Sheffield launches UK’s first community-designed AI campaign

TL;DR:

• The University of Sheffield has launched ‘Let’s Talk AI’, a campaign built from six months of public workshops and described as the UK’s first community-designed AI awareness initiative.
• The pilot runs as bus-stop posters and webtoons across Sheffield, Plymouth, Morecambe and Lancaster, anchored by the £1m UKRI-funded Public Voices in AI project.
• For UK organisations, the campaign is a useful reference point for what public-facing AI explanation looks like outside the government’s “AI skills for the workforce” framing.

The University of Sheffield has launched ‘Let’s Talk AI’, a campaign described as the UK’s first community-designed AI awareness initiative, according to local reporting in The Star. The pilot covers AI in the media, AI in everyday life, and AI in schools, with stories drawn from six months of workshops with members of the public.

The format is deliberately untechnical: vertically scrolling webtoons illustrated by artist Kitty McEwan and posters at bus stops across Sheffield, Plymouth, Morecambe and Lancaster, supported by an online resource hub at letstalkai.org.uk. The campaign is championed by Margaret Colling, a retired librarian from Morecambe who proposed putting the creatives on bus stops because, she says, “that’s where we can reach people — waiting for the bus, going about their lives. Not at conferences or on webinars.”

A different framing of AI literacy

The campaign is led by Dr Susan Oman, Senior Lecturer in Data, AI and Society at Sheffield, and builds on Public Voices in AI — a £1 million UKRI-funded research project that found people overwhelmingly want to understand AI better but feel excluded from the conversation. The advisory group includes the Government Office for Science, the Ada Lovelace Institute and Connected by Data.

Oman’s framing is the part worth flagging. Most UK government AI literacy initiatives focus on workforce upskilling and school curricula. ‘Let’s Talk AI’ targets the population those programmes don’t reach: grandparents navigating scam emails, parents trying to follow what their children are doing online, anyone encountering AI for the first time without a professional reason to engage. Oman calls it a gap government policy has not closed.

Looking forward

For UK businesses with public-facing services, the campaign is a useful template, particularly for any organisation thinking about how to explain AI use to customers in plain language. The bus-stop format also tracks an emerging UK pattern: AI awareness as physical-world infrastructure, not just digital. Whether this scales beyond the four-city pilot will depend on whether central government picks it up. Colling said it should be national policy. The same week the AI Security Institute published technical research and Whitehall ministers debated EU regulatory alignment, a community-led campaign in four cities is a reminder of the audience that policy still has to bring along.