canjoena - stock.adobe.comNewsMajor obstacles facing Labours AI opportunity action planSkills, data held in legacy tech and a lack of leadership are among the areas discussed during a recent Public Accounts Committee sessionByCliff Saran,Managing EditorPublished: 30 Jan 2025 16:12 Among the takeaways from the Public Accounts Committees 30th January 2025 session looking at the governments AI strategy is that achieving tangible results will require strong leadership, skills development and recognition that legacy IT needs updating.During the session, Sarah Munby, permanent secretary for theDepartment for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), said: Its always hard as an organisation to be truly self-critical, and I think we do have to be self-critical about digital leadership across government.Citing the State of the statereport, she added: Many non-digital public sector leaders with sizable delivery responsibilities have insufficient technical expertise and lack the digital orientation to implement tech-enabled programmes, or they dont fully understand mission critical technology dependencies or high priority opportunities such as AI.Another challenge in the public sector, according to Munby, is that digital leaders are not well represented at executive level: The report into the state of digital government says we have very serious challenges and an enormous amount of work to do to close the gap between reality and ambition.Speaking on the skills and hiring crisis, Catherine Little, chief operating officer for the civil service and permanent secretary for the Cabinet Office, said: Just at macro level, we have got a huge challenge and were not alone. You know the private sector and other public sector organisations have exactly the same challenge in deploying these technologies at scale and making sure [theyve] got professional experts at scale. Were all competing for the same [people], and thats a massive challenge for central government and for the civil service.During the session, David Knott, chief technology officer for the UK governments Central Digital and Data Office, was asked about the technical challenges that government departments face. I think it varies by department, he said. There are many challenges and they are not evenly distributed.Knott said that a series of workshops was run last year with departments to understand the challenges and obstacles they face. Skills still remain a challenge, and the data the departments need to use to train models are often locked inside legacy systems, he said.Knott acknowledged that there has been uneven progress in remediating these legacy systems. The third area identified by the workshops is market maturity, since many AI products that could be deployed in government are developed commercially.Part of the reason were trying to find the right balance between guiding procurement centrally, without stifling the ability to buy locally from SMEs, is that lots of people want help to understand how they should think about the stability of the companies theyre buying from. We see lots of volatility in the market, he added.The fourth challenge Knott discussed is change management and how it relates to AI: What people realise now is that these tools start to show up in peoples daily work and it can be a significant shift to their working patterns. He compared the change as the shift to a graphic user interface from command line programs.Read more about the governments AI opportunity action planGovernment funding to help businesses discover AI value: The government is betting the bank on the power of artificial intelligence to fix the public sector, mend roads and boost the UK economy.Can UK government achieve ambition to become AI powerhouse: The artificial intelligence opportunities action plan has been largely well received, but there are plenty of questions about how it will be achieved.In The Current Issue:World Economic Forum: Digital supply chains at risk as world faces two years of turbulenceData sovereignty and security in the UKDownload Current IssueConfluent: Shifting the paradigm to (real-time) data engineering CW Developer NetworkVision for the technology landscape of 2025 Data MattersView All Blogs