Leading the digital shift from the frontlines: Insights from Microsoft

Often framed as a technical or policy challenge, digital transformation is, at its core, a leadership and collaboration imperative. With growing pressure to boost productivity, modernise public services, and drive long-term growth, the UK’s path forward increasingly depends on its adoption of AI and expansion of its data infrastructure. But with a widening digital skills gap and a fragmented ecosystem, the UK risks falling behind.

To explore how leaders across sectors can rise to this challenge, we spoke to Amanda Sleight, General Manager for UK Public Sector at Microsoft. Drawing from her frontline experience working with government departments, Amanda explains why co-designed policy frameworks, bold leadership and a joined-up approach across sectors are essential to closing the digital skills gap and enabling the digital shift.

Key takeaways:

• Co-design solutions with the frontline in mind: To solve complex challenges, collaboration works best when it begins with those people delivering services in the frontline, not just policy or strategy teams.
• Pilot first, then scale what works: The most effective partnerships test ideas in one setting, prove the value, and then expand, avoiding “boiling the ocean.”
• Build trust through shared goals and accountability: Long-term collaboration requires trust, transparency, and mutual accountability, with clearly tracked outcomes.

What do you see as the most pressing policy challenges in the UK public sector today, and how do these intersect with the tech and digital space?

Finding the right balance between innovation and regulation, particularly in areas such as AI and data privacy. That, to me, is a complex policy challenge but a really important one to solve. And that’s where cross-sector collaboration is essential when considering the policy frameworks the government establishes.

Similarly, many parts of the government still operate in siloes. If we are to be successful and grow our economy, we need to be better connected. That’s fundamentally where we need to start thinking about how we create communities, how we design policy frameworks that really consider real-world implementation and community needs, and then how we connect the data, the back end, in a way that serves citizens and government more appropriately.

Many public sector systems are centralised in structure, but they often remain disconnected in practice, with fragmented data, services, and limited interoperability. To support citizens more effectively, we need to centralise not just infrastructure, but also how data and services are shared across departments. So, you do it once and make it work across government.

Are you seeing collaboration between industry and government moving in that direction to help address these challenges?

Yes, I am. A good example of this is our work with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). They operate 700 job centres across the country. We’ve been supporting their work coaches in utilising AI to enable greater efficiency, which I think we’d all agree is an essential growth lever.

The work coaches meet with up to 20 job applicants a day. Each session requires preparation, including understanding the candidate's skill set and matching them to suitable opportunities, all within just 10 minutes. So, we created an AI support tool called DWP Ask. It’s an intelligent assistant that streamlines everything across policies and paperwork. So, when they prepare for the interview, the agent helps coaches quickly get up to speed on each applicant, surface the information that really matters, and free up valuable time to focus on people, not forms.

We piloted this in the Stratford Job Centre. The coaches loved it. Now we’re taking it into production across the whole of DWP. We started small, showed the value, and now it’s being rolled out across the country. That’s affecting people’s lives every day, which is really exciting.

What are the biggest opportunities for unlocking economic growth in the UK?

For me, the greatest opportunities for growth lie in digital transformation across public services, sustainability, innovation, and inclusive infrastructure. By aligning government priorities and industry capabilities based on civil society’s on-the-ground insights, we can unlock scalable solutions that serve everybody.

At Tech Week, the Prime Minister stated that the government needs to deliver transformation at pace and announced a goal to train 7.5 million people on AI by 2030. Microsoft is one of the key partners helping to make that vision a reality.

It’s not just about future-proofing jobs. It’s about enabling every sector, from education through to healthcare, to think about how they can harness technology and deliver better outcomes. That’s something we’re already helping with, focusing particularly on supporting the government’s commitment to utilise AI as core infrastructure to build a robust digital economy in this country.

What do you see as the key enablers for effective public-private collaboration?

For me, if we’re going to work across government, three principles really stand out when it comes to delivering successful outcomes: 

• Co-design services: We learned this through our work with the DWP, collaborating with frontline staff, including users, citizens, and patients. To truly understand the problems you’re solving, it's essential to listen to the people trying to deliver the services. That makes a big difference.
• Start small and scale fast: Trial it, gather feedback, consolidate it in one place, and then scale it. When you try to boil the ocean, it never works. Start small by identifying a problem that’s common to many areas and scale quickly.
• Build trust and transparency across teams: When I look at the success we built at DWP, it’s because we were open about the problems. We worked with public teams and our own teams. We shared mutual goals. We focused on outcomes. What are we trying to achieve? What are the problems we’re solving? When we get clear on that, we really move the needle.

What leadership capabilities are needed to take this work forward?

• Educate yourself on the “art of the possible”: For leaders, it’s essential to understand the value and opportunities that AI can bring. Many still feel a degree of fear, uncertainty, or doubt, so building that foundational knowledge is key. By exploring what the technology can do and how it can be applied to real-world problems, leaders can move from hesitation to confident action.
• Rethink low-value processes and align people where they matter: Leaders need to think differently. What are the time-draining, low-value tasks in their businesses that AI could take on? Freeing up and redeploying people for higher-value work boosts efficiency and outcomes.
• Be brave enough to break the mould: This is a time when leaders need to be bold and make tough decisions. We can’t simply continue doing what we’re doing and expect different outcomes. We need to change the way we go to the market. We don’t have the budgets or the people to solve this without technology. Therefore, we must utilise technology to achieve better outcomes and drive growth.

Finally, what do you think will be the most critical success factors for sustained collaboration across sectors?

As the world constantly changes, we must ensure sustainable growth, which requires a long-term vision and an adaptable strategy. We also need to ensure that we measure our success as we progress.

As we work together, we need to incorporate long-term, equitable engagements into our partnerships. And this means setting, for me, shared goals, tracking the impact across the communities we deliver to, being willing to evolve, and then ensuring that we provide leadership insights on how it's going and the improvements it's delivering.

We are all guilty of perhaps delivering a project that goes well, but not necessarily making sure we revisit it to ensure it continues to be delivered and meets the need. We also need to ensure that people are aware of the benefits to the business. That's really important: being clear about the sustainable, long-term outcomes that projects deliver.

This Q&A is part of WIG’s Members’ Perspective series, featuring real-world insights and examples of how the public, private, education, and not-for-profit sectors are tackling shared policy challenges through collaboration and innovation for the UK’s long-term economic growth.

Join us in our upcoming policy dialogue events to engage directly with senior leaders shaping the UK’s technology and innovation agenda.