Don't let AI replace your thinking

At first I thought AI would revolutionise report writing in the public sector.

Then I saw what it produces.

The problem is AI is trained on existing content. If your organisation (and every other one) has spent years producing reports that are too long, unclear and unread, AI will learn from them and give you more of the same. But faster.

Think about that for a second.

You're not getting better reports. You're getting mediocre reports at scale.

And that's a problem in the public sector where the audience is usually non-experts. They need clarity. They need credibility. They need context that only you understand.

AI doesn't know your stakeholders. It doesn't understand your political landscape. It can't assess risk the way you can.

Because AI is actually a very sophisticated autocomplete machine. It predicts the next word based on probability. It doesn't think. It doesn't reason. It calculates.

That's useful for some things. But your most important reports? The ones that need to build trust and drive decisions?

They need human judgment. They need your expertise. They need writing that reflects the nuance of your situation.

So yes, you can use AI to speed up drafts. But don't let it replace the thinking that makes a report actually worth reading.