Council / Using AI could increase council efficiency, chief executive says
ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) will make Shetland Islands Council (SIC) “more efficient” and will help their dwindling workforce to go further, its chief executive has said.
Councillor Dennis Leask said last month he wanted to see the rollout of AI in the council be “accelerated”, adding it should “happen a little bit quicker”.
A meeting last month heard a project investigating how AI integration could be used to improve council services was expected to be completed in October 2027.
However on social media commenters were less impressed with the possibility of AI software being rolled out across council departments.
SIC chief Maggie Sandison said she felt there was “no doubt” that digital solutions like AI would help the council “fill the gap as our workforce changes”.
“Doing things more efficiently, more effectively will help us in that transition,” she told Shetland News.
“It will make us more efficient, and help us deal with the fact we have less people to do all of the work that we need to do.”
In response to concerns that jobs could be lost as a result of AI, Sandison said they were a “small council” and very different from a lot of other local authorities.
“We don’t have a single person dealing with free school meals or clothing grants,” she said. “It will be a small part of one person’s job.
“So if we digitalise one element of their job it doesn’t actually remove the individual because they’re doing multiple jobs within the single post.”
In larger councils, however, Sandison said one person may be dealing specifically with blue badge applications – so if that was digitalised, their job could be put at risk.
The rollout of AI would allow the SIC to “put people in the places where people need to interact with people”, Sandison added.
“We’ll keep our humans for the activity that needs a human interface. That will be a good thing.”
Sandison was keen to stress that the introduction of AI software would not be a solution to the SIC’s funding gap.
She did say, however, that it would allow them to “stretch our reducing workforce better” and prioritise what work they do.
“I think there is a greater conversation that needs to be had that if we have less people, what is it we continue to do with them,” Sandison said.
“What does scaling back services look like? We haven’t got the capacity to keep running them.”
She added it could be about “having a conversation that if we can’t do everything, what are the things we’re going to stop doing.”
And she said the council was not alone in making those sorts of decisions, adding other businesses were doing things like changing opening hours due to cost pressures.
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