How we’re preventing AI misinformation at DBT At the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), we are proactively building a content lifecycle that guards against AI providing the public with incorrect government information.

Our content team at Dept Business & Trade are doing fantastic work thinking deeply about what it means when AI is the primary source of information for citizens. Read more about how we're preventing AI misinformation digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/04/20/h...

How we’re making strategic decisions based on the needs of businesses Find out what we have learned as we take a more strategic view of user research insights to improve decision making and support businesses more meaningfully.

User research on how businesses experience government support is key to how we develop the Digital Business Growth Service, read more about how we do it from our lead user researcher digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/24/h...

I’ve been refreshing my memory and getting Essex to adopt the Service Standard was a big win for us in this space essexdigitalservice.blog.essex.gov.uk/2018/03/19/h...

I was at Essex 2017-19 and we just said "GDS do it, so it's ok for us too" and didn't ask for specific permission. Officials already understood being party political wasn't allowed, so guardrails were there. I think press office got jittery maybe once but we managed it!

Strengthening business support through user-centred, evidence-led collaboration How our Digital, Data and Technology team's first Co-Lab collaborated with policy and Local Business Support teams across DBT to make policy and services more user-centred and effective.

Delighted to share our experiences running a multi-disciplinary co-lab to help develop DBT's Business Growth Service, more in the post: digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/11/s...

There Are Few Things Harry Styles Has to Himself. Running Is One of Them. — Runner’s World The global pop superstar chats with legendary author and fellow marathoner Haruki Murakami on the sublime simplicity of running—and how it nourishes the creative life.

Well this is lovely - Haruki Murakami and Harry Styles in conversation about running (News+ link) apple.news/ABXj0KVisTzK...

Unsung heroes: Flickr’s URLs scheme – Unsung A blog about software craft and quality

Lovely post on Flickr's URL structures unsung.aresluna.org/unsung-heroe... - I absolutely adored how Flickr was built and worked hard to emulate it. Cal Henderson ran a brilliant workshop sharing more of their engineering process for scaling, which became essential for managing growth at Netmums

Yes! Hence the need to keep experimenting and sharing our learnings, which will help ground our understanding further.

Content isn’t static: what I learned about content ownership in the world of AI summaries We reviewed a number of Department for Business and Trade (DBT) tagged pages flagged for review to confirm ownership and decide next action: update or retire. Without clear ownership and ongoing stewa...

Tracey Wilson writes about how Department for Business and Trade are working on improving our published content in a world of AI summaries. digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/03/03/c...

Re-posting for morning readers 👇

Some thoughts on AI “Anyone who tries to tell us they know the future is simply trying to own it.” — Margaret Heffernan in her introduction to Uncharted Take a deep breath. Nobody knows what is going to happen with AI…

More pondering on AI as I wrangle with what it means for public servants... Here's where I've got to so far: There is a useful path to take between hype and doom. It's time to keep experimenting and learning as nobody knows what the future will bring. jasonkitcat.com/2026/03/02/s...

New Paper: Towards a science of AI agent reliability Quantifying the capability-reliability gap

A nice piece of work: Towards a science of AI agent reliability

AI 'reliability lags capability, and that reliability will remain a barrier to deployment unless researchers and developers focus effort on improving reliability as a separate dimension from accuracy'

www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-...

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

I fear many do not understand that AI search does not provide results in the way standard searches do. Broken mental models alert🚨 theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

We can’t be sure an AI “ClawBot” did post a nasty blog post when their code was rejected, but an ArsTechnica journalist did use AI hallucinated quotes when reporting the story….

Totally agree this is a big risk. I was in a session with big consultants showing me how agents would do all sorts of clever things with our suppliers & stakeholders. Yet they were assuming they wouldn’t also be pointing agents at our services. Spam and race conditions beckon…

Driving success through digital adoption Digital adoption is about people. Our work on Data Hub shows that change is a process, and through collaboration and support teams can embrace tools that help improve workflows, strengthen business en...

It's so easy to fall into a "build it and they will come" mindset when creating digital products & services. We work to overcome this with our wonderful Engagement & Strategic Adoption team, here are reflections on how we've boosted adoption of our CRM tool digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/02/17/d...

Oh behave!! 😆

Humble-brag there Simon!

Walkman.land The most complete portable pocket audio cassette player database. WML is a tribute to the Walkmans.

Nostalgia alert - illustrated catalogue of Walkman models (not just Sony ones) walkman.land via @densediscovery.bsky.social

A new evaluator role to support modern digital government Discover the new Digital Evaluator role! Learn how it ensures accountability, value for money, and continuous improvement in UK government digital projects.

We have long championed the importance of monitoring & evaluation in digital teams, so we're delighted to have succeeded in getting 'digital evaluator' added as a role in the UK Govt Digital & Data framework digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/02/12/a...

How breaking the routine fuels fresh ideas and delivers value Every 3 months, DBT Digital, Data and Technology colleagues are free to pause routine work to test fresh ideas. They gain insight, build skills and deliver improvements for colleagues, the public and ...

Every quarter we encourage our DDaT teams to pause & take part in a Firebreak week. It's a way to encourage us to work on challenges in new ways, with a different mix of colleagues. I think it's a core ingredient to sustaining and encouraging innovation digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/02/09/h...

I'm going to share a very good story about the internet. I won't tell it well because I apparently have the flu, but I think we all need a good story about the internet.

It starts in 2021, when I took a sabbatical and got a little workspace to write a design book.

From Redbox to Assist: Building AI tools that balance innovation and trust When I.AI closed their Redbox product in December 2025, DBT had already diverged substantially from that original platform. Two years of user research and iteration created something distinct, shaped ...

We've recently launched DBT Assist, our generative AI tool for helping colleagues with their work. It's a tool powered by working in the open: Using the Redbox code from i.AI we learnt and iterated, sharing our learnings for others to hopefully build on too digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/02/04/f...

Empowering Women in Tech: DBT’s focus on inclusion and innovation “Diversity in Digital and Data leads to better outcomes for all of DBT and the businesses we support in the UK and beyond.”

I’m so incredibly proud of our team at Dept Business & Trade who won well deserved recognition as Women in Tech’s Best Public Sector Employer 2025. In this post we share practical insight into how we beat the sector for recruiting & retaining brilliant women digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2026/01/27/e...

A User Centred approach to helping colleagues collaborate by improving DBT’s People Finder How DBT's Employee Experience team combined user research, design and delivery expertise to improve the department's intranet.

With about 8,000 colleagues working in more than 100 countries around the world for Department for Business and Trade, finding the right person to talk to can be a blocker to collaboration. Read more about how we've been iterating our People Finder digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2025/12/08/a...

Civil Service Pension Scheme transfer: Capita says it has fixed 'teething problems' Outsourcing giant responds to concerns over new portal after readers reach out to CSW to point out technical issues

www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/...

Launching the Export Support Chatbot: Empowering small businesses to go global How DBT's Export Support Chatbot will supply small businesses with the knowledge they need to export.

In the lead up to Small Business Saturday, we're sharing more about our work at DBT launching an Export Support AI chatbot on business.gov.uk and learning from our users, read more from Kai Hellström on our blog digitaltrade.blog.gov.uk/2025/11/27/l...

Push through on Ted Lasso, it has so much heart.

Fabulous: Shrinking, Ted Lasso, Silo, Morning Show, For All Mankind, Bad Sisters, Sunny. Didn’t like Loot or Big Door Prize

Yes it's all in progress and will re-open.