Digital Economy Dispatch #284 -- From Digitizing Government to Making AI Work for Britain

There is something disconcerting about picking up a book you wrote twelve years ago. Thumbing through the pages and remembering what you were thinking, feeling and experiencing over a decade ago. Not because much of what you’re reading is wrong, but because a lot of it still rings so true!

In 2014, Mark Thompson, Jerry Fishenden, and I published Digitizing Government with an argument centred on what we called "government-as-platform". The thesis was that government should stop building bespoke systems for every function and start creating shared digital infrastructure — common components, open standards, reusable services — on which departments and citizens could build. The language was technological, but the underlying logic was structural: the problem was not that government lacked good technology, but that it kept buying the same capabilities repeatedly, in isolation, at great expense, with no shared foundation beneath any of it.

Looking back now, that argument is recognisably the same one I make in Making AI Work for Britain under a different name. "Consolidate demand, diversify supply" is what government-as-platform was really saying, expressed in terms of market structure rather than architecture. We did not quite see it in those terms at the time. The platform framing felt primarily like a technical proposition about APIs, shared components, and interoperability. The buyer-side logic, the idea that organised demand fundamentally changes what markets deliver, was present in the argument but not yet a primary focus. A decade of watching the same structural failures repeat themselves, now in AI, has made that underlying point considerably harder to miss.

Next Tuesday, Mark and I will revisit that argument at a University of Exeter online event. We’ll be looking back at what Digitizing Government got right, what the decade since has taught us, and what it means now that AI has entered the picture. You can sign up here.

What GDS got right

The Government Digital Service, established in 2011 and gathering real momentum by the time our book appeared, represented something important and different. Not just better technology or more modern design, though it delivered both. Its real innovation was structural: it consolidated demand across government before it opened the door to competing suppliers. Common platforms, shared standards, spend controls, and a clear mandate meant that, for a period, government bought differently. The market had to respond to organised demand rather than exploit fragmented procurement.

The results were visible. GOV.UK replaced hundreds of departmental websites with a single coherent user experience. The Digital Marketplace changed how smaller suppliers could compete. The Government Design Principles gave hundreds of teams a shared framework for what good looked like. None of this happened because government discovered better technology. It happened because it briefly acted as a coordinated buyer.

The difficult decade that followed

What went wrong is harder to summarise, because it happened gradually. But in retrospect, the cumulative effect is clear. The spending controls relaxed. The mandate weakened. Departments reasserted their independence. The market, which had adapted to GDS-era discipline, adapted back again. By the early 2020s, the fragmentation that Digitizing Government had diagnosed was largely back in place. The GOV.UK infrastructure endured, and pockets of strong practice remained. But the structural discipline that had made GDS work did not become self-sustaining. It had depended on institutional will, and institutional will is always provisional. (Particularly when it is continually at odds with the “administrative won’t”).

However, this is not a matter for despair. The GDS era demonstrated what is possible and produced a generation of digital leaders who understand what good government technology looks like. The question is whether the conditions for their impact can be created again.

Déjà vu all over again

When AI arrived in Whitehall and in boardrooms across Britain, I was really hoping to see many of those lessons applied. Instead, I watched the same structural errors repeat themselves. Organisations launched dozens of disconnected pilots before anyone had agreed on priorities. Procurement reverted to established relationships rather than open markets. Accountability for outcomes was diffuse. Suppliers shaped the agenda more than buyers did.

The terminology may have changed. "Digital transformation" has become "AI adoption." The pattern of failure did not.

The reason is not ignorance or bad faith. It is that the underlying incentive structures were never reformed. Digital technology adoption was detached from policy evolution. Each department, each directorate, each agency still has its own budget, its own relationships and its own definition of success. Consolidating demand requires someone with the authority and the will to act across those boundaries. In the absence of that, the default is fragmentation.

Consolidate demand, diversify supply

This is why I felt compelled to write Making AI Work for Britain. It is the argument at the heart of the book, and it owes a direct debt to the GDS experience. The lesson of the digital decade is not that government cannot innovate. Quite the contrary. It is that innovation without structural discipline produces pilots without programmes and activity without progress. Too many ideas and too much investment were wasted. And we’re in danger of seeing the same thing happen in the UK with AI.

"Consolidate demand, diversify supply" is not a slogan. It is a description of the conditions under which markets behave in the public interest. When buyers act together, suppliers compete on merit. When buyers act in isolation, suppliers exploit the asymmetry. The GDS model worked when it had the force of political will and structural alignment applied to that principle. Delivering on the UK’s AI strategy will only work when it does the same.

That means common frameworks for AI procurement, shared evaluation standards, and coordinated investment decisions across departments rather than parallel and competing ones. It means acting as a smart buyer rather than a collection of individual customers. None of this is technically overwhelming. Making it happen institutionally is a different matter entirely.

A conversation worth having

When Mark and I discuss Digitizing Government on Tuesday, we will not be indulging in nostalgia. We will be asking a practical question: what did the experiences of a decade of digital transformation teach us about how institutions change, and what does it mean for the choices facing the UK’s AI adoption in government and business right now?

And I will leave you with the question I am sitting with as I prepare for Tuesday: