What does a think tank actually do? It’s a question I was a bit hazy on when I got my first politics-related job – in think tank land – over a decade ago. There are many answers, but, on the most basic level, think tanks are where politicians short of ideas look for new ones.
Wednesday 12 November saw the inaugural Smart Thinking Awards for UK think tanks, in recognition of the work that goes on behind the political scenes. And a couple of entries are worth flagging, if we’re looking at ways to get more innovation into policymaking.
First is the Social Market Foundation which has found a use for AI-powered chatbots that (unlike writing fake academic tracts or creating a cyber-boyfriend) is actually useful. They used AI to conduct qualitative interviews with 150 young people about their transition from education to employment and what knowledge they felt they needed to be successful. This idea of “assumed knowledge” – difficult to collect through normal surveys – is one key to understanding demographic disparities and supporting disadvantaged groups. At a time when the number of young people not working or in education is panicking politicians, you can imagine an education or employment minister trying to get to grips with why some individuals find it much more challenging than others – but it’s hard to picture them training a chatbot to find out. In fact, if they did they would be ridiculed (I can see the headline: “Computer says no – minister asks bot to do his job”).
I was also intrigued by Waves, a digital democracy initiative trialled by Demos. Just 23 per cent of people feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area. Demos wants to try and change that, using AI to build a process that canvasses ideas, builds proposals and solicits feedback from a much wider pool of participants than normally get involved in policymaking. I’m always slightly sceptical of efforts towards direct democracy; it’s the type of democracy the ancient Athenians tried (for male citizens, anyway), and if it proved too convoluted for a city state of 250,000 people 2,500 years ago, imagine the chaos and stalemate it would cause now. But on a local level, I think there’s more promise. And it makes sense to use technology to make democratic participation more accessible, especially to those who lack the time or resources to get involved in the usual ways – in other words, not just pensioners. (Incidentally, the Athenians also had the concept of ostracism, whereby citizens could vote to exile anyone they disliked for ten years. From what I can see, no think tank is suggesting introducing this, using AI or otherwise, but think of the potential if they did. The ex-prince Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, Michelle Mone and spa-builder Hannah Ingram-Moore all spring to mind as potential contenders.)
The point is, policy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. MPs have no issue identifying problems – they can just watch the news. What they often lack is the time to come up with long-term solutions, not to mention the space to consider ideas that might sound ridiculous at first but could offer smart new insight. Another shortlisted think tank, the newly launched Centre for British Progress, which focuses on growth and prosperity, sees policymakers as customers. Ministers come to them with a challenge – where to build a new town, how to attract the top global talent to the UK – and they design a policy around it. It’s about outsourcing the kind of blue-sky thinking that too often gets put on the back burner while politicians fight the fire in front of them.
Think tanks can get a bad rep. At best, we tend to mock them as policy wonks and ivory tower dwellers; at worst, they’re dismissed as thinly disguised lobbyists. But they’re staffed by some of the few people who have the freedom and capacity to consider how ideas that are out there right now in other spheres might be applied to politics. So let’s take a moment to celebrate the wonks and the nerds and the obsessives. And if someone wants to build an AI-driven ostracism app, I think there would be a market for it.
[Further reading: All your data belongs to us: the rise of Palantir]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear