GOV.UK to unleash AI chatbot on confused citizens

Coming with added 'filters and rules' after prototype spat out inaccurate or outright wrong responses

The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) will add an AI chatbot to its GOV.UK app in early 2026, before rolling it out across the GOV.UK website used by most government departments and services.

"We want people to be able to ask questions as they would in everyday life; for example: 'I've just had a baby, do you know what help I can get?'" wrote Leanne Cummings, GDS's director for products and services, in a blog post. Responses would combine material from multiple departments including HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, and the Department for Education into "a single, simple conversational answer."

While GOV.UK Chat will initially answer questions, GDS is exploring whether it could carry out simple transactions as well. This would follow Ukraine's Diia.ai chatbot, which began generating income certificates on request in September.

"Our focus is to transform Diia from a digital services platform into a fully functional AI agent that operates 24/7, without the need to manually fill out forms or fields," Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's first deputy prime minister, wrote in an article.

GDS will first deploy GOV.UK Chat to the GOV.UK app, which has been in a public beta test since July and had nearly 260,000 downloads by November 24. More than 80 percent of users have customized the app's homepage, including by adding their local authority.

The chatbot, based on OpenAI technology, has been in development for more than two years. It uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model drawing on GOV.UK website content with personal data stripped out. GDS has conducted extensive testing, including red-teaming exercises where government colleagues attempted to break or corrupt it.

A private pilot with 1,000 users in late 2023 found that while most people liked using the chatbot, its answers weren't accurate enough and it made outright mistakes. GDS believes it has since addressed these issues by adding filters and rules to prevent from it answering certain questions. ®