UK Government’s Assist AI Tool for Communications Professionals

Assist is a groundbreaking generative AI tool developed by the UK Government Communication Service (GCS) specifically for government communications professionals. This bespoke conversational tool represents a significant step forward in how the UK government approaches internal communications and content creation.

What is Assist?

Assist is a secure and accessible AI-powered tool built by government communicators, for government communicators. The tool emerged from insights gathered in the 2023 GCS Horizon Review into Responsible Innovation, which identified “lack of time” as a major challenge for GCS members who were spending substantial portions of their workday creating first drafts.

Key Features

• Generative AI-powered: Uses advanced AI to help brainstorm, create first drafts, and review communications work
• 50+ pre-built prompts: Communications-specific prompts covering typical daily tasks across all seven GCS disciplines
• GCS policy compliance: Outputs automatically follow GCS policies and standards
• Document integration: Can reference specific GCS documents for context-aware responses

Scale and Impact

The tool has achieved remarkable adoption across the UK government:

• 2,700+ users across 174+ government organisations
• Average time savings: More than three hours per week per user
• Quality assurance: Majority of users report the tool provides first draft-quality outputs all or most of the time

Responsible Implementation

Assist’s development prioritized responsible AI use, guided by the GCS Framework for Ethical Innovation and GCS Generative AI Policy. Key safeguards include:

• Mandatory training: All users must complete a bespoke “AI for Communicators” course before accessing the tool
• Human oversight: Designed to enhance rather than replace human skills, with human quality control as a cornerstone
• Security assessments: The tool passed several key assessments before widespread deployment

Government Communication Service

Case Study: Using GCS ‘Assist’ in Practice

STOP Framework:

Using AI to transform the UK’s crisis communication preparedness

Why is this important?

It’s imperative that we continue to improve our ability to respond effectively in times of crisis, to help ensure public safety. GCS used expertise from within and outside government to develop a new crisis communications framework, before working with departments to rapidly create and test dozens of crisis communications plans. To achieve this, GCS integrated AI into every stage of the project: using GCS Assist to help devise the framework, to draft plans and automatically evaluate returns alongside human quality control of outputs. This has never been done before, and is a world-first for public sector communications.

GCS is focused on strengthening preparedness of high-quality crisis communication plans, and building even stronger collaboration between communications and policy teams.

How Assist Helped

GCS created a new crisis communications planning framework and template, asking departments to submit a plan for each of their ‘owned’ risk areas. The team used a bespoke, high-quality written instruction or ‘prompt’ to maximise the quality of the first drafts created by Assist. They then used Assist to evaluate the submitted plans, identify commonalities between plans and make final recommendations for improvement. They supported 17 departments and over 100 colleagues on how to use GCS Assist as they created their plans. They also hosted workshops and worked with resilience, policy and operational colleagues to further improve and align each plan, using human oversight to review all of Assist’s outputs.

Outcomes:

• 45 colleagues from 17 departments trained on Assist, saving an estimated 150 hours of work.
• Excellent qualitative feedback: “The AI tool saved significant time in the drafting of communications plans”.
• AI identified significant areas for improvement: these insights may save lives in a crisis.
• Relationships built during the project will allow GCS to respond to crises even more effectively.
• The team created a Crisis Communications Planning Guide – ‘STOP’ to support government communicators in creating crisis communications plans.

Read more about AI Assist: https://gcs.civilservice.gov.uk/blog/introducing-assist-the-dynamic-ai-tool-rapidly-transforming-government-communications/