A major 18-month study of 208 UK local authorities has found that Scottish councils are measurably ahead of their English counterparts in AI readiness — with researchers crediting a coordinated national approach, shared digital programmes, and strong university links.
A Heriot-Watt University study published on 9 March 2026 examined how ready local authorities across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are to adopt and use artificial intelligence in public services. The 18-month research project, led by Heriot-Watt’s Intelligent Automation Systems Lab (IAS) in partnership with AI specialists GoLLM, analysed 208 councils against a range of indicators including data quality, digital infrastructure, governance maturity, and early AI deployment.
The overall UK picture is mixed. Some councils — particularly in England — are deploying practical AI tools with growing confidence, while many others across all four nations remain at the earliest stages of building basic digital foundations. But the regional pattern is revealing.
Dr Luciana Blaha, IAS lab lead at Heriot-Watt University’s Edinburgh Business School, said: “In Scotland, we saw councils benefiting from a coordinated national approach, shared digital programmes and strong links with universities, which helped create more consistent data foundations and more confident early use of AI.”
By contrast, England’s picture is more fragmented. “In England, we saw some of the most advanced councils in the UK operating alongside others at the very earliest stages, reflecting how fragmented structures and different local conditions can shape what is realistically possible on the ground,” Dr Blaha noted.
The study found that Scotland’s more consistent data foundations — a product of the “Once for Scotland” model of shared digital services and national coordination — gave Scottish councils a more stable platform from which to explore AI applications. In Scotland, councils including Fife and Glasgow City are already using AI in waste and recycling, from automated sorting to advanced robotics for materials processing — the kind of work pioneered by Cireco Scotland’s AI-powered sorting at Fife Council’s Dunfermline materials recovery facility.
Wales, the report found, is taking careful first steps under a strong national framework, with early adopters like Bridgend County Borough deploying AI-powered chatbots. Northern Ireland is beginning to explore AI but faces constraints from funding pressures and limited internal capacity.
The report is explicit that size alone does not determine AI readiness. Daniel Shorr, CEO of GoLLM and co-author, said: “It shows that AI readiness isn’t determined by size alone, the councils pulling ahead are distinguished by leadership ambition, governance discipline, strategic clarity and stronger data capability.”
Those findings sit alongside a steadily expanding picture of Scottish public-sector AI activity. In recent months Silicon Scotland has reported on the Scottish Government’s five-year AI plan to drive growth, jobs and public service reform, the overhauled national digital strategy designed to push AI innovation across public services, and individual examples of Scottish councils embracing AI-powered transformation in their efficiency drives. Earlier still, ministers called for the mandatory registration of AI usage in Scotland’s public sector, and CivTech awarded £9 million to Scots AI projects — much of it aimed squarely at council and public-service problems.
The research was made possible through partnership with the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE), the Society for Innovation, Technology and Modernisation (Socitm), Coram Children’s charity, and the Sustainable Scotland Network (SSN), with funding from the Interface Innovation Voucher Programme and IAS Lab.
The report calls for stronger national coordination, improved data quality, modernised legacy systems, and expanded shared digital platforms. For Scotland, the findings provide evidence that the coordinated approach built over the past decade is beginning to pay dividends in AI adoption — and offer a model that other UK nations may wish to study.
