Public Sector AI Task Force Meeting January 2025
Details
The January Task Force meeting took place on Tuesday January 21. You can find details of what was discussed in the meeting below.
Minutes
Welcome and updates - AI Policy, Scottish Government
The UK Government AI Action Plan was published on Monday 13 January.
The Department for Science, Innovation & Technology has launched an open call for evidence as part of the consultation on the Government’s Technology Adoption Review and aims to identify barriers to technology adoption.
The Scottish Government has given its response for the independent report for the Unlocking the Value of Data programme, which aims to unlock value in Scotland’s public sector personal data in secure, ethical and transparent ways.
The latest public attitudes to data and AI: Tracker survey (Wave 4) report was published.
Fully funded public sector places are still available through the Scottish Digital Academy for two of the Data Lab’s popular online courses, Driving Value from AI and Driving Value from Data.
Scottish Enterprise have launched a survey to explore Scotland’s AI capabilities, strengths, and opportunities for growth.
Presentations
AI Risk Awareness Sessions - Scottish Government
The team from Saidot, who have built and support the infrastructure for the Scottish AI Register, will be delivering two in person sessions on AI risk awareness on Thursday 30 January.
The first session is aimed at anyone interested in knowing more about the AI risk landscape, with the second session being more focused on how the new governance tool can help you manage risk better.
A follow up session will be provided on Friday 31 January to run through specific team questions and real-life examples on how the governance will work.
Living With AI - Scottish AI Alliance
The flagship free public AI Literacy course called Living with AI has been created for the people of Scotland and has been designed to ensure citizens are engaged, interested and informed about how AI is being used in our lives and society.
The course material has been redeveloped with the course relaunching to the public in February 2025.
A new website will be created to keep all resources, information and courses on AI Literacy in one area. In addition, new micro learning courses are also being developed.
The Living with AI Course is also being licensed out to colleges and universities with discussions ongoing with the Scottish Libraries Information Council (SLIC) to ensure maximum reach for the AI public literacy course.
Guidance on the use of AI - ICO
AI – and its application in biometric technologies – is one of the ICO’s three focus areas in 2024/25, together with children’s privacy and online tracking.
ICO does not consider AI to be unregulated in the context of data protection law. The same principles of protecting people’s information, being transparent and fair with individuals and not holding information for longer than necessary apply in the same way.
Last year the ICO launched a call for evidence on five chapters covering the lawful basis for web scraping to train generative AI models, purpose limitation in the generative AI lifecycle, accuracy of training data and model outputs, engineering individual rights into generative AI models and allocating controllership across the generative AI supply chain.
Following on from this, the ICO is in the process of producing guidance for English Councils to help them comply with the Public Sector Equality Duty and data protection law when procuring AI technologies.
AI Action Plan – Scottish Government
Matt Clifford's AI Opportunities Action Plan makes 50 recommendations across key areas: improving data capabilities and access, developing AI talent, reforming regulation, and driving adoption across both public and private sectors.
The Plan includes significant commitments like a 20-fold increase in public compute capacity by 2030, new AI Growth Zones, and a dedicated function to support sovereign AI capabilities.
The Scottish Government are engaging with UK Government to ensure Scottish people and businesses are not left behind.
Working Groups
Health and Social Care
Full spectrum of all AI issues related to health and social care. Possible benefits or services deliverable through using AI, Implications for people’s personal data, can care options be improved through new innovations
Technical
Looking at all aspects of the technical side of AI. New developments or practice in relation to data science and new technical/product development. How we can support those working in this space.