Five rooms, one company: our first regional Company Day

ICS.AI has grown significantly over the past year. Our people are now spread across the country, from Newcastle to Portsmouth, Cardiff to Chelmsford. We work closely with councils and universities from all four UK nations, and increasingly that means our colleagues live and work near the organisations they support.

That's great for our customers. It does make one of our favourite traditions harder, though. Company Day has always been about getting everyone in a room together. When "everyone" means people in every corner of the UK, a three-hour session can cost someone a full day of travel, time away from clients, and a long evening getting home to their families.

So on Friday we tried something different.

Together, just closer to home

Instead of one venue, we met in five regional hubs – Manchester, Leamington Spa, Salisbury, London and Basingstoke. Colleagues gathered in person in their nearest location from lunchtime, and the hubs were linked live for a shared programme of sessions. Everyone got what matters most about being together: the conversations over coffee, putting faces to names, and new starters meeting colleagues properly for the first time. Nobody had to lose a day on the train to get it. Each hub then finished the day locally with dinner and drinks.

It wasn't flawless. At one point we were hunting for an Allen key to fix a projector, and "London calling, can anyone hear us?" became the unofficial opening line. But it worked. Our Leamington team said the format made the day more interactive, because each room talked through the sessions together rather than simply watching them. Huge thanks to our Head of People, Kat, for the logistics of getting everyone in the right place at the right time.

Why we're here

Our CEO, Martin, opened with the question every company should be able to answer: why do we deserve to exist?

Our answer hasn't changed. We exist to create financially sustainable public services through the structured use of AI. Councils and universities are being asked to solve an equation that, with traditional methods, has no solution. When nobody solves it, services get rationed and waiting lists grow.

What that means for our team is simple. Every feature we ship, every bug we fix and every ticket we answer eventually reaches a real person. It might be a parent applying for support at midnight, or a care worker whose freed-up hours go back into visits rather than paperwork. It might be a student who gets an answer they need at 2am the night before a deadline.

From AI that answers to AI that acts

The big theme of the day was the next generation of AI in public services.

The last wave of AI has already helped. It answers residents' questions, drafts notes and gives staff an assistant. But it tends to stop at the edge of the systems where the real work lives. Most public sector organisations run hundreds of applications, and many of them were never designed to talk to one another. People end up carrying information between those systems by hand.

The next generation changes that. Take a tenant whose boiler breaks on a Friday. The AI doesn't just log her call. It checks her tenancy, raises the repair, books the engineer and tells her when to expect them. For residents, that means problems solved rather than merely acknowledged. For the organisations we work with, it means savings on the scale their budgets actually need.

No autonomy without control

Throughout the day, one point came up again and again: none of this works without control. People stay in the loop, agreeing what gets built before it's built and accepting results before anything goes live.

Martin was just as clear that this has never been about replacing people. As AI makes more possible, human work moves to where it matters most: understanding what services really need and making sure that what's delivered works for the people using it.

Velocity, velocity, velocity

If there was a catchphrase for the day, this was it, and it has three meanings. First, velocity is what AI does for our customers, turning work that might have taken weeks, into work that takes an afternoon. Second, it's about keeping pace with AI itself. As Martin put it, an organisation that adopts AI and then stands still hasn't really adopted AI at all; it has photographed a moving train. Third, it's about delivering real outcomes for customers, faster.

Practising what we preach

It was a day full of examples of the team using AI in its own work. Martin opened with a series of explainer videos he had created using AI that same morning (the pace of AI video development is pretty incredible!). Colleagues across sales, marketing, HR and transformation shared the tools they've built to work smarter. In each case, AI handles the volume and people provide the judgement.

People first

We welcomed four new starters since our last Company Day - Isabel, John, Adam and Sipo - and celebrated some well-deserved promotions. Our people team also shared how they're building what they call ICS.AI's "human operating system." That means regular check-ins, a buddy scheme for new starters, and "stay interviews" that ask colleagues what we could do better long before anyone thinks about leaving. We're growing, and there are more roles on the way, so watch this space.

Looking ahead

Our COO Neil closed the day with a reflection that captured the mood. When we started out with our first web assistants back in 2018, we dreamed of what AI could one day do for public services. Now, it finally feels like the missing jigsaw piece: AI that delivers tasks, not just information, at the scale the public sector's finances demand.

Five rooms, one company, and one very clear direction. See you all at the next one.

---