TL;DR

The Open Data Institute spent five days in mid-June putting the government’s AI Work Assistant through its paces, and found it is not wired up to the Work Hub vacancy catalogue it is supposed to draw on. The tool therefore steers users towards LinkedIn and Indeed instead of public sector vacancies. Its CV builder failed in every test the ODI ran.

Billed as a job centre you carry in your pocket, the assistant is reachable through GOV.UK and offers guidance, CV help and interview preparation around the clock. Professor Elena Simperl of the ODI and King’s College London, whose team ran the tests from the 12th to the 16th, reports that the foundations underneath it were never laid.

The failures are specific rather than general. Asked to help a senior marketing consultant, the assistant proposed a Development Officer role. Told the same person needed flexible hours to care for a disabled child, it revised the suggestion to Domestic Home Cleaner. The hyperlink it produces sometimes led nowhere. Because it cannot read job descriptions, it infers what a role involves from its title alone.

The CV builder never worked. Users must paste text rather than upload a file, strip out their own personal details first, and then hit a 3,000-character ceiling — against a professional CV that typically runs to 8,000 or more.

Simperl’s diagnosis is a procurement one, not a model one. The Work Hub catalogue is a government data asset that should have been vectorised so the assistant could match live vacancies against a user’s stated skills. That technique, retrieval-augmented generation, is thoroughly routine; the ODI built it into its own National Data Library prototype. The government’s own guidance on making datasets AI-ready cites the ODI framework that recommends it.

Transparency is the second gap. There is no code repository, no disclosure of which models sit underneath, no published evaluation criteria, and no statement of where uploaded CVs are stored — a departure from the open working the Government Digital Service built its reputation on. The tool appeared with little notice, seemingly timed to London Tech Week.

This lands badly against the wider UK picture. Lancashire County Council put Copilot in front of thousands of staff only yesterday, and ONS data has adoption among firms with 10 or more employees at around 35%. Public sector deployment is accelerating while the evidence base for it thins out. The people directed to this particular tool — jobseekers, and young people facing youth unemployment above 16% — have the least capacity to push back on bad advice.

Looking Forward

New ministers get a reset opportunity in the autumn. The ODI wants the catalogue made AI-ready before any deeper integration, the architecture published, and the CV builder bias-tested. Whether that happens before the service folds into the Jobs and Careers Service is the question worth tracking.