S10 Ep5: AI and the Future of Public Services with Imogen Parker

Artificial Intelligence is now at our fingertips, in our homes, and governing what we see and how we see it. We are currently riding a great wave of change. 

But while private companies have embraced AI, how is the public sector keeping up? How can public institutions build and maintain trust amongst all this change? 

Our guest today is Imogen Parker, she is Associate Director in Social and Economic Policy at the Ada Lovelace Institute, at the Nuffield Foundation which is on a mission to improve social wellbeing through research and innovation. She led the strategic development of the Institute, identifying in 2017 the profound impact data-driven technologies and AI were having on the way we live, work and interact with the state.

Imogen works at the intersection of technology, policy and public life, exploring how artificial intelligence is governed and how it’s deployed. She’s spent her career working on public sector reform, from early years to pensions, immigration and education. And formerly leading research at Citizens Advice, she is only too aware of the pain caused from the public sector not responding to people’s needs.

Their tagline might be described as ‘learn fast and write things’, the Ada Lovelace Institute moves at lightning speed, and Imogen is here to tell us their latest findings.  

In the We Society, join acclaimed journalist and Academy president Will Hutton, as he invites guests from the world of social science to explore the stories behind the news and hear their solutions to society’s most pressing problems.

Don’t want to miss an episode? Follow the show on your favourite podcast platform and you can email us on wesociety@acss.org.uk and tell us who we should be speaking to. 

The We Society podcast is brought to you by the Academy of Social Sciences in association with the Nuffield Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. 

Producer: Emily Uchida Finch
Assistant Producer: Emily Gilbert
A Whistledown Production for the Academy of Social Sciences