Case study 1: Using GCS Assist in practice
STOP Project: Using AI to transform the UK’s crisis communication preparedness
Context
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 with using GCS Assist to 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.
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.