Digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), offer exciting opportunities for use in social policy: they can help to better target benefits and services to people who need them, improve take-up, make service delivery more efficient, and reduce stigma and hassle costs. But digitalisation also carries risks related to data privacy, accountability, fairness and exclusion due to digital divides. The consequences of AI in social policy going wrong can be devastating for people and their families.
• How are digital technologies and data being implemented and scaled up to improve the coverage of social programmes? What barriers exist, and how should risks be addressed?
• What can be done to overcome the challenges of digitalising social programmes, and whose action is needed?
• What is being done to ensure that the procurement of AI and other technologies is well-informed, and, for example, does not replicate gender and other biases?
