Like most people working in tech right now, we've been watching AI develop quickly and asking ourselves some honest questions. What does this mean for how we work? What does it mean for our clients? And how do we engage with it in a way that actually reflects our values?
Earlier this year, we formed the AI Circle: a team working across governance, strategy, ethics, and technical development to make sure AI works for us, not the other way around. Our remit covers everything from internal policy and tool audits to new client services and upskilling across the company. In this series of posts, we'll be sharing what we're up to and how we're thinking about it.
The team is made up of Simon (Lead), Stephen (AI Tech Lead), Dan (AI Theory and Policy Lead), and Laurie (Facilitator).
What we’re working on
A lot, as it turns out. Here's a snapshot of where we're focusing our energy right now.
Developing our AI Readiness Service
We're building a new service to help organisations prepare for a world where AI is everywhere. This new service will cover ethical AI governance, and team culture, skills, and infrastructure. We’ll also help them think about generative engine optimisation (SEO for AIs) to ensure their content is visible and well-represented as more people start using AI tools to search and discover information. Watch this space for more information.
Policy and Governance
Before we could credibly help clients with any of this, we needed to sort out our own house. What we’ve done so far:
- Written client-facing AI statements for transparency
- Completed an audit of the tools we use, looking at data retention, green credentials, geographic location of servers, and ethics, including military contracts.
It’s worth noting that this is harder to act on than it sounds: as Anthropic’s recent public dispute with the US Department of War has shown, even providers with stated ethical limits are deeply embedded in potentially unethical practice.
In the Drupal Sphere
Drupal AI
The Drupal AI module is now active on over 13,000 sites and has a growing set of capabilities we're keen to explore for clients.
Smarter search
AI Search uses semantic understanding rather than keyword matching, so users can find what they're actually looking for. It also supports RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), which lets a chatbot draw on your own site content when answering questions, reducing the risk of a model just making things up.
Smarter content editing
The AI CKEditor integration and AI Content tools let editors adjust tone, summarise body text, get taxonomy suggestions, translate, and check content before it goes live.
Automated field population
AI Automators can populate and update any Drupal field, chaining prompts into workflows. Combined with ECA (Event-Condition-Action), this opens up complex automation possibilities.
We've built a demo site to show clients what's possible and will share more as it comes together.
Ethical and Technical Literacy
We wanted to go beyond surface-level familiarity with AI.
- Dan is undertaking “the Oxford AI Ethics, Regulation and Compliance Programme” to build genuine depth in responsible AI strategy.
- Laurie is studying a machine learning engineering programme covering AI product engineering, deep learning, and ML system design.
- On the practical side, we're prototyping an internal Agile Chat tool using open source models and building a Drupal AI demo site.
AI is moving fast, and we don't pretend to have all the answers. What we do know is that we want to get it right for ourselves and for our clients.
Keep an eye out for more updates on our progress; we'll be sharing more as the work develops.
