Transforming Public Services: What Local Government Needs to Turn AI Promises into Better Services

The UK government has just published its roadmap for modern digital government, outlining an ambitious vision to transform public services through AI, data and digital innovation. The plan speaks to £45 billion in potential savings, a new CustomerFirst unit to redesign citizen-facing services and a commitment to make one in ten civil servants work in digital roles by 2030.

For those working in local government and public services, the language will be familiar. Roadmaps, transformation programmes and bold efficiency targets have been features of the landscape for over a decade. The harder question is this: what changes on the ground for the social worker trying to clear a backlog of referrals, the housing officer supporting vulnerable tenants, or the occupational therapist stretched across too many cases?

At Datnexa, we work with councils every day to deliver AI that people actually use. Not pilot projects filed away after six months, but tools embedded in daily practice that measurably reduce friction, free professional time and improve outcomes. The Government's roadmap sets a direction. This article is about what it takes to get there and what councils need to demand from partners, technology and themselves to make transformation real.

The Gap Between Roadmaps and Reality

The UK public sector has a persistent challenge: digital transformation remains permanently two years away. In 2021, 71% of organisations expected to complete their transformation within two years. In 2023, that figure was still 71%. In 2025, it remained 71%. Meanwhile, the proportion of organisations that have actually implemented their digital strategies fell from 23% in 2023 to just 16% in 2025. Satisfaction with digital government services has declined from 79% to 68% over the past decade.

This is not a story of insufficient ambition. It is a story of tools that do not land, pilots that never reach production and strategies disconnected from the daily reality of overstretched teams. Research shows that 55% of public sector workers say administrative burden negatively impacts their ability to do their jobs, with 45% reporting they are "drowning in unnecessary administrative tasks". Social workers, housing officers and commissioners spend more than eight hours per week simply managing information and data, time that should be spent with the people they serve.

The roadmap's focus on CustomerFirst and AI-driven automation speaks directly to these friction points: long phone queues, repeated form-filling and endless paperwork. But if the sector is to avoid another cycle of promise followed by disappointment, it must shift from technology-first thinking to problem-first delivery.

Impact, Not Hype: What AI Must Deliver

Datnexa's starting principle is simple: if social workers, housing officers, or commissioners do not actually use an AI tool in their work, it is not a success, regardless of how advanced the technology.

This matters because the gap between proof of concept and live deployment has become a defining barrier. Many councils have piloted generative AI in customer contact, document drafting and internal knowledge search, but struggle to take those pilots into live services at scale. Constraints include funding pressures, operational risk, data governance complexity and procurement hurdles. The result is a proliferation of small experiments with little cumulative impact.

In 2023, Peterborough City Council’s Geraldine Jinks, an occupational therapist with 35 years of experience, had become the living encyclopedia for technology-enabled care. Her expertise in helping vulnerable residents maintain independence through assistive technology made her the go-to resource for colleagues. But demand was overwhelming: Geraldine was swamped by repetitive queries, unable to focus on complex cases and when she was absent, her knowledge became inaccessible.

Peterborough City Council partnered with Datnexa to turn Geraldine's knowledge into a 24/7 AI assistant, aptly named "Hey Geraldine". Rather than pursuing technically complex or over engineered approaches they chose a pragmatic solution that was live within two weeks and deployed in around six weeks, working directly with Geraldine to capture not just what she knew but how she would say it. 

The impact was immediate and measurable: during the first six weeks, the chatbot handled over 1,200 staff queries, saving the occupational therapy team more than 300 hours, time that went directly back to supporting residents. The referral backlog was cleared entirely and staff reported that using "Hey Geraldine" felt just like talking to Geraldine herself. 

The tool engendered a shift from traditional care packages to TEC and has already delivered a 900% ROI.

This is what real AI deployment looks like. It starts with a clear problem, staff overwhelmed, expertise bottlenecked, backlogs growing. It involves the people who will use it from day one. It delivers measurable time savings tied to specific outcomes. And crucially, it is governed from the outset, with Data Protection Impact Assessments, Data Processing Agreements and service agreements completed before testing began.

What the Roadmap Means for Local Government

The government's roadmap is more than aspirational policy. CustomerFirst's partnership with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), the expansion of GOV.UK One Login to over 11 million verified identities and the commitment to train civil servants in AI and digital skills represent tangible steps forward. The £45 billion in potential savings is not invented; it reflects real opportunities through process simplification, AI-driven automation of manual tasks, greater availability of digital channels and reduced fraud.

But for local government, the roadmap also exposes uncomfortable realities. Only 26% of the public believe government uses AI responsibly. Councils face an £8 billion funding black hole by 2028/29. Workforce pressures are acute: vacancies in adult social care increased by 52% over twelve months, while planning departments report one in nine posts unfilled. In this context, transformation is not optional, it is the only way to meet rising demand with constrained resources.

The question is how. The roadmap provides direction. Datnexa's experience provides the answer: real, governed AI in production, delivered with councils, not to them.

Big Ideas. Bold Tech. Better Tomorrow.

Datnexa's mission is to harness data, digital strategy and emerging technology to deliver practical solutions that achieve real results. That means amplifying human expertise, not replacing it. It means creating genuine user adoption through co-design. It means maintaining focus on measurable outcomes tied to the people councils serve.

Hey Geraldine is now a fixed-price, rapidly deployable tool available to other councils. The National Frailty Index is helping authorities shift from reactive crisis management to proactive prevention. Datnexa continues to share open case studies at forums like LocalGovCamp, the Local Government AI Summit and AI.GOV.UK, because the sector learns fastest when successes (and failures) are shared openly.

For local government leaders reading the government's roadmap, the response does not have to be scepticism or paralysis. It can be a shift to governed, impact-led delivery. Steps that Datnexa already supports include:

• Start with a tightly scoped use case in social care, housing, or prevention, with clear success measures for residents and staff.

• Embed governance by design: define safeguards, escalation routes and data protections before build and use an auditable stack to keep control.

• Invest in workforce confidence: use live tools like Hey Geraldine and prevention dashboards as prompts for training, reflection and continuous improvement, not as black boxes.

• Demand integration, not sprawl: insist on AWS-native or equivalent platforms that provide a single pane of glass, avoiding the mess of overlapping pilots.

  
  

The roadmap speaks to a better tomorrow: faster, simpler, more joined-up public services that work for the people who need them. Datnexa is here to help councils turn that vision into reality, one problem, one tool, one measurable outcome at a time. Because transformation is not about technology for its own sake. It is about what changes for real people and real services.

And that change starts now.