In this video, Craig Spence, North Highland's UK Public Sector and Transport Leader, walks through a major AI capability programme delivered for a UK government department.

The department had 50,000 civil servants and no clear baseline for where they stood on AI. Literacy, it turned out, was reasonable. Confidence to apply those skills in day-to-day work was much lower. And beneath that sat something harder to measure: negative perceptions of AI, and genuine fear about what it might mean for jobs.

North Highland surveyed over 10,500 people, built six workforce personas, and designed tailored learning pathways around the real diversity of roles, functions, and grades within the organisation. The result was the first statistically grounded AI capability baseline the department had ever held, and a learning offer embedded in cultural ways of working rather than housed on an intranet.

Craig explains the thinking behind the design decisions, why technological readiness and people readiness have to be developed together, and what it looks like when an organisation's AI vision finally translates into measurable value.