STOP project: Using Assist to transform the UK’s crisis communication preparedness

Discover how the STOP project demonstrated the practical application of Assist AI technology to revolutionise crisis communication planning and enhance the UK’s emergency response capabilities.

The challenge

In Government Communications, we are focused on strengthening preparedness of high-quality crisis communication plans, and building even stronger collaboration between communications and policy teams.

How Assist helped

The central Government Communication Service (GCS) team created a new crisis communications planning framework and template, asking departments to submit a plan for each of their ‘owned’ risk areas. The team used a bespoke, high-quality written instruction or ‘prompt’ to maximise the quality of the first drafts created by Assist. They then used Assist to evaluate the submitted plans, identify commonalities between plans and make final recommendations for improvement. They supported 17 departments and over 100 colleagues using Assist to create their plans. They also hosted workshops and worked with resilience, policy and operational colleagues to further improve and align each plan, using human oversight to review all of Assist’s outputs.

Outcomes

  • 45 colleagues from 17 departments trained on Assist, saving an estimated 150 hours of work. 
  • Excellent qualitative feedback: “The AI tool saved significant time in the drafting of communications plans”.
  • AI identified significant areas for improvement: these insights may save lives in a crisis. 
  • Relationships built during the project will enable government communicators to respond to crises even more effectively. 
  • The Crisis Communications Planning Guide – ‘STOP’ was created to support government communicators in creating crisis communications plans.

Why this matters

It’s imperative that we continue to improve our ability to respond effectively in times of crisis, to help ensure public safety. The GCS used expertise from within and outside government to develop a new crisis communications framework, before working with departments to rapidly create and test dozens of crisis communications plans. To achieve this, GCS integrated AI into every stage of the project: using Assist to help devise the framework, to draft plans and automatically evaluate returns alongside human quality control of outputs. This has never been done before, and is a world-first for public sector communications.