CentreAI: Rebuilding the Leader’s Office for a Reimagined State
Hello Colin,Recently we’ve explored a question that is becoming increasingly important for political leaders. If we were designing government today, knowing what AI can do, would we build the institutions we have now?
At TBI, we believe the answer is no. But reimagining government is one thing. Building the technology to help make it possible is another.
I’m Liam Wilkinson, Principal Applied AI Engineer at TBI, and I’ve been working with our team to do just that.
Introducing CentreAI
Governments hold extraordinary amounts of information and expertise. But much of it is scattered across departments, buried in documents or stored in systems that don’t communicate with one another.
For political leaders and their teams, accessing and connecting that knowledge can be an enormous undertaking.
That’s part of the challenge we’re tackling with CentreAI, TBI’s new platform of AI tools built specifically for government.
Drawing on our experience working alongside political leaders, we’ve developed technology to help governments access information, develop policies, navigate legislation and track delivery more effectively.
The ambition is to give leaders and officials greater capacity to understand complex problems, make informed decisions and turn those decisions into results.
Making the law easier to use
One part of CentreAI I’ve been particularly involved in building is Codify.
Anyone who knows me knows about my slightly unreasonable obsession with legislation.
I’ve always thought of the law as the source code of the state. It determines how government operates, what it can do and the rights and obligations of its citizens.
Yet in many countries, that source code is still buried in scanned PDFs, disconnected documents and outdated formats. Sometimes, as I’ve joked, it’s effectively a bad photocopy with tea stains.
This makes something as fundamental as understanding what the law actually says far more difficult than it should be.
We built CentreAI Codify to help change that.
It transforms legislation into structured, machine-readable information, making it easier for governments to understand their existing laws, identify where reform is needed and develop better legal frameworks.
We’re already working with several countries at different stages of putting Codify to use. Its core is also open source, allowing others to build on the technology.
Better access to legislation matters not only to governments, but also to lawyers, businesses and citizens trying to understand their rights.
From ideas to practical tools
Codify is one example of what we’re building through CentreAI.
Another is CentreAI Policy, which helps policymakers work through complex questions, draw on evidence and develop policy options.
These tools are part of a wider ambition to help governments harness AI, starting with practical challenges that can make a difference to how they work today.
As our Chief AI & Innovation Officer Benedict Macon-Cooney recently explored in our Institute Insights newsletter, AI also presents an opportunity to rethink how government itself operates.
That transformation won’t happen overnight or through technology alone. But by developing tools that address real problems, we can begin building the capabilities and experience that will help governments take more ambitious steps.
For those of us building these tools, that’s what makes the work exciting. We’re taking problems that governments have struggled with for decades and exploring how technology can help solve them.
And we’re only getting started.
Liam Wilkinson
PRINCIPAL APPLIED AI ENGINEER
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how AI could change the way governments work. Connect with me on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
