Briefly describe the initiative/ project/service; please include your aims and objectives

Annie is the newest member of Bradford Council’s Adult Social Care Information & Advice Hub (IAH). Annie is available both online and via WhatsApp to answer any question people in Bradford have about Adult Social Care (ASC) – 24/7. Annie can manage 100s of conversations at any one time, in any language, she has a wealth of trusted information and advice at her finger tips covering everything from carer assessments and benefits to telecare and equipment information, as well as details of local support groups and relevant national ASC services. Annie is a new breed of ASC assistant. Annie is AI.

The ASC Front Door in Bradford receives between 3,000-3,500 calls per month on top of web and in person enquiries. Around50% of all the contact centre calls are information based enquiries, requiring relatively simple information and/or signposting to further information and local services. Demand is constant, with peak times being at the start of every working day, particularly a Monday after the weekend.

With a need to take the pressure of frontline and EDT teams, as well as ‘ensuring people have access to the right information at the right time’, as stipulated under Section 4 of The Care Act 2014, Bradford Council embarked on a collaboration with Norfolk County Council, West Northamptonshire Council, Bullet AI and CC2i to test and pilot an AI digital assistant based on trusted ASC information and advice.

The main aims of the project were:

• To give 24/7 access to trusted ASC information and advice beyond our website, allowing people to ask questions in their own way, and not be bound by the website’s taxonomy and structure
• Ensure people receive the right information, at the right time
• To deliver information and advice to people on devices and platforms they are confident in using, trust and have access to, to ‘fish where the fishes are’, and leverage WhatsApp in particular to help support people better
• To offer our community trusted multilingual ASC advice without the need for translation services
• Elevate the accuracy of information and advice service delivery
• To increase our prevention offer and foster a strength-based approach
• To reduce demand at the front door
• To build capacity within the team
• To reduce response times
• To work with AI experts, using a collaborative methodology, share the cost and risk of developing with new technology with other councils, and learn from each other as we progressed
• To leverage AI in a safe domain, where we were not using personal information or training the wider AI model
• To explore AI in terms of wider transformation of council services
• To work in co-production with our community and start to build public trust in AI technology.

Key to our decision to be involved was the collaborative and partnership approach which has underpinned the project. We were clear that we needed to find a new and innovative means to support the ASC front door and address rising demand. We also knew that with limited access to IT skills and with Artificial Intelligence (AI) being a new and emerging technology, that working as part of a council led collaboration – with AI experts, external project management and shared resources – would be the most effective and efficient approach to co-design, develop and deploy a digital assistant.

What are the key achievements?

New Customer Access Channel: Annie is available on both web and more importantly WhatsApp. Latest Ofcom statistics show WhatsApp is the dominant UK messaging app, used by 92% of adult smartphone users, with 76% accessing it daily. As  such, being able to share information and allow people seeking ASC advice use the most popular messaging service, was a significant addition and achievement to our channel access policy.

Improved ASC Information & Advice: In addition to knowing the content on which Annie is trained and relies is trusted, we are able to bring together multiple sources of ASC and wider care related information and services, to give people access to all relevant information in one place. ASC is an area that many people know little about, until they need to access the service for themselves or a friend or family member. People often engage at a time of crisis, and the sheer amount of information can be overwhelming. Whilst the council is the core provider of ASC services, there are 100s of local, regional and national services and charities that support people with ASC needs. Our website and front door team signpost to many of these, but by harnessing AI and building Annie, we are able to blend trusted information and services from across all these providers to give a comprehensive offering. Whilst Annie prioritises local advice and services, she also delivers guidance from organisations such as Carers UK, NHS, Age UK, RNIB, Bradford Dementia, food banks, West Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service et al.

Relevant & Responsive Advice & Guidance: Being free of traditional website structures and display techniques, means that Annie can be more intuitive in terms of responding to people’s queries. She is able to link advice based answers with relevant local groups, without the person needing to click into our care directory and undertake a manual search; Annie asks people clarification questions which then refines and improves the quality of her answers; Annie is built using generative AI, so is able to refer back to information within the conversation to make her responses personal and relevant.

24/7 access: Providing 24/7 multilingual access to trusted information and advice, is an aim we have long held. Whilst our website does a great job, being able to have a conversation with an AI advisor allows us to be more open, proactive, available and supporting. We can see that 20% of Annie’s conversations take place outside of contact centre hours, supporting people when it suits them.

Improved Reporting & Insight: By working with the partners to co-design the platform dashboards, we are now able to get a deep and clear understanding of what people are asking, when they want to access services and what content has the greatest value. This insight is critical for evaluation, monitoring, strategy, planning, website updates and wider training.

Ongoing Conversation: A big demand on our team’s time is following up with people who are signposted to community services 2-4 weeks after their call. Users of Annie in WhatsApp now receive a scheduled message checking in with them that the information was suitable for their needs, how satisfied with the service they are, and reminding them that Annie is available for ongoing support. To date, 68% of people have confirmed that the information Annie has shared was useful. This is a clear benefit and achievement of the project, as by automating this contact process, we are able to free up significant advisor time.

Impact: Whilst Annie is relatively new in terms of available channels, we have estimated that in due course she will be equal to1 full time equivalent advisor, and her impact is already being felt. Currently Annie is handling 50-75 conversations per week; over 550 people have had a conversation with Annie; 26 of them were in languages other than English, (Hindi, Serbian, Welsh  and Urdu), and we can see repeat usage of Annie showing that people are engaging with her as a trusted source. We are currently undertaking a more detailed evaluation, however, realise that this can take months if not years to evidence – we can however immediately recognise the value of having a 24/7 multilingual service.

Council Leadership: This exciting innovation and partnership has been a huge milestone for IAH and has ensured that Bradford has led the way being one of the first LAs to develop and utilise AI. We have been asked to speak by various industry bodies (LGA, iNetwork) and participated in project webinars informing 110 councils in England as to the work and impact of Annie. Our councillors raised the innovation at the last Labour Party conference, attracting great interest, we also received great press coverage regarding our innovative approach to ASC and access, receiving coverage in the regional (Telegraph & Argus), sector (UK Authority) and national news (BBC).

How Innovative is your initiative?

With the demand for ASC information and advice increasing and no funds for more advisors, we had to take a different and more innovative approach to tackling the issue and supporting our community. Faced with AI sharing information from our website via Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude and other AI platforms without needing to gain our permission, we decided to embed AI into our own ASC offering and build out new access channels. This approach was deemed to address multiple issues in Bradford, not only to ensure that the content people search is accurate, trusted and relevant to Bradford, but to build an expandable resource that can manage multiple conversations simultaneously, and to widen access to the c70,000 people whose first language is not English, and use the most popular communications platform, WhatsApp.

WhatsApp: WhatsApp is a key element to the innovation we have developed with our partners, not least because it is the most popular communication platform used regularly by adults in the UK, and as such is trusted, accessible and people know who to use it – but WhatsApp’s functionality offers us a number of ‘firsts’ in terms of a council’s public access channels.

WhatsApp offers us the ability for people to return the questions they have posed and information we have shared. No other platform provides a comprehensive record of the conversation and questions and the answers, there at one’s fingertips. The ability to review information and advice shared, to return to it at a later date, to ask further questions or for clarification without time pressure or fear of feeling stupid gives people the freedom to really query and understand the ASC offer and what might be available to them or a family member. WhatsApp also offers our community the choice of communicating via voice or text, as such people with lower literacy or digital skills or those with accessibility needs are not disadvantaged, as Annie can communicate via text or speech.

Safeguarding: Key to Annie is that she and the other AI digital assistants developed (Rose in West Northamptonshire & Cora in Norfolk) each have an inbuilt monitoring layer, which scans every message for potential safeguarding issues. ASC colleagues are trained to listen out for issues that might pose a safeguarding threat, and as part of the partnership collaboration we have developed the technology to alert the ASC team when a potential risk is identified. Messages that allude to or contain words around violence, hate, harassment, self harm, financial vulnerability (and more) are automatically flagged within the system and clear response is given to the person as to what steps they should take and/or automatically transfers the conversation to ASC colleagues.

Speed of development: With limited access to internal IT resources, partnering with Bullet AI, CC2i and the other councils aspart of this collaboration, meant we could develop Annie with technical experts, at a speed rate that could not be matched internally. The partners drove the development process, with clear content curation, development and testing phases, which kept us on track.

Partnership & Collaboration: By working alongside councils outside our geography but facing the same challenges and wanting to solve the same problem, meant that we were able to move more quickly and benefit from their ideas and work they had undertaken. In particular, we used Norfolk’s DPIA to develop our first ever AI focused DPIA, producing the documentation more quickly and efficiently than working alone. We shared testing plans, marketing and communication ideas and assets, and worked on reporting and dashboard functionality collectively to ensure technical colleagues captured all the elements we required from auto summarising conversations in the back end to being able to truly evaluate Annie’s impact. Now all the digital assistants are live we are able to compare results and benchmark activity, questions and content with the other councils, which is bringing significant insight.

Trusted Content: A key achievement of the project is that we know the information and advice that Annie is sharing is trusted and accurate. AI can be criticised for hallucinating and giving people information that is out of date, from other parts of the world or just irrelevant. But the underlying approach of us curating the content and it being put in a metaphorical ‘locked box’, means we can be 100% confident that the information being shared is accurate, relevant to ASC services and the Bradford area.

The team set out to address front door demand and use new and emerging technology to safely deliver a new access channel and address budget pressures. Annie is the result of this, described by senior leaders as ‘an exciting innovation and a huge milestone for the Information & Advice Hub which has ensured that Bradford has led the way being one of the first LAs to develop and utilise AI.’

What are the key learning points?

There are a range of learning points not only from Bradford Council in terms of deploying AI driven digital assistants to support ASC, but from the wider collaboration and partners involved.

Making best use of funds & resources: In the current climate councils need to make the best use of limited funds and resources to deliver ever wider and more complex services, particularly in ASC. By being able to partner with like-minded councils in other parts of the UK, we were able to share the cost of developing and testing a new technology;

Scaling & Sustaining: Again, by sharing the cost and collaborating with other councils and partners, we were able to prove the value of the digital assistants in different council, geographic and service settings. By sharing our requirements and co-designing with the technical and business partners, we were able to collectively build a multi-purpose solution, which has value not only to other councils wanting to deploy an ASC digital assistant, but also digital assistants that could support children’s social care, revs & bens, housing, planning – literally any other council service where information and advice is complex and could be simplified and/or translated to enable wider access. By working together we also ensured the product had wider appeal so that other councils sign up and the solution would grow and be sustainable;

Cyber Security: ISO 42001 is the first international standard for establishing an Artificial Intelligence Management System, providing a framework for organisations to responsibly develop, use, and govern AI systems, ensuring ethics, transparency, risk management, and compliance. This solution was one of the first to be accredited in the UK. The project has also developed in alignment with NCSC Secure AI System Development principles;

New technology brings IG challenges: One of the main learning points from the project is that new technology brings information governance (IG) challenges, and on this project we had to navigate new IG territory in terms of both AI and WhatsApp. On reflection we needed to engage with our IG and IT teams earlier in the project and ensure they were working in lockstep in terms of the concept and timeline. All the partners, not only Bradford, encountered the IG hurdle as AI had never been considered or deployed in the councils before. AI was emerging as a new technology and IG and IT colleagues had to race to catch up and ensure our use of it was appropriate, ethical and in line with legislation. As a direct result of the project, the council now has an AI strategy and an AI technical board who oversee and sign off all new projects with an AI element(another significant achievement);

Build it and they will come: 20 years ago councils began to build websites as a new front door to their services, and at the start very few people were online, trusted or used them. However through marketing, comms and channel shift initiatives council websites are now the cornerstone of our access channel strategy. We need to keep up with the technical times and deliver services in a way people want to consume them, and expect them to be delivered. AI is as significant a milestone in social and technical history – possibly more so – than the web was 20 years ago, and this partnership project allowed Bradford and the other councils to safely move into a new space, one which will ultimately change our service delivery model beyond what we can currently understand;

Co-Production: Working with our communities to build and test Annie was critical throughout the project. Ensuring they understood what we were doing and why, was key to ensure they would use and trust Annie; Testing, Refining & Improving: Whilst Annie went through robust testing and various iterations before being launched to the public, we know that there is still a lot to learn in terms of what questions people ask her, giving us new data on what people are looking for. We will be using this data to manage expectations around ASC (which are often out of sync in terms of what people believe and give ASC somewhat of a poor reputation), we shall also be using the data to support strategy and following West Northamptonshire Council’s lead, we shall be looking at the questions asked of Annie and improving our website content. Following ideas shared across the partners, the digital assistants will soon be able to manage multimedia messages, including images where appropriate.

Additional Comments

We are proud to say that Annie (along with Cora & Rose) are the only ASC focused multi-lingual advisors in the UK, trained on trusted information and advice, available 24/7.

We would love for Network colleagues to ask Annie some questions and see how she helps, you can access her online here: https://bradford.bullet-ai.com/ or add her to your WhatsApp using this number: 07418 609003