AI: Civic Signals | Local Government Immersion Day 2025 | Session 3

In November 2025, CACI, Snowflake and AWS came together to host a Local Government Immersion Day in London, bringing together leading councils and public sector organisations to explore how accessible data and robust data foundations can transform local government services.

In this session, Sue MacLure, Director of Data & EI Ethics at CACI, highlighted Principle 2 from the local government AI playbook titled: ‘You use AI lawfully, ethically and responsibly’. But how do local governments do this?

In terms of the ethical considerations, Sue discussed the importance of the following:

• Appropriate transparency & explainability
• Accountability & governance
• Technical robustness & safety
• Contestability and redress
• Societal & environmental wellbeing
• Diversity, non- discrimination and fairness

She then shared some of CACI’s insights from our ‘Voice of the Nation’ survey about what ‘harms’ local councils’ residents are most worried about. Here were the top answers:

• “We’ll lose the ability to think for ourselves, don’t make to many decisions in isolation”
• “Overt scams and lying, but also not knowing what to trust”
• “Anxiety about its role, how to interact with it, what it means for me?”
• “Will I become a number without any personal meaning, resulting in both unfair treatment but also loss of personal dignity.”
• “Fear of isolation, not talking to people, service being replaced with machines”
• “What does it know, how does it know it, what will it do with that information”
• “Who’s watching the powerful, can it be misused against us – even if unintentionally at first?”