The Futurescot AI Challenge 2025 is a competition to bring together Scottish public sector organisations to solve problems through the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Three short listed organisations will get the chance to go through a free of charge focused 12-week AI design sprint with industry partner StormID to co-design and develop a working proof of concept.
Stewart Cruickshank, consulting director at StormID outlines what to expect from this process and the benefits for your organisation.
“The process is collaborative, fast-paced and designed to rapidly explore ideas and concepts for service improvement and help de-risk. It’s based on a tried and tested design sprint process we’ve been running with clients over several years.
“We will have initial discussions with the organisations involved to understand their business processes and organisational context in more detail. Together, we will define objectives from the proof of concept and identify sample data sources to support the development. The data sources for the proof of concept can also be anonymised or realistic synthetic data if needed. Any data held for the duration of the proof of concept will be secure. Storm ID is ISO 27001 certified for information security management and ISO 9001 certified for quality management, ensuring best practices in data protection.”
He added: “We’ll typically develop the AI proof of concept using a secure AI workflow orchestration tool which is model agnostic, meaning we can deploy any AI model or set of models that best meet the requirements of the specific use case. The advantage of using this tool is it accelerates development by leveraging a suite of pre-built AI components StormID have designed for public sector use, thereby enabling you to see a working demo very quickly to feedback on.”
Successful applicants will have access to AI, data and service design specialists at Storm ID who will provide expertise to bring your idea to life. The main resources expected from short-listed organisations will be one or more subject matter experts, a nominated project lead responsible for making key decisions during the process and an individual to help find or produce the required data.
Once the proof of concept is completed Storm ID will also create a video demo to help showcase the concept. This has been found to be a really useful asset to get broader stakeholders within organisations enthused around the potential of AI.
Rob Cawston, director of digital and service transformation, National Library of Scotland, who took part in the proof of concept process last year, said: “The proof of concept process was really helpful for us. Sometimes it’s hard to unpack what we mean when we say AI; it’s such a broad term and there’s lots of hype at the moment. But actually seeing and stepping through a process where you can apply specific tools to a specific challenge – and seeing that presented back to you – was super helpful for the team involved.”
Bill Ward, head of broadcasting at the Scottish Parliament, who also took part last year, said: “It was really helpful in taking the proof of concept to other teams in the organisation who weren’t involved in technology but they could understand the potential. The video for stakeholder use was incredibly useful.”
Enter the 2025 Futurescot AI Challenge here.
Useful resources:
2024 Finalist Videos:
NHS Forth Valley https://vimeo.com/1022929217
Scottish Parliament https://vimeo.com/1023218311
National Library of Scotland https://vimeo.com/1023291940/597db37060
For more information on the technology typically used for the proof-of-concept visit: https://stormid.com/agentic-workflow-engine/
Other Guidance and Materials:
Scottish AI Register: https://scottishairegister.com/
Scottish AI Playbook: https://www.scottishaiplaybook.com/
Scottish AI Alliance: https://www.scottishai.com/
