It’s a sunny morning in the City of London, and I’m off to the AWS Public Sector AI Symposium. From my hotel room, one end of Tower Bridge peeps through the gaps in nondescript office blocks. Crystal Palace Hill sits distant, and a railway line runs; less used than I expected it to be when I first spotted it. But it’s Fenchurch Street, so that figures.
It is early autumn, just into September, and there is still damp on the rooftops from earlier rain. I check out of the hotel through a plush-but-unstylish lounge and out past the Princess of Prussia. It’s the kind of pub that looks like one I would want to drink in, though I don’t stop to find out whether it really does sell the stouts, mild ales and porter its century-old ceramic frontage suggests.
The streets are cool and full of traffic; off towards Aldgate, vehicles moving at a crawl next to me, pretty much walking pace. F&M men smoke outside a building. There’s a Tesco Express, city workers off to work, and blocks of public housing nestling where one would least expect.
Opposite the social housing, it’s a mix of actual old buildings and 90s fake marble-fronted offices. One of them is the now-defunct Sungard Availability Services, which wears a rounded, perspex-fronted lift but is absolutely covered in graffiti anywhere in human reach – looks like it might not be too available anymore.
On past hoardings plastered with posters: “Drum and Bass Weekender”, “You and Me Comedy”, “Dub Vendor”.
Past the dragon-on-a-plinth marker of the City of London boundary, and past St Botolph Without Aldgate – the city belying its older existence. There is even a bingo hall, not something you expect to find in the city, though I suppose many here play bingo all day long in some sense.
Our venue is 133 Houndsditch, and I nearly walk straight past, then turn to see it. In through the main entrance and a revolving door, then helpful staff, one of whom says “prass” instead of “press” in the way young home counties folk seem to these days. My e-ticket loads easily from email. Up to the second floor, where the event is happening, and I am early.
Croissants and listening walls
Rows of tables hold miniature croissants (pictured), smoothies and juice. Partner stands line the walls. One firm, Version1, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to listen to an entire room’s conversations to surface IT solutions in near to real time – like a useful version of everybody’s paranoid ideas about mobile phones that eavesdrop. An Indian man from PA Consulting explains the messy business of migrating large public sector organisations. But it’s time to get to work.
I am in my red-striped 1970/80s Van Heusen shirt, still awaiting my Amazon Web Service (AWS) press office guide, and I duck out of forced conversations to take my press seat in front of the stage.
A data scientist from King’s College London plonks down beside me and introduces herself. My use of large language models (LLMs) in code editors has changed my work in data journalism significantly in recent times, and I’m keen to talk, especially to a “real” data scientist – I’m self-taught.
Meanwhile, the session is due to start. IT event favourite Daft Punk ramps up over the PA. No dry ice, though. It doesn’t feel like a rave at 9am, which is a nice change from many vendor events.
Revolving doors everywhere
The building entrance, it turns out, was not the only revolving door. The keynote opens with the host, AWS’s Holly Ellis, a veteran of a number of government posts including the Home Office. By late-morning I’ve lost count of the AWS and supplier speakers that reference their public sector past lives.
AWS’s David Appel opens by talking about the 1951 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, “a million square feet of glass and iron built in just nine months”, and a pitch that references the high water mark of British Empire industry and capitalism, and the parallels between electrification and AI. His colleague, Ash Thankey, brings the gush. “We love you guys,” he tells the room. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.”
The numbers come thick and fast: 58% of public sector organisations have adopted AI, yet only 31% have reached the advanced stage, and redesigning workflows earns efficiency gains of 68% against 40% for basic users.
Accenture’s Hacer Evans, a 27-year civil servant until recently, is more prosaic. She talks about “scalers” and warns that leadership, not technology, is the gap.
Social good peeps through
A panel discussion follows. I grimace inwardly at the mention of The Tony Blair Institute, but its representative brings insight, talking of the cost of deprivation that results from the UK as “the third most unequal country in the OECD developed nations”.
Later, Maggie Philbin, former Tomorrow’s World presenter, hands the stage to students Miranda and Safa, who talk about AI literacy, and the soft skills needed for a successful AI future. It’s another moment when the event stops selling and social good comes through.
Afterwards, I am whisked (thanks again to my AWS press office guide) to an interview with Proximie and University Hospital of Coventry and Warwickshire.
It’s lunchtime when I leave. Past registration, into the lift, down to the ground floor. I’ve taken in so much that it feels like an age since I arrived, but it has only been four hours. Information was densely packed; I later found out I’d recorded 30,000 words.
I gather my bearings, go through the revolving door and emerge onto a street full of office workers. I duck through the alleyway to Aldgate Station, past a resting food delivery e-cyclist, enter the arched portal, flash the card at the ticket barrier, and the gates open. That is it.
