In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the spirits of Christmas ‘Past, Present and Yet to Come’.

As 2020 draws to a close, and we reflect on progress in developing Scotland’s AI Strategy, it felt appropriate to frame our reflections in a similarly spirited way.   

In the Past, January saw the publication of The AI of the Possible: Developing Scotland’s AI Strategy (Opens as PDF), the scoping document, produced by the steering committee, that set out proposals for the strategy. February saw the opening of a consultation on these.

March and April saw all of the planned activities within the strategy development process being reconfigured in light of the emerging Covid-19 pandemic.

The first change was an extension of the consultation closing date to late May, by which time it had attracted over 80 responses. We then developed a short informal survey to ask people what they thought about AI’s role in a post Covid-19 Scotland.

June to August saw our public engagement programme, reengineered for delivery online, with people across Scotland. As well as discussion workshops, this included producing a range of interactive quizzes, school activity packs and videos for the strategy website (Opens as HTML).

Summer was busy, with five working groups each holding three workshops between July and early August as they explored their respective strategic theme in detail. Late August saw the steering committee presented with an update on progress, and an outline of the next steps.

September saw the publication of the consultation report (Opens as PDF) and public engagement report (Opens as PDF), which detail the outputs from the respective activities, and reflection on the key issues and suggestions that were highlighted by these.

A report of the working groups (Opens as PDF) was published in November, which also saw the steering committee meet to consider the proposed structure and content of the strategy.

At Present, we’re digesting the feedback from the steering committee, alongside the outputs from all of the activities completed over this year, as we complete the detail of the strategy.

Yet to Come is the iterative drafting of the strategy and sharing it for feedback with members of the steering committee and other partners, which will be our focus in January and February.

Perhaps the best that is ‘Yet to Come’ will be the strategy itself, which we plan to launch in March. Ahead of this we’ll be doing a range of communication activities – watch out for these. 

After such a challenging year across Scotland and the world, we hope you have a safe and enjoyable festive season.