Digital Leaders

Why do government projects stall in the pilot stage? Often it happens because departments rush to adopt AI and ignore the foundations. This article shows how to assess your organisation’s AI maturity and the steps you should take to ensure your AI project can scale. AI adoption across central government is accelerating, driven by high-level pressure to improve services, increase efficiency, and boost productivity.

At Informed Solutions, our agentic AI strategy is built on two principles that have guided our work across government and the wider public sector for many years: trust and impact at scale. Agentic AI marks a new inflection point for public services because it changes not only what technology can do, but the authority it may be given to act on people’s behalf. Organisations must therefore consider how service design, governance and accountability need to evolve alongside it.

There’s an assumption that tends to go unexamined in most technology transformation conversations and it goes something like this: the goal is to get rid of the old stuff and replace it with something better. It sounds logical. In practice, it’s often the most expensive way to fail. I’ve worked on modernisation programmes across complex public sector estates, and the pattern I see most consistently isn’t organisations that lack ambition or don’t know what they want to achieve.

On 7 September 2026, local government secretary Angela Rayner paused the government’s flagship local government reorganisation (LGR) programme after “updated and privileged legal advice”. Decisions for Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were withdrawn, and plans for fourteen more areas, including Gloucestershire and Devon, were put on hold (GOV.UK). Most of the commentary since has been about boundaries, costs and legal risk. That’s understandable, but it misses the bigger question.

A digital-first organisation places technology at the heart of how it operates, delivers services and engages with customers, employees or citizens. It doesn’t simply support the business, it is the business. Every interaction depends on technology working exactly as it should. When systems fail, trust suffers. But when they perform well, the technology should be seamless, almost invisible. That’s particularly true at Nest.

Will AI destroy civilisation, or save the planet? Will it make us cleverer or hollow us out? Does it end work, or merely rearrange it? What becomes of being human when the machines get good enough? The argument about AI’s future has never been louder, and it has rarely been less useful. Nobody knows the answers, and the confidence with which so many are delivering them is usually a decent guide to how much speculation is being positioned as a revealed truth.

Across the employability sector, there is no shortage of activity. Programmes are being delivered, support is available, and employers continue to recruit. Yet despite significant investment and good intentions, the system often struggles to achieve the outcomes it seeks. Unemployment persists alongside skills shortages, employers report difficulty accessing talent, and many individuals continue to face barriers to sustainable employment.

Securing AI at scale requires a broader view than most organisations start with — one that accounts for multiple stakeholders, not just a single control point. When I sit down with security leaders to think through what “architecting AI defenses” actually means, my advice is consistently the same: focus on the capabilities you need, not on locking yourself into a specific product architecture that may not survive the next eighteen months of AI tooling change.

Effective regulation is not about creating more rules, but designing regulation that is easier to understand, navigate and apply. As governments, regulators and businesses increasingly focus on supporting growth and innovation, I’ve come to see better collaboration, clearer guidance, digital transformation and user-centred design as essential to achieving better regulatory outcomes.

Across this Employability series, we’ve explored why change is needed to processes, which have been in place for several decades. Labour markets are becoming more dynamic, workforce needs are changing faster, and individuals are increasingly likely to move between sectors, roles and career pathways over the course of their working lives. In this environment, success will depend less on individual initiatives and more on the principles that underpin the system as a whole.