Article by Sarah Wray: “The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) has published new guidelines to help public sector organisations prepare their datasets for use with artificial intelligence. Alongside a four-pillar framework, the guidance includes an AI-ready data action plan and a self-assessment checklist.
The document states that: “The United Kingdom is at a critical inflection point in its adoption of artificial intelligence across sectors. While advances in machine learning, generative AI capabilities, and agentic AI capabilities continue at pace, the effectiveness, safety, and legitimacy of AI adoption remain fundamentally constrained by the quality, structure, and governance of underlying data.”
The guidelines, which were shaped by input from public sector bodies, departments and expert organisations, set out four pillars of AI-ready datasets to address these issues: technical optimisation; data and metadata quality; organisational and infrastructure context; and legal, security and ethical compliance.
The document states that: “AI readiness is inherently socio technical. Infrastructure modernisation, metadata fitness, and unstructured data pipelines are essential, but insufficient without clear accountability, sustained skills, and explicit legal and ethical decisioning at dataset level.”..The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has also published a progress update on the National Data Library (NDL).
The forthcoming NDL is envisaged as a tool to make it “easier to find and reuse data across public sector organisations”. Its goal is to support “better prevention, intervention and detection, [and open] up data to industry, the voluntary sector, start-ups and academics to accelerate AI-driven innovation and boost growth”.
The creation of the NDL is backed by over £100m (US$138m) as part of a £1.9bn (US$2.6bn) total investment allocated to DSIT for cross-cutting digital priorities…(More)”.
