How Government Digital Service uses AI

In the GOV.UK One Login app, a user takes a selfie and records a short video with prescribed movements. iProov's Dynamic Liveness model matches the face to the photo on the submitted ID document and checks that a live person is present. The register describes the capability as used for all app based identity proving journeys.

GOV.UK Chat is a retrieval augmented generation assistant in the GOV.UK app that answers questions from GOV.UK guidance only, with links to the source pages under every answer. It retrieves from a vector index of roughly 100,000 GOV.UK pages, uses Claude Sonnet 4 on Amazon Bedrock in the EU, rejects questions that contain common personal data patterns, and runs every answer through a second model check on advice, language, tone and quality before the user sees it. The transparency record describes a limited test with up to 2,000 users over four weeks; it makes no decisions about users.

The Government Digital Service ran a trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot with 20,000 employees across UK government from 30 September to 31 December 2024. Copilot in Teams was the most used application throughout, with adoption peaking at 71%, and one participant named summarizing meeting notes among the tasks where it helped. Participants estimated an average saving of 26 minutes a day across all tasks; that figure is self reported, covers every Copilot use and is not recorded as a meeting metric. The report also notes weaker results on complex, nuanced or context heavy work, and concerns that Copilot relied on external sources without built in verification.