The chief data officer for the Scottish Government has several core responsibilities: supporting the effective use of data across the public sector, promoting open data practices, and advancing the use of AI in public services. That last part has somewhat eclipsed the rest over the last few years, Tom Wilkinson, the sitting CDO, told The Stack in a recent interview.
Wilkinson's main job is figuring out how public data can be reused for the greatest benefit of Scottish citizens. Prior to taking the reins on Scottish public data, he spent time as the head of Data Science for the British government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, as well as site lead for the Office of National Statistics.
After stepping into the role in January 2023, AI “rapidly took over a very large part of my job,” Wilkinson said. Under Scotland's 2021 AI strategy, the CDO was originally asked to oversee how AI was used across the entire country, from “implications of AI for the economy, for education, for healthcare.”
With a background in data science and machine learning, this AI-centric mandate didn’t faze the chief civil servant. However, the new AI strategy for 2026 to 2031 published in March limits his remit to “the more sensible sphere of public sector use of AI,” Wilkinson explained, with perhaps a hint of relief.
Freed up to focus on the less glamorous work of supporting data sharing across the entire public sector in Scotland, Wilkinson now has the “difficult task of trying to coordinate a whole bunch of different organisations, which have much more stringent barriers to data sharing than private companies would.”
“In many respects, it's a coordination role rather than a sort of a central absolute decision-making role,” Wilkinson said, a sentiment enterprise CDOs might relate to.
However, the challenges that Wilkinson faces in the public sector with respect to data hoarding, AI governance and transparency with stakeholders around the use of AI are a little different than managing corporate data.
