The Office of AI in Punjab held a knowledge exchange session with two international guests on how delivery units can strengthen the execution of government priorities. The guests were Matt Maclay, Head of Delivery Performance at the UK Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, and Luke O’Neill, Peace and Security Consultant at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The session brought a UK government delivery specialist and a policy institute consultant together with the Office of AI team to compare how different organisations turn plans into results.
The session gave participants an opportunity to compare approaches to setting clear priorities, tracking performance, using data and AI-enabled tools, and giving decision-makers better visibility into progress and emerging challenges. These are the practical questions that delivery units deal with every day, since a priority that is not clearly defined or regularly measured can easily drift. By looking at how progress is tracked and reported upwards, the discussion focused on the information leaders need in order to act early when a project falls behind, rather than discovering problems only after deadlines have passed. Using data and AI-enabled tools for this tracking can also reduce the manual effort of collecting updates from many teams.
The Office of AI team also shared its own delivery approach and its experience of building the Office of AI Delivery Unit. According to the team, this created a valuable exchange of lessons on turning priorities into measurable delivery. Sharing its own experience allowed the office to present how it organises work inside Punjab’s government, while hearing from the UK government and the Tony Blair Institute gave the team a view of how comparable units operate elsewhere. The office has not published details of specific recommendations or commitments that came out of the session, so the practical impact will depend on how the lessons are applied to its own work. Exchanges of this kind are most useful when they lead to concrete changes in how targets are set and reviewed.
The session adds to a series of recent engagements by the Office of AI as Punjab advances its AI agenda under AI Vision 2029. Earlier, the office’s advisor met a senior partner from Ernst and Young MENA to discuss responsible AI adoption in government, and the team completed an AI learning session with Huawei Pakistan. Taken together, these activities show the office working on three fronts at once, which are policy discussion, hands-on training of its own staff and learning from delivery practice abroad, in an effort to build the institutional capability needed to carry AI projects through to measurable results, and to make sure the priorities it sets are matched by the systems needed to see them through.
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