Who do we trust with AI?
November 2025
Building trust and efficiency with AI in public consultations
When I spoke at AI Week 2025, I wanted to focus on something very practical: how councils across the UK are using AI not as an experiment, but as a tool that actively transforms how public consultations are delivered. Across the UK, we’re seeing AI move from a tentative experiment to something genuinely transformational in day-to-day workflows. In project after project, teams are going from months of analysis to days, while still maintaining the transparency, accuracy, and defensibility that public trust depends on.
This isn’t about hype or technology for its own sake. It’s about officers, planners, and analysts who are under real pressure – tight deadlines, thousands of emotive comments, complex interlinking policies – who need to produce reports that stand up to scrutiny. AI has been helping them meet those pressures, not by replacing professional judgment, but by taking on the manual heavy lifting so officers can focus on what matters.
Public consultations are rarely straightforward. They attract thousands of responses, often emotional, from diverse voices. Traditionally, processing that data could take months.
When we began deploying AI, the time savings were remarkable. We’ve now achieved the highest reductions on the market, 96% of analysis and reporting time, with exceptionally high accuracy meeting regulatory-grade standards.
That means what once took twelve months can now be a matter of days. It now takes just minutes to hours for detailed consultation reports to be created from complex datasets. Seeing those results in real council workflows, like BathNES’ parking consultations with over 18,000 responses, made it clear this wasn’t just about speed. This is about enabling teams to be responsive to the public.
Whenever AI enters public decision-making, trust is the first question people ask, and rightly so. I’ve always believed that trust and accuracy are inseparable. If people don’t understand how AI was used, or doubt its reliability, the outcome loses legitimacy even if it’s technically correct.
There’s enormous importance in being transparent. Transparency doesn’t mean sharing every technical detail; it means being clear about where AI fits in, when it was introduced, and how results were reviewed.
In statutory consultations, thoroughness isn’t optional. When we talk about statutory consultations, there’s a requirement to be thorough, and in some cases, exhaustive. AI supports that standard by producing auditable, traceable outputs. Every statement in a report can link back to source comments, allowing officers to validate logic before publishing.
Transparency isn’t a hurdle to adoption, it’s the foundation of public legitimacy.
AI doesn’t replace public officers; it refocuses them. I see this repeatedly. AI handles the heavy lifting, while humans provide judgment, empathy, and accountability. Officers still read comments, feel the tone, and make decisions about balance and fairness.
The real issue was never about removing humans, but freeing them from repetitive summarisation. When AI completes the first 96% of analysis, officers can use their time where it counts, making sure interpretation is sound and framing is right for the public.
Confidence grows when the human role shifts from processing to verifying, ensuring that AI remains an assistant, not an authority.
AI systems are only as strong as the data they receive. Many councils underestimate how much small errors ripple through to the final report. I often repeat the phrase: junk in, junk out. Missing fields, spelling inconsistencies, or truncated entries can distort themes and statistics later on.
That’s why I encourage every team to include a short, structured data-cleaning phase before analysis. It’s the cheapest insurance against rework. When you start with accurate, complete data, you finish with credible, auditable outputs.
The goal isn’t perfection, it’s predictability. When officers trust the dataset, they can trust the results.
AI is everywhere now, but not all tools are equal. General-purpose copilots can speed up writing or summarising, but consultations need more: auditable classification, multi-issue splitting, and regulatory precision.
That’s why purpose-built platforms like Consult AI matter. They’re designed for accuracy-sensitive, multi-step workflows. They don’t just write text, they structure evidence, match feedback to policies, and produce results aligned with ISO 42001 governance principles.
Consult AI isn’t a black box, and it doesn’t need to be. Councils can explain how it works, what transformations happen to the data, and how results are verified. It’s explainable, not mysterious, and that’s what public accountability requires.
Even when officers are ready to adopt AI, internal governance can slow them down. But governance shouldn’t be a blocker, it should be a framework for speed with accountability.
I’ve seen success where councils start assurance early, using existing ICO and government guidance as scaffolding. That predictability shortens procurement cycles and builds confidence among leaders.
Interoperability is another place where good governance shows up in practice. Any work with data in the modern age should include some level of interoperability. You should never feel like your data is locked into that vendor.
Open, exportable data ensures councils remain in control and can evolve their systems over time. It’s a small point, but it makes a big difference to long-term adoption.
Governance isn’t about slowing innovation, it’s how innovation earns trust.
For councils just beginning this journey, my advice is simple and practical:
These aren’t massive transformations, they’re focused adjustments to existing workflows, and can build staff confidence in using data and AI whatever the baseline experience.
After years of working with the public sector, I’ve seen how much valuable public feedback gets gathered and then quietly lost to time – buried in folders, forgotten in spreadsheets. This leads to consultation fatigue and an erosion of public trust – people ask, why bother?. Digital transformation has helped, but it’s AI that is a real transformer in enabling councils to turn feedback into action, quickly.
We at The Future Fox are proud to be pioneers in this space but this is really just the start. The relationship between the public and the institutions that serve them is on the cusp of a wholesale transformation to an evidence-based, responsive system. The more we can turn public feedback into something usable, quickly, the more we can restore public confidence and create the infrastructure and services that genuinely benefit people.
👉 Watch my full AI Week 2025 session on-demand
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