Programme 4 State of AI Report 2021 2022

Strategy Actions

First 100 Days

1.1 We will establish the Scottish AI Alliance including board members and start building an effective mechanism to ensure civil society’s full participation.

1.2 We will work with partners to ensure wider strategic alignment complementing the Digital Strategy and Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review (STER).

2.3 Work with partners to align the AI Strategy with other national technology initiatives and programmes.

1.3 In the first 365 days, we will confirm our priorities and establish Task Forces and Communities of Practice to lead our work in these areas.

1.6 Initiate a communications programme to promote the Alliance.

1.7 Establish a community engagement and participation strategy to encourage non-tech businesses and the people of Scotland to adopt and engage with AI.

1.8 Publish a State of AI report to review progress at the end of Year 1 (and in subsequent years).

2.6 Encourage the public to develop their understanding of AI using open online resources.

2.7 Determine the steps required to make sure everyone in Scotland benefits from AI and exercises their rights.

2.9 Develop a plan to influence global AI standards and regulations through international partnerships.

Year 1

1.9 The Alliance will evolve. We will review our performance regularly and adapt to create sustainable growth and continued innovation.

This programme of work has seen the most activity in Year 1 and will continue to be core activity going forward into Year 2.

The Scottish AI Alliance

Recruitment for the Scottish AI Alliance’s Leadership Circle was launched at the same time as the strategy on 22 March 2021. The membership of the Leadership Circle was announced on 7 June 2021 to coincide with the first meeting of the group. The group has agreed to meet quarterly.

The Support Circle of the Scottish AI Alliance provides the executive function and was established as a partnership between The Data Lab (Scotland’s Innovation Centre for Data and AI) and the AI policy team within the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate. Recruitment for staffing resource in The Data Lab was launched in May 2021 with the new team starting in August 2021 including a Communications and Events Officer, Project Manager and Administrative Support Officer to support the Head of the Scottish AI Alliance Support Circle.

The Delivery and Community Circles have evolved into an interested group of critical friends for the Alliance. In November 2021, they were onboarded to The Data Lab’s Online Community (more below) to enable two-way interaction with the interested members. Input from the groups was sought with regards to the Playbook. Going forward, we will work to better leverage input from these interested members of the AI community whilst recognising that more significant pieces of work will be commissioned through formal tender processes with appropriate compensation.

As we go forward into Year 2 and expand our activity, we will be commissioning work from collaborative task forces to ensure that we have groups of the appropriate expertise to deliver desired outputs. Interested members of the Delivery and Community Circles are welcome to submit proposals for these tenders.

Engagement and participatory mechanism

Efforts to develop an effective mechanism to ensure civil society’s full participation began in July 2021 with a workshop bringing together a range of civil society organisations. Three key themes emerged from this workshop:

preparing the ground

engaging with civil society organisations

engaging with citizens

This workshop has led to the Alliance thinking about engagement and participation holistically and that there is no one single mechanism for engagement or participation that will address the needs of the three themes above.

The “mechanism” in essence will consist of many different moving parts with distinct outward (communications, events, public engagement etc) and inward (citizen panels, workshops, deliberative engagement, surveys etc) workstreams.

In terms of the outward workstream, the Alliance has set up a wide range of communications channels (website, podcasts, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook) with growing audiences across the board. More on the communications programme can be found below.

For the inward workstream, the Alliance were keen to get an understanding of best practices in engaging society in the delivery of a government strategy. An invitation to quote for organisations to undertake this review in November 2021 with the work awarded to the Democratic Society in December 2021. The report from this review was delivered at the end of February 2022 and its key findings (and the report itself) can be read in the blog from the Democratic Society.

The exact shape of the next steps following this review is still to be determined but the Alliance are planning to commission some work to develop design principles and for it to be co-designed with civil society. Once these principles are established, a rolling scenario-based programme of engagement will follow and will involve organisations relevant to the scenario.

Engagement is general is also tied into the work with Saidot in the CivTech challenge (in Programme 8) around trust and agency in the use of AI in the public sector, and also the upcoming programme involving children with the Children’s Parliament and The Alan Turing Institute in Programme 9.

The Scottish AI Playbook will also play a part in engagement as we will ensure that it points to quality resources (in addition to our Demystifying AI MOOC – more below) that are already available to help people increase their understanding of AI.

Discussions are also underway with The New Real and Experiential AI initiatives to collaborate on an artistic commission in Year 2 with the view of a launch at the world-renowned Edinburgh International Festival in Summer 2023.

Communications

As mentioned above, the Scottish AI Alliance has established a range of communications channels to reach out to stakeholders and the general public, guided by an External Communications Strategy placing people at the centre of all communication.

On the launch of the Strategy, the website created during the Strategy’s development process pivoted to be a communications hub for the progress of the Scottish AI Alliance in the delivery of the Strategy as well as for AI activity across Scotland more widely. The website features news, blogs, events, AI resources and job listings in the field.

The Scotland’s AI Strategy e-newsletter was established and gained over 1000 subscribers in the first year.

Turing’s Triple Helix, the podcast channel for Scotland’s AI Strategy, was launched in July 2021 in order to feature guests from Scotland and the wider international sphere and explore topics relating to artificial intelligence in an easily digestible way. In the first year there were 15 episodes of the podcast distributed across five podcast platforms: Amazon Music, Podbean, Spotify, Apple Podcast and the CogX app.

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts were launched and by the end of the first year had a combined following of over 4,400.