Descriptions:
The UK Ministry of Justice Justice AI Unit is about 40 people doing work that normally takes 300. Their probation officer tool went from MVP to national rollout with two engineers in a matter of months. A team of 40 would have been the standard approach. What makes the difference is that their engineers spend two or three days a week on site: sitting with probation officers, walking prison wings with keys, watching workflows that no policy document accurately describes and no one at HQ knows about.
William Tarr and Louis cover the friction that comes with running a startup inside a 95,000 person organization: governance built for policy that gets applied to products, committees filled with people who have never been inside a prison making decisions about what prison officers need, and Victorian buildings with six foot walls that block WiFi. The answer to most of it is the same: build something real, show it to the people who will use it, and bring that signal into the room instead of a deck. You cannot design this stuff from a desk.
Speaker info:
– https://www.linkedin.com/in/willtarr/
– https://ai.justice.gov.uk/
