TL;DR

The Scottish Government has issued guidance covering responsible AI use across public services, hosted on the DSSM — the Digital Scotland Service Manual — and written for senior leaders, service designers and policy staff alike. It is explicitly a first iteration, and the team behind it wants feedback before extending it. Devolved AI policy rarely gets covered as a distinct track, but it is quietly becoming one: Scotland is setting its own guardrails while Whitehall works on a separate programme for English authorities.

What it covers

The opening material concentrates on three things: what responsible use actually means inside a public service, how transparency should work, and which frameworks are needed for accountability and human oversight. Rather than issuing a fixed standard, ministers have committed to revising the text as both the technology and the surrounding policy move.

Becca Fairless, who heads digital citizen policy within the digital directorate at the Scottish Government, framed the exercise as a shift past early enthusiasm towards workable delivery, and positioned the manual as a single trusted reference that fits the rest of Scotland’s digital estate. Its Public Sector AI Team sits in the same directorate, working alongside the national digital strategy and public service reform.

Notably, the department is asking organisations to send back what they learn, treating adoption as a shared exercise rather than a compliance obligation flowing downwards.

Looking forward

For anyone selling into or working with Scottish public bodies, this is the document procurement questions will start citing. That matters more than the announcement suggests, because guidance published centrally tends to become contractual language within a year or two.

The wider pattern is worth tracking. Separately today, the Government Digital Service set out its own AI and data capability programme for England’s Strategic Authorities — a different government, a different mechanism, no obvious coordination between them. The same week has seen AWS argue Whitehall must lead adoption before business follows and a minister link Palantir mistrust to rising NHS opt-outs. Public sector AI here is being governed in parallel rather than in concert, and suppliers will feel the divergence first.