Wigan Council’s GenAI Journey

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

Wigan Council has embarked on an ambitious journey to transform and innovate public services through the strategic implementation of co-produced Generative AI (GenAI) technology. Over the past 12 months, we have actively developed and utilised GenAI to support our core missions under our new era “Progress with Unity”. This resetting of the council’s purpose aims to enhance the lives of our residents by fostering greater equity, improving service delivery, and promoting community well-being. Indeed, a key transformation strand set out in the plan is to “Transform the way we operate through technology and AI underpinned by a relentless focus on data and insight.” Our GenAI initiatives are designed to align with the core principles of the plan, such as recognising individual needs, engaging deeply with communities, and fostering a personcentred approach. This submission highlights our innovative use of GenAI, focusing on its scalability, positive impact, and potential for adoption by other local authorities. We have collaborated effectively with our IT Innovation Partners, Agilisys Transform, to co-produce several projects, some of which are now at mature stages, demonstrating the potential for long-term efficiencies and improved quality of care and service delivery. Each of these initiatives have been undertaken in line with real problems faced by the Council and our residents and in a responsible and ethical way. 

Some key use cases include: 

• – Survey analysis – identifying key themes and sentiment analysis creating insights where previously there was little capacity to do so. 
• – Conversation to Assessment – a bespoke tool to record Adult Social Care (ASC) Needs Assessments on a phone and for the transcript to be summarised into the correct sections on the assessment template, allowing a social worker to spend quality time have a deeper conversation with a service user. 
• – Nava Chatbot – a specific ASC chatbot to assist with the high number of queries to the ASC front door each day, many of which can be answered by information already present on the Wigan Council website. To help residents help themselves before reaching out to the front door team. 
• – Meeting Minutes – to produce a summary of a meeting transcript in the format of formal meeting minutes and reduce the significant admin burden associated to this. Ranging from informal team meetings to formal safeguarding meetings. This has huge time saving efficiencies (£59k+ identified for PA team over 12 months, £13K+ for ASC Business Support staff over 3 months). 
• – ASC Case Auditing – to evaluate large amounts of text and cross-reference it against other documentation to audit historical case notes (either an individual case note, a resident’s journey through care, or a batch of multiple resident’s notes) and evaluate how well Wigan’s 5-point formula for delivering care has been assessed. 
• – Job Application Evaluation – to compare an application to a job description and evaluate how the application meets the essential criteria, shows examples of skills and experience, matches against the Be Wigan behaviours, shows any gaps in employment and provides a recommendation as to whether the applicant should proceed to the next stage. This will be conducted as a ‘shadow’ evaluation alongside a human assessment, serving as an assistant to potentially challenge any unconscious biases, ensure consistency, and highlight the strongest applications. 

These are just some of the use cases currently being explored by the Council with some great early results from pilot testing. 

• – Other areas also being looked at are: 
• – Democratic services – applications for community funding 
• – Performance and Insight Team – Address cleansing 
• – Children’s Services – Education, Health and Care Plan creation 
• – Children’s, Adults and Legal – Subject access requests 
• – PR – Report summaries to identify potential news stories 
• – Technical Services – Computer code generation 

We have worked with Agilisys Transform to co-produce a GenAI tool called QuickAction, which uses large language model capabilities and the concept of repeatable prompts. A robust set of foundational guardrails have been established in order to ensure that we are innovating both ethically and responsibly. 

These include:

• – An agreement to work closely with our IT Innovation Partners Agilisys Transform to co-develop our vision 
• – Creation of a GenAI Policy 
• – Formation of a GenAI Working Group (colleagues from Digital, Information Governance and Audit) 
• – Collaboration with GMCA on their Principles for the Use of Automated Decision-Making Systems 
• – Heading up the Cooperative Council Innovation Network (CCIN) Policy Lab as the lead authority alongside Mutual Ventures to develop a values led, AI Guidance Framework 

All of the above was done under the agreement and guidance of our Digital Board. This submission highlights our comprehensive and innovative approach to GenAI adoption, focusing on the overall strategy rather than a single innovation. 

What are the key achievements? 

Conversation to Assessment Tool – It was identified that a huge challenge was the admin time to document needs assessments, with Social Workers often spending up to 80% of their time on paperwork. This is not the best use of their time and there needed to be a way to remove this admin burden and allow for a richer, asset-based conversation to take place. Agilisys Transform alongside service looked at ways of reducing that admin with the help of AI, and developed a prototype for a tool that would allow social care workers to record an assessment on their phone, and then have the transcript summarised according to the relevant sections of a Mosaic (case management system) form. 

As part of the co-development of this tool, Agilisys Transform were able to shadow social workers in Wigan (with consent) during their needs assessments. This experience provided the product development team with invaluable insights into the real-life challenges faced by social care workers and the reality of their work. 

Lisa, a dedicated social care worker, expressed the frustration of balancing note-taking with the need to fully engage with residents. As she put it, “It can be difficult to capture everything while still giving people the attention they deserve.” The product managers left with a deeper understanding of the essential, human elements that sometimes get lost in documentation. Ayria, one of the product managers, shared how eye-opening the experience was: “While I thought I understood the process from studying it, being there in person showed me nuances and edge cases we hadn’t considered. It led to immediate design changes to better meet the real-world needs of social workers.” 

For the Agilisys team, this experience underscored the importance of designing a tool that goes beyond efficiency. Yuvika described her time with Morgen, a social worker: “It gave me a real sense of how these conversations play out in real life. It’s not just about streamlining tasks; it’s about creating space for social workers to focus on the people, not the paperwork.” Joe, another product manager, was particularly struck by his interactions with Toni and Lisa, realising the critical need for features like speaker identification in multi-person interviews. These hands-on visits shaped significant design changes, ensuring the solution truly supports the care workers’ needs. 

This visit reinforced the team’s commitment to co-developing the right solutions with Wigan’s social workers, acknowledging that technology must enhance—not replace—the human touch at the heart of social care. The insights gained from this visit will continue to drive the development of tools that give social care workers more time to focus on what truly matters: the residents they serve. 

This work directly aligns to the Progress with Unity principles of: 

• – See the Person: Recognising the individuality of each resident. 
• – Listen Deeply: Engaging in meaningful conversations to understand needs and aspirations. Early testing of the tool has reduced the time needed to capture a needs assessment to 15 minutes, compared to the current 2-3 hours, plus there is more focus on the person resulting in a presumed better-quality interaction. 
• – Survey Analysis – via the QuickAction tool, we have developed a way to analyse qualitative survey data and provide key insight that previously was unattainable due to capacity issues. The tool will analyse data to pull out key themes and patterns along with the ability to summarise the overall sentiment. 

A key area where this has been piloted is for the Housing Tenant Satisfaction Measures – currently of significant interest. 

The regulator of social housing (RSH) sets standards for how landlords should treat tenants, including interactions, their property, and local area. One of the new measures introduced by the RSH is the tenant satisfaction measures (TSM’s) in which as a landlord we must interact with the tenant and ask key questions regarding the housing services they are receiving to ensure we are upkeeping with the RSH as a satisfactory landlord. The tool was used to analyse three free text responses from over 4500 respondents. As this was a new process and the first year of the TSM’s this hadn’t been done before but would have involved exporting the data to a csv file and analysing thousands of rows taking a significant amount of time. Using the tool has reduced potentially days’ worth of work to a matter of hours (and probably less when more familiar with the process). 

Similar analysis has been done with the Adult User and Carer Surveys, allowing themes to be identified and to provide a narrative explaining our national ranking (e.g. possibly due to factors outside of our control). A further development of this use case was to incorporate an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool into the QuickAction platform to allow handwritten surveys to be analysed. 

How Innovative is your initiative? 

Wigan Council’s GenAI initiatives are making significant strides in public sector innovation. Our approach is characterised by several innovative aspects: 

1. Creative Solutions: We have developed bespoke tools like the Conversation to Assessment Tool and the Digital Front Door Chatbot (Nava), which address specific challenges faced by our social care and customer service teams. We continue to explore further opportunities such as a tool for address data cleansing which would be enormously scalable and would massively support data teams.
2. Pushing Boundaries: By integrating GenAI into our service delivery, we have challenged the status quo and explored new ways to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. Our initiatives have pushed the boundaries of traditional public service delivery, demonstrating the potential of AI to transform local government operations.
3. Risk-Taking: Implementing GenAI in a public sector context involves significant risks, particularly around data privacy and ethical considerations. We have navigated these challenges by establishing robust governance frameworks and working closely with our IT Innovation Partners, Agilisys Transform, alongside our GenAI Working Group (Digital, IG and Audit colleagues) to ensure responsible and ethical use of AI.
4. Co-Development: Our collaboration with Agilisys Transform and our staff has been essential in creating tools that address real-world needs. This co-development process has ensured that our solutions are practical, user-friendly, and effective.
5. Scalability: The tools and processes we have developed are designed to be scalable, allowing other local authorities to adopt and benefit from our innovations. We have led a Policy Lab which has led to the creation of a Framework on valuebased AI through the Co-operative Councils Innovation Network. This was launched at the 2024 LGA Conference and via the LGA AI Network. Cooperative Values-Driven AI – Co-operative Councils Innovation Network
6. Fail fast principles: We ensure that ideas can be quickly scoped and tested to see if they result in value added outcomes and if they do not then we accept the outcome and minimise losses. This requires a culture where failure can be tolerated, and people are not penalised for taking risks.

It is also imperative to ensure that any innovation that we undertake is done so in a responsible way. We do this by adhering to the following principles: 

• People first: we are not looking to replace humans, cut jobs or automate decision making. We aim to help people to do their job faster and more effectively
• Listening to practitioners: focussing on the ‘why,’ innovation is in response to real problems and in co-development with social care workers 
• Rigorous testing: solutions are rigorously tested by staff and Agilisys Transform before any deployment 
• Extra pair of hands: AI should be providing an extra pair of hands for the team and allowing them to achieve more, not replacing them 

What are the key learning points? 

Our GenAI journey has provided valuable insights and lessons that can be adopted by other local authorities: 

1. Collaboration is Key: Working closely with IT partners and frontline staff is essential for developing effective AI solutions. Our partnership with Agilisys Transform has been instrumental in our success. 

2. Governance and Ethics: Establishing a robust governance framework is crucial for ensuring the responsible use of AI. We have developed a GenAI Policy and formed a GenAI Working Group to oversee our initiatives. 

3. Pilot and Iterate: Starting with pilot projects allows for testing and refinement before full-scale implementation. Our pilots have provided valuable feedback and insights, enabling us to improve our tools and processes. 

4. Focus on Long-Term Gains: While immediate efficiencies may be difficult to quantify, the long-term benefits of GenAI, such as improved service quality and increased capacity, are significant. It is important to maintain a focus on these long-term gains. 

5. Scalability and Replicability: Our initiatives are designed to be scalable and replicable, providing a model for other local authorities to follow. Sharing our experiences and lessons learned can help others adopt similar innovations. 

6. Robust Communications Strategy: Our communications strategy is closely aligned with our commitment to building digital confidence and capabilities within our staff. We have initiated light-touch internal communications to introduce GenAI, ensuring that all staff, regardless of their prior knowledge, feel informed and reassured. By emphasising that GenAI is designed to augment rather than replace human roles, we foster a positive and supportive environment. Key Members have been updated, and we are extending this outreach to wider members, reinforcing our core values of positivity, accountability, courage, and kindness. Additionally, our external webpage and forthcoming good news stories aim to highlight the innovative strides we are making, showcasing our dedication to a versatile and capable workforce. This comprehensive approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also ensures our digital services remain robust, adaptive, and forward-thinking. 

Additional Comments 

Wigan Council’s GenAI journey is a testament to our commitment to innovation and excellence in public service delivery. By embracing new technologies and working collaboratively, we are driving positive change and setting a benchmark for other local authorities. We look forward to seeing the impact of this initiative over the longer term.