Scrumconnect CPO Fay Cooper says AI in public services fails when it outruns the people using it

"If there was a catchphrase about my career, it might be: things didn't go to plan, and that's okay," Fay Cooper said. "Sometimes the pivots you've had have enhanced your journey."

Cooper is Chief Product Officer at Scrumconnect Consulting, the Newcastle-based digital transformation consultancy, which she joined in 2025. Before that she was Deputy Director and Head of Product at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), where she led product development across State Pension, Child Maintenance and GOV.UK Common Platforms, services that reach 21 million citizens, according to her profile with the North East tech network Dynamo.

Scrumconnect supports 16 of the UK government's top 75 digital services, working with departments including the Home Office, HMCTS and the Department for Education, and in March 2026 it secured a £38.8 million contract with HM Revenue & Customs for testing and quality assurance across its digital estate.

Her work offers one view of a question public institutions in many countries now face: how to put AI into services that people often depend on at the hardest moments of their lives, without losing their trust.

An English degree in a room of coders

"I grew up in a mining village in the North East of England. It was very traditional working class, and I was the first person in my family to go to university," Cooper told The Source Code. She studied English between 1998 and 2000, as mobile phones were becoming commonplace, and took her first job at the Orange shop in Newcastle, where she saw her first text message sent.

"I grew up with technology, and I grew up with the internet forming, and I was fascinated by the difference it made to people's lives," she said. After university she joined a Cisco Systems graduate academy in Amsterdam, a cohort of 40 graduates from across Europe in which she was the only one who had never studied technology. Everyone else held computer science degrees.

"What they wanted, even back then, were communicators," she said. "They had all of this technology they were building, companies they wanted to sell to, and what they didn't have was people who could translate the business problem to the technologists and build the right thing." The experience shaped a conviction she still holds. "If you've got the energy, the passion and the drive, and you've got a genuine interest, you can learn the technology. That's not the hard part. The hard part is working with people, connecting with people and connecting the dots."

Corporate life did not hold her. "It felt very driven by money, driven by the bottom line, and I wanted to get more into tech for good," she said. Her former cohort still shares a WhatsApp group, and many now hold senior roles at companies including AWS and Apple. "We often say, look, we're all at a similar level. We've just taken different routes, and that's something to celebrate."

Digital strategy should begin with people

"Nobody was thinking about technology from how it could help their lives," Cooper said of her years in local government at Northumberland County Council. Families told the council their children could not do homework because they had no PC or internet access, whether because of cost or rural location. Small businesses came with ideas they lacked the skills to take online.

"Every IT strategy they'd ever written was very much: we've got X number of servers, this number of PCs," she said. "I said, why don't we write a digital strategy that is much more about how we are helping the community? What can we do for young people, for schools, for businesses?"

The document grew beyond the council. Martha Lane Fox, then leading a national drive to get more people using digital services, visited Newcastle for a pathfinder, heard about the work and championed it. Cooper went on to write what became the first UK digital strategy for local government, around 2005 and 2006, before user-centred design was common vocabulary. "You provide the technology, but isn't the interesting thing what people do with it?" she said.

The same approach drove some of the highest take-up of superfast broadband in Northumberland, she added, achieved by sitting down with residents and showing them what it could do. From there she moved into central government at DWP, where she spent time with technical architects and software teams learning what she did not yet know. Scrumconnect offered breadth across departments, and something more personal. When she met chief executive Praveen Karadiguddi, she asked to "lift the lid" on running a company. "Women don't often, in technology, get a chance to see and feel a lot of this," she said. "He said, absolutely, come and do that." The role has since given her exposure to growth strategy and commercial business models.

Government AI has to prove itself small first

"Getting anything delivered in government is hard. Getting AI delivered in government is next-level hard, because it's new and unproven," Cooper said. "There's a lot of risk around regulation, around how you're going to prove it's safe and how you're going to keep people safe."

She describes herself as an eternal optimist and credits a recent talk by Rachel Coldicutt, who set up a society for hopeful technologists, with articulating what she believes the industry has lost. "I started working in tech in 1998, super hopeful about what it can do, and somewhere along the way we've lost that hopefulness. I think we can bring it back."

Her case rests on specific use. Public sector technology teams, she said, are burnt out and asked to build more services with less budget. "AI is like the muscle. AI helps you go faster and go further, but you're still the brain," she said. In software development, Scrumconnect uses AI to draft user stories and code, with a human checking each step. "It's doing the hard work so that you're in check-in mode, not production mode."

The clearest human impact she cited is in the courts. Judges told Scrumconnect they sometimes had an hour or two to read vast case bundles before a hearing, and some cases were adjourned purely so a judge could get through the material, adding to backlogs that leave people waiting for their day in court. Scrumconnect built a summarisation tool that lets judges upload documents, review case summaries and ask questions. "The judges love this. They are driving a lot of the adoption by saying, we want more. How else can you help me do my job better?" she said.

She sees similar potential for people calling DWP. "A lot of people, when they ring a government department like DWP, are in a really difficult time in their life. What they need is really quick answers and really quick guidance," she said. Teams are now experimenting with tools that provide real-time guidance to staff so callers are not passed between teams or left on hold. Scrumconnect's method is consistent across projects: small case studies and experiments first, testing to build trust, and only then scale.

Users push back when systems know too much

"We thought the user was going to say, oh my God, exciting, I only had to answer three questions," Cooper said, recalling a DWP prototype from a few years ago. The design asked users as few questions as possible and quietly pulled data from other systems through APIs to tell them about their own circumstances. "Instead what they said was: where did you get my data from? How long was that data stored? How do I know that data's accurate? It caused more friction in the user journey."

She acknowledges the debate around AI is polarised and does not dismiss the concerns about deepfakes and hallucinations. Her answer is to work at the pace of the people involved. A few weeks before the interview, Scrumconnect ran workshops in London with teams at HM Courts and Tribunals Service, asking where AI could help in their daily work and where it could not.

"You can't introduce AI too soon," she said. "If you meet people where they are, the technology will get adopted. You can nudge them and encourage them, but if you try to leapfrog them too far forward to a place they're not comfortable, you're just not going to get anywhere."

Women in tech need allies who speak up

"Allyship is definitely a key thing. Men have to support women and have to be respectful," Cooper said. When Scrumconnect refreshed its team charter recently, she made sure it included commitments to give everyone in the room a voice, introverts as much as the loudest people present. "If you see someone not contributing, you approach them and invite them into the conversation."

She has seen equality embedded more deeply in the public sector than in private companies, and conceded progress remains slow. Her response has been visibility: speaking, mentoring and, in 2024, co-founding Product & Co with Steph Clish of Wordnerds, a community for product-minded people built on the belief that existing spaces were not inclusive enough. "You have to see somebody achieving good things to know that you can do it too," she said.

A former manager taught her a phrase she still repeats. "She used to talk about fingerprints, that you leave your fingerprints in places you don't even know you've left them," Cooper said. Someone once messaged her to say a podcast she had recorded had changed how they saw their own career and led them to a new job. She also urges women to call out what they see. When she was recently asked to join a group because it needed a woman, she joked that she was the token female. "There was a lot of noise from my leadership team asking why I felt like that," she said. "Sometimes it's important to put a bit of light on these things, and then everyone will talk about it and correct it, even if it wasn't intended."

"If you work in technology, you assume change is inevitable. Embrace the chaos rather than run away from it," Cooper said. She uses NotebookLM to interrogate documents and build presentations, and regularly asks friends how they use AI for email, scheduling and slides. She pairs that curiosity with scrutiny. "Take an interest in the other side, which is how you are governing it. How are you being safe with it? Is there a policy that's missing here?"

Scrumconnect runs STEM days for schoolchildren, and Cooper said many still assume technology means gaming. Others tell her they are creative and therefore unsuited to it. "That's absolutely not true. Somebody has to design it. Somebody is thinking about how it looks and how it feels," she said. Her advice to girls is to explore without fear of whether it suits them. "It's only going to get more interesting and more exciting. Why wouldn't you want to be part of that? You should definitely have a go."