Social Care and AI Discovery Day

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

A perfect storm was brewing: AI advancement + social care costliness = Robot social workers!!! Not quite that bad but for many that’s how it was feeling. AI was hitting the headlines both as saviour of productivity and as prophet of existential threat. At the same time Social Care was continuing to be underfunded and under loved politically. The narrative of AI equating to social care productivity was growing and it concerned us in its narrow view that placed social care staff as unproductive, costly and replaceable. This narrative failed to talk about how wonderful, how skilled and how important social care is. We decided that a conversation was needed, a really big one and one led by social care. It was time to ask social care people what they want from AI and where they want it, to ask them how they feel about AI and to let them shape our approach with their compassion, qualifications and insight. Afterall, who better to advise on ethical decision making and risk management? 

And so, the Social Care and AI Discovery day was born. Well over 200 people came to this full day exploration of what AI is under a social care lens. 

Our aim was clear, to empower social care professionals to take ownership of the AI agenda. To see that we do have the necessary skills already and that by sharing knowledge and understanding and by taking some time out to focus we can be prepared, informed and even ready to lead. 

AWS kindly agreed to fund the whole day (despite strict “no sales pitches” instructions!). Together we ensured a nice venue, good refreshments and lunch were all a part of the day. Too often these corners get cut in the world of social work and public services and we wanted to step up and provide a really positive context for good idea sharing and learning. 

Our NYC team was made up of 

• – Cath Ritchie – Transformation AI lead 
• – Jonny Hoyle – Children’s social care AI lead and qualified social worker 
• – Mike Rudd – Adult social care AI lead and Head of Technology 
• – Evie Wiliams, Project Support Officer 
• With support from the NYC AI Steering group and chair (Robert Ling). 

The agenda was: 

• – North Yorkshire Council Speakers 
• – Cath Ritchie, introduction to the day and to using technology for good 
• – Robert Ling on the support the Transformation service can provide and are already providing to help shape the change we want to see, including our Ethical Impact Assessment 
• – Stuart Carlton on an introduction to using AI in Children’s social care, why it is ok to be brave and think innovatively towards the future and deliver real change to support social care 
• – Mike Rudd on the journey so far and the learning from years of technology enabled care which primes us for an informed approach going forward. 
• – Amazon Web Services Speakers 
• – Adrian Hanley and Kris Burtwistle on how AWS is working with public services to increase options for ways of working including using AI to improve access to information for the public and officers 
• – Demos of how AI can work in practice to connect people to information quickly and accurately 
• – BEAM – Magic notes
• – Demo on Magic notes with a live interaction with a role play assessment conversation. Taking an audio file and transcribing it into a case file ready for case notes. 
• – Jonny Hoyle on AI in CYPS 
• – The knowledge mining project which uses AI to reimagine how we can access and visualise case notes and the CYPS Policy buddy which connects practitioners to policy and guidance in seconds. 
• – Feedback and Engagement sessions 
• – Interactive sessions on Use cases, Ethics, Training and Next steps. 

This day delivered transformation in a way that takes some projects years to do. It did it with a truly holistic audience and delivered to and for a much wider group. We are more prepared than ever for AI with a workforce eager to join in, eager to lead and eager to deliver for the people of North Yorkshire with AI a tool in the tool bag. And we can share our learning and approach right across the public sector. This is why we deserve to win the Transforming and Innovating Public Services Award. 

What are the key achievements? 

We really feel like we achieved and surpassed our aims of learning and engagement and have a real mandate now to take the next steps. Key outputs included: 

• – Which user cases to take forward (and a real sense of pace and permission behind these) 
• – The need for bespoke training packages to deliver the day’s teaching opportunities to the wider audience. 
• – Support for more time to share and communicate what AI is all about, what we are doing in practice and how the whole organisation can help (and benefit) 

We are not keeping this to ourselves either and are presenting our findings back across multiple AI networks to support the national conversation. We are also planning a roadshow to engage citizens in this debate and journey. 

We have also been asked by another council for a clear plan on how to deliver this as they would like to do the same – so we will see you next year for the Best Imitation award! 

The softer benefits are the biggest ones. Culture is a hard thing to assess, mark and change and yet it is one of the biggest factors of success. Nebulous in concept and yet of undeniable importance. With our discovery day we delivered cultural step change with many attendees talking of how they started the day sceptical and ended the day asking when and where do I sign up! The team and I have been asked by multiple people since the day to come and talk next steps, to come and make it happen (and we’re doing just that). These conversations are routed in a real understanding of what AI can do but also an understanding that success comes from people and their services not the technology. It is genuinely wonderful to see. This is a key indicator of change at an organisational level, to the very culture that shapes us. 

Another indicator came during the day itself when we asked the attendees to simply say the first word they thought of when we said AI. We knew that the national tracker on AI attitudes shows quite a negative picture and yet when our words started appearing on the screen there was a palpable sense of excitement and innovation. The top words were: Excited, interested, optimistic, nervous, curious, apprehensive, intrigued and positive 

And, you don’t have to just take our word for it, here’s a few snippets of feedback form attendees 

“the AI conference on Friday was brilliant! I have loads of ideas for how AI can help in my team” 

“the conference on AI on Friday was excellent. Easily the best conference I’ve been to in a long time. A real buzz in the room and lots of real genuine ideas that people wanted to take forward.” 

“I wanted to reach out and personally thank you for such an awesome conference. I had such an amazing time! ” 

“Thanks again for the invite to the event on Friday. I loved it, you were able to showcase so many interesting developments. I’m hoping that we will be able to follow in your footsteps!” “Just a note to say a huge huge huge congratulations for what you achieved on Friday!! It was honestly the best work event i’ve attended and i now feel a renewed sense of passion and excitement for my role!! EVERYONE was utterly engaged, engrossed and educated and it was just so amazing to hear all the conversations about the opportunities available to HAS and CYPS colleagues, that your vision has sparked!! 

“I just want to say how much I enjoyed today – thank you for encouraging me to attend! Its a really exciting space and I can’t wait to dive in!! “ 

“Successful event packed full of interesting AI solutions to reduce admin time, what more could we ask for. Eager to have Magic notes and the Generative AI chatbot. simply cannot wait for the future. Having dyslexia can add extra time to my admin, often finding i am working out of hours to complete work. My strengths are in communication and if a recording can capture the information in an assessment, WELL, what are we waiting for. Excellent session thank you for putting it together. I left the session feeling optimistic and that is powerful.” 

How Innovative is your initiative? 

Lots of suppliers and leaders in AI talk of ‘coproduction’ and ‘person in the loop’ but very few take the time to engage like we did. We are all reaping the benefits of this from the social worker who feels more reassured about their future to the Head of Service needing to understand how we can make technology tools better for our teams and the innovators seeking pilot partnerships and volunteers. 

But, we didn’t know about this success before it came. Coproduction usually happens in small groups on small pilots. We chose to coproduce a cultural change around the AI agenda! This was not a tried and tested approach. We got very creative, and we backed ourselves to deliver the right outcomes against a very real problem. We were driven by feelings of anxiety and knowledge gaps that were permeating our organisation and we worked as a very small team to deliver a very big and lasting output. 

We challenged the idea that AI is about technology and made it all about people. We challenged the idea that AI is complicated or scary and made it simple to understand and exciting. We challenged the idea that social care officers don’t have the time to engage with new subjects or learning opportunities and brought them together to share and learn. We also challenged the idea that we work separately with Adult and Children services, and we held one day across both services as well as partners from other councils, health and national programmes. Doing this with our workforce empowers them to be an integral part of the conversation, demonstrating their value to the wider network but also reflecting it back to them as well. Proving that together we are stronger and by combining our skills and experiences across all disciplines our impact is unstoppable 

What are the key learning points? 

The approach is entirely replicable, and we are in the process of advising others how to do this for their own councils. What is great is that it can be replicated as is but it is also scalable to need. For example, we are planning smaller sessions with the same format for single service areas but equally the approach could be scaled up to work across the whole organisation. 

Some key learning points are: 

The key to AI is assurance, reassurance, and action. Assurance comes from shared agreed policies, process and frameworks. Reassurance involves a holistic impact measurement, permission from the top, upskilling, storytelling, and transparency to demystify AI. Action comes from finding those valuable user cases, where do people want us to point AI? The discovery day approach addresses all three strands in one go, enabling real change and paving the way for a successful future. 

If you invite them, they will come! People want to learn about AI and putting the emphasis on social care (their expertise) not the technology means people felt ready and willing to engage. We also found that by leaning on our existing networks, across the organisation and nationally, gave a real credibility to the event and ensured a fantastic turnout. 

You can talk about AI all day without getting technical. Too often AI conversations alienate people as we try to explain LLMs, Foundation models, GenAI…. But actually, just like we don’t learn to drive by building an engine we don’t need to learn about AI by training a bot! We talked about what AI can do and how it can and should work, as well as what it is bad at. It was much more hearts and minds than nuts and bolts but that was the right thing to do. Enthusiasm breeds enthusiasm – wanting to get this right and being genuinely passionate about how it can help and improve things is infectious. Having a day to talk and learn and share this passion was a veritable breeding ground and the whole room was abuzz with enthusiasm. 

Additional Comments 

We would love to share this work across the I network; it is something that we are very proud of here at North Yorkshire Council and feel others can get value from too. An award would be great both in recognition of this work (did I mention how proud we were?!) but also a way to share to a wider audience.