In November, the Innovation Team travelled to Oxford University to attend Microsoft’s “Accelerating Public Sector Impact with Cloud & AI” event. The event brought together voices from Microsoft, local government, healthcare, and academia to explore how AI is transforming public sector organisations.
Becoming a “Frontier Firm”
Glen Robinson, Microsoft UK’s National Technology Officer, opened with a keynote on what it means to be a “Frontier Firm.” He began by tracing the “democratisation of innovation” through three eras:
- The cloud era — empowering developers with scalable infrastructure.
- The low-code era — enabling non-technical staff to build solutions.
- The Gen AI era — where natural language becomes the only barrier to entry.
In the Frontier Firms of this new era, teams of humans and AI agents form around outcomes rather than departments. Glen outlined three phases of adoption:
- Human with assistant — every employee has an AI assistant.
- Human-led agents — AI agents join teams as “digital colleagues.”
- Human-led, agent-operated — humans set direction while agents run entire workflows.
He also stressed the importance of strategy, culture, governance, and GenAIOps — a discipline for managing prompts, performance, and responsible AI.
Panel Insights: Adopting AI in Practice
After the keynote, Tim Packwood, our Head of IT Innovation, joined a panel discussing strategies for AI adoption. Key themes included:
- Practical use cases — from Copilot reducing admin time in NHS trusts to AI-driven contract reviews in higher education.
- Balancing ambition and accountability — standing still is the real risk for the public sector, but we must improve services, not just achieve internal efficiency.
- Creating safety and agency — IT’s role is to build confidence so staff can use AI securely and effectively.
- Regulation and reality — education and enablement matter more than prohibition: “You can’t stop people using AI — it’s like whack-a-mole.”
Looking Ahead: What Does Success Look Like?
Other sessions covered AI skills development, responsible AI use, data platform unification, and modernising estates for AI readiness — reinforcing that success depends on strong foundations as well as innovation.
Priorities for the next 3–5 years included:
- Closing the gap between IT and the business.
- Embedding privacy, security, and equity from the start.
- Driving true productivity gains, not just incremental efficiency.
- Moving beyond polarising views of AI’s impact on the workforce, and towards helping people achieve their work goals.
- Collaborating across sectors to share solutions.
Reflections from Our Team
The day offered a clear message: AI isn’t just a technical upgrade — it’s a cultural and strategic shift. From practical use cases to long-term visions of “Frontier Firms,” the event highlighted both the opportunities and responsibilities that come with adopting AI in the public sector. For us, the challenge is to turn these insights into action — building confidence, embedding governance, and enabling innovation across the university.
In closing, we wanted to share some personal reflections on the event.
Max
The event was characterised by a focus on the possibilities of agentic AI, but I felt that people struggled to give tangible examples of its use cases. More compelling to me were discussions around the importance of empowering business stakeholders to apply their own contexts to AI — letting AI be technology-enabled, but business-led. With that said, the team offered some provoking pushback here: in fact, GenAI has always been inherently IT-led, because nobody asked for it in the first place!
Ben
Throughout the event we were hearing about the positive use cases of AI throughout the public sector, and it was interesting to see the exciting projects that teams in different areas were working on. However, it was important to remember that (almost) everyone in the room will have been optimistic and enthused by the uses of AI and that that sentiment isn’t necessarily reflected across the wider population, with some people hesitant to adopt the technology into their work. Sharing these positive stories and use cases whilst easing anxiety around AI will be key in bringing the power of AI to everyone.
Tim
The public sector, spanning local government and all levels of education, is increasingly recognising the need to do more with less. For organisations that have struggled to prioritise the budgets for technology and digital transformation, the emergence of Generative AI now presents a massive change positive and negative.
While our role often requires us to champion the strategic impact of AI within our university, the prevailing sentiment we observe is frequently one of ambivalence. Crucially, many attendees at the event were focused on exploring how we can harness this technology to produce a tangible dividend: more time in our day. By augmenting people and processes, the discussions centred on using AI to free up staff to concentrate on tasks that uniquely require human input.
The supportive, challenging conversations, meaningful interactions, and collaborations were truly positive. I left the event with valuable new ideas and perspectives to integrate into our AI work and strategy — insights I certainly would not have gained from a large language model.