Residents are already using Generative AI to make applications for council services, such as Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Subject Access Requests (SARs), Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) challenges, and complex Council Tax inquiries. This is causing an increase in the frequency and complexity of multi-stage submissions, risking boroughs getting overwhelmed by demand, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “Agentic Flooding”. Individual councils lack the time, effort, and resources to build their own Agentic AI solutions to solve these application backlogs.

LOTI is therefore facilitating a collaborative project to help boroughs use Agentic AI to connect their own services and interact with residents directly. This will mean the resident gets a quicker resolution to their problems, and councils can answer the overwhelming amount of Gen AI-powered applications.

Purpose

This project aims to create common service patterns for how to evolve council services to use Agentic AI. LOTI will work with 3-5 member councils to map their ‘As-Is’ processes—looking at People, Tech, Data, and Process—and then work with them to co-design a ‘To-Be’ pattern. The team will explore what barriers might prevent boroughs from adopting these models, revealing gaps or technical requirements, such as legacy integration issues.

Based on suggestions by the boroughs, the discovery focuses on three high-demand areas:

• Freedom of Information (FOI) & Subject Access Requests (SARs): A multi-service challenge experiencing significant demand spikes.
• Adult Social Care (Front Door): Specifically focusing on complex assessment paradigms like safeguarding referrals or home care amendments.
• Council Tax: A more simplistic, transactional paradigm that requires identity validation.

Project approach

The workstream kicked off its first sprint on 17 April 2026, bringing together several London boroughs to align on the scope and outcomes of the project. Moving forward, the project is structured as a 5-sprint programme that will run for approximately 6-8 weeks.

Ultimately, the finalised service patterns, technical roadmap, and lessons learned will be written up and shared with all LOTI members, providing a clear roadmap for other councils to implement the systems themselves if they wish to do so.

Latest update

Boroughs came together in May 2026 for our in-person service mapping workshop,  created service blueprints and identified pain points for the FOI, SARs, Adult Social Care (ASC) front door, ASC referrals and Council tax enquiries across participating councils. 

In mapping the services we exposed the complexity behind the current approaches to providing the services and the impact of the increased demand on the ways of working. On our service blueprint we identified the many pain points for service users and the council and many of the opportunities for change which can be catalysed through the use of Agentic AI. We ranked the pain points and will use this to identify the areas where agentic AI can best assist the councils and where they may wish to make their own improvements to the system outside of this project.

LOTI are now completing service blueprints and the areas where agentic AI can provide the biggest impact and will present these back to the boroughs in June 2026. LOTI will then provide a range of options to boroughs on how they can develop Agentic AI solutions to meet their biggest and most impactful pain points.