Interview: Local government digital modernisation specialist on building AI-enabled councils

For Timothy Spiers, a local government CIO specialist, the use of AI in councils cannot be disentangled from the wider process of local government reorganisation.

With structural change, service integration and financial pressure all occurring simultaneously, Spiers says AI could help ease the strain by improving efficiency, reducing duplication and supporting smoother transitions between legacy systems and new operating models.

He argues that, used well, AI can give councils the capacity to focus on the more complex, resident‑facing work that cannot be automated, and that early adopters will be better placed to manage the disruption and build more resilient services for the future.
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From his freelance work with local authorities, Spiers has seen AI begin to prove its value by reducing administrative burden and improving customer contact. This is in part thanks to its usefulness in supporting high-volume text work and triaging cases according to need. 

Used effectively, he argues, the technology can also help councils improve efficiency by harmonising processes and policies, adding that “AI is becoming more than a productivity tool, it's a way of creating functional integration rather than formal integration”.

However, this is not yet a reality for all councils, with progress remaining uneven among them. While some local authorities have led the way in adopting AI, others are working on the basics, with the national picture being one of “early acceleration, but uneven maturity”.

Furthermore, deploying AI in local government comes with its own set of challenges.

The first of these concerns data quality; AI can only be as good as the data that underpins it, and bad data notoriously produces unreliable outputs. Data quality is a particularly significant issue in local councils due to the prevalence of siloed legacy systems which capture information in fragmented ways.

Another challenge is getting staff to feel confident in using AI, Spiers said. That entails providing training and support, involving employees in designing AI services, and reassuring those with concerns about ethics, security and the technology's impact on jobs.

In relation to the last point, Spiers admits that there “probably will be a reduction in workforce in the long term”, but argues that its impact has been overstated. Instead, he believes that the opportunity it will give staff to focus on higher-value work will be more significant.

Good governance and leadership are equally important in achieving this aim.

"How do we ensure that a council is using artificial intelligence in the right way, in a way that protects both the workforce, but also those residents and communities that they're serving?" Spiers asked.

For him, the answer lies in clarity of purpose, transparent guardrails and human oversight.

Indeed, the human element remains essential throughout digital transformation. Spiers warns about the damage that over-automating services could cause in areas such as safeguarding, complex care and resident services.

"We need to think about residents and communities, and about how if we over-automate, it may still affect how comfortable residents are with artificial intelligence being used," he said.

Instead, AI should be used to redesign services and better support the most vulnerable. Spiers cited the example of a council using AI to better understand and predict residents' needs, enabling improved services while helping councils plan resources more effectively.

Yet even with good data and working practices, limited funding continues to constrain councils’ ambitions. This issue is compounded by negative experiences councils may have had with failed tech ventures in the past potentially making them more reluctant to invest in unfamiliar AI initiatives.

Despite this, Spiers is optimistic that the “perfect storm” of financial pressure and uneven digital maturity could in fact encourage positive change, with councils working together more closely to overcome these obstacles.

Looking ahead, he believes the biggest opportunity AI will offer will be workforce augmentation.

This is as work done by council employees seems set to change significantly, with AI being used to answer FOIs, retrieve knowledge internally, and, in the case of agentic AI, to automate workflows for certain functions such as finance or HR - saving councils hours of time, and improving employee wellbeing. AI would also lead to greater inclusivity for citizens, he claims, including by increasing accessibility and making it easier to provide translations.

The extent of the change to come was illustrated by an encounter Spiers had at a recent event, in which participants discussed the idea of a “human manager of AI agents” becoming a reality in the future of local government.

“Which, when you think about it, it's not a job you would have imagined would exist,” he said.