AI in the Public Sector Scotland Conference

The 2026 revision of Scotland’s AI Strategy provides an opportunity to shape the next chapter of Scotland’s public sector AI transformation.

• What does the Government see as the role of AI in its vision for the future of public services?
• Next steps for the 2026 Scottish AI Strategy refresh: revised mission, governance architecture, measuring impact, and priorities for the Government going forward
• How might the revised strategy evolve to reflect the fast-changing pace of AI developments and emerging best practice?
• Addressing systemic barriers to accelerated AI adoption across the public sector
• Reforming funding and incentives to enable scale

Incremental change that delivers meaningful value and efficiencies are a likely outcome in the immediate term. Where does Scotland’s public sector currently sit on its AI journey, and what needs to happen for AI’s potential to be fully realised?

• How does the current AI transformation differ from previous digital transformation, both in terms of the pace of change and the ‘size of the prize’?
• Strengths and weaknesses of AI: how can it be deployed to maximum benefit in the public sector?
• Learnings from international and private sector experiences
• How can AI help address the current demand-capacity mismatches facing government services?

Adopting AI safely and managing the risk will be vital to building public trust and ensuring potential benefits are fully realised. However, the complexity of the legislative landscape, and concerns regarding inaccuracies, bias and redress can hold back progress.

• What does responsible AI look like in practice?
• Managing issues such as bias, explainability, consent, risk registers, ‘human in the loop’, proportionality with regards to job displacements. and measuring social impact
• Balancing risk and benefits: ensuring compliance doesn’t result in risk avoidance
• Developing a sustainable approach to AI adoption: tackling AI’s carbon footprint

Meet your colleagues and make new connections

• Understanding the purpose of AI in the public sector, and what we should be measuring for
• Beyond costs: what should be the primary metrics?
• Measuring performance, including their responsible AI practices

Enabling employee readiness, and the need to manage complex cultural change is one of the most essential building blocks of successful AI deployment.

• Enabling AI literacy and upskilling across your current workforce
• What changes are needed across the broader education, skills, training, career guidance and life-long learning ecosystem to prepare the next generation of AI literate workers?
• Ensuring the workforce, lead and are not led by the technology
• Successfully bringing employees along with us for the AI transition

Learning by example and diffusing best practice from across both public and private sector experience is key to ensuing implementation challenges are addressed and AI benefits harnessed.

• Hearing from best practice from across the public sector
• Understanding the benefits of AI in practice and the opportunity to scale across public services
• What does successful implementation look like
• Learning from challenges encountered
• Towards personalised, unified public services that serve citizens on their own terms: realising the vision

Despite the potential, many public sector projects remain stuck in pilot phases. Most commonly, challenges arise from integration complexity, funding challenges and cultural misalignment.

• Removing the barriers to scaling up projects
• The dos and don’ts of ‘scan-pilot-scale’
• How could government funding and incentives be reformed to better enable projects to scale?

AI agents or assistants with the ability to reason and potentially take action on our behalf, as well as ‘address complex tasks across workflows’ is the promise extended by the next generation of AI innovation that comes with Agentic AI, augmented with the exascale compute capacities of quantum and supercomputers.

• Understanding the impact of the next wave of AI innovation to the public services sector
• What new benefits and risks will the next wave of AI technology bring?