roles: “It’s one thing to thrive in a well-resourced, digitally-enabled environment, where the value of design is well established. But what about when everything is harder—budgets are tight, priorities keep shifting, and progress feels hard-earned?”.

🏗️ How the Lego Group built culture change from the ground up. TL;DR: They invited people at all levels of the organisation to help shape and embed culture, and gave staff the freedom to interpret guidelines for change according to their working environment. A testament to the reality that, in even an organisation as large as Lego, change is forged through active conversation.

🚦Julia Harrison tells us how to make the most of meetings. In short: Be an active participant - establish the meeting’s objective and be purposeful about making it happen. As Julia says: “Complaining about being in bad meetings is like complaining about the traffic, when you are the traffic.”

🌍 How to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of your website, according to digital product studio ustwo. The Green Web Foundation is also a great resource which tells you if your website runs on green energy. Meanwhile, the founder of Drupal puts us to shame by running a solar powered RPI web server.

Technology in focus

🤯 The release of DeepSeek’s open-sourced AI model rocked the global technology market last month. The significantly lower cost and chip count of DeepSeek’s model compared to its US rivals has disrupted assumptions about AI and where it’s heading, and, as we said on our blog, it shows us how little we understand AI.
Deepdive into DeepSeek:
🔹 DeepSeek is reportedly more vulnerable to jailbreaking, according to the Wall Street Journal.
🔹 How the idiosyncratic culture of DeepSeek was key to its success and also why China’s top AI talent is skipping Silicon Valley.
🔹 Dario Amodei, Anthropic boss, on DeepSeek and export controls.

⚠️ A major Barclays outage at the end of last month, reportedly caused by a technical issue, prevented users from making essential transactions, with Barclays resorting to advising customers to use foodbanks. As Dave Rogers wrote last year in the wake of the CrowdStrike outage: the fragility of our tech eco-systems mean that simple accidents are a greater threat than cyber attacks.

📲 This summary from Simon Taylor explains why HSBC failed to beat Revolut and Wise with their own app: “Sometimes innovation means admitting others solved the problem better.” It’s an insight which echoes the analysis of our CEO Ben on why taps have evolved to be so complicated: While it seems to promise a competitive edge, innovation can risk producing a worse product.

🤖 Half of all knowledge workers are using ‘shadow AI’ (non-company issued AI tools) at work, a reminder of the desire lines of corporate technology. Anyone adopting AI in the workplace should take heed of Bruce Schneier’s observations that AI mistakes are very different from human mistakes, and that brings risk: we’ve developed complex safeguards for human mistakes, but we’re yet to do the same for AI. For tech executives looking to adopt AI in their organisations, Kainos offer an ethics-by-design approach.

💡Some fascinating insights from NODE magazine’s technology outlook, which asks a panel of experts - including our own Andrew Greenway - about the forces shaping technology in 2025. And Ben Terrett features in the Goldman Sachs Growth Agenda report, calling for guardrails from government to balance ethical AI use with innovation.

Digital government

🇺🇸 The US administration’s drive towards “efficiency” has so far included a ‘Twitter playbook’ approach to public servants - including targeting technology transformation staff - and a data purge. Here are some interesting takes:
➡️ ’Fork in the road day’ and how Democrats can counter Musk, Jen Pahlka.
➡️ Why DOGE might succeed, Mikey Dickerson
➡️ Not all disruption is born equal, Dominic Campbell.
➡️ The US can’t be run like a startup, Wired
➡️ DOGE and the evil housekeeper problem, Dan Hon.
➡️ The US government badly needs a digital makeover, Financial Times
➡️ DOGE v USAid, the Guardian

🌊 Andrew and Jen’s report from the Niskanen Centre on state capacity in the US has been making waves, with this summary from Gideon Lichfield calling it “the nearest thing I’ve seen to a thorough, completely non-partisan agenda for making government less awful.” It also gets an honourable mention in Francis Fukuyama’s appeal for policy implementers, not policy makers. Listen to Andrew and Jen talking about it on The Dynamist podcast and Statecraft podcast.

🙌 Excellent work from Nova Scotia’s Cyber Security and Digital Solutions team on their digital code of practice, which aims to “guide and enable wayfinding as you design, build or buy digital products and services.” It’s a big achievement, given how tricky it is to land a digital code of practice.

⚡It’s heartening to see the Head of the National Audit Office calling for UK gov to take risks and innovate, and considering what value-for-money risk-taking might look like. It sounds like another endorsement of test and learn, which Pat McFadden announced would be brought into government late last year. On the subject, this great piece from Eddie Copeland explores LOTI’s learnings from applying a test and learn approach to ambitious transformation of local public services.

🇦🇺 Finally, we’re fans of this UX approach to city council digital services in Sydney, where the council has developed a centralised dashboard that allows residents to submit, track and manage service requests. While they’ll need to beware of vendor lock-in, Sydney’s person-centred approach is to be applauded.

Something fun

📸 Is this award-winning badger shot real, or was it the result of taxidermy, smeared cat food, trickery or other wildlife photography dark arts? A debate among PD colleagues prompted Tom to consult friend of Public Digital and regular photo debunker Paul Clarke. Paul’s verdict: It’s real. But it probably required a lot of training food. 🦡🐾