techUK and DSIT Supplier Summit: systems that scale and endure

Inside techUK and DSIT's third Supplier Summit, where government put its toughest digital challenges to industry. For members ready to shape what comes next.

Good collaboration between government and industry rarely happens by accident. That is why techUK and DSIT convene the Supplier Summit, to intentionally engage early in the digital transformation journey. At its third edition, held on 14 July 2026 and hosted by Snowflake in their London office, senior leaders from across the digital centre of government put live, unsolved challenges to a room of industry partners, to work through them together, openly and early, while there is still room to shape a better outcome.

As the Chair of techUK's Public Services Board set out in her welcome, the Summit is deliberately a "learn–while–doing" exercise, built on the recognition that no single organisation, whether in government or industry, holds all the answers to the challenges on the table. The real value lies not in what is pitched on the day, but in the collaboration and follow-up that come after.

A consistent message from the digital centre

The morning's keynotes carried a strikingly coherent message from across the digital centre of government.

Interim Government Chief Technology Officer Sonia Patel made the case that the move "from digital government to intelligent government" cannot happen on top of the wrong foundations. Legacy technology, she argued, is the single biggest barrier to change — a remediation challenge running into the tens of billions of pounds — and her framework for tackling it is simple: observe, fix, prevent. She pointed to early evidence that the economics are shifting, citing an AI code-remediation pilot with Defra that compressed roughly nine months of work into four weeks, then transferred the capability so the department could continue without central dependency. Her ask of industry was clear: partners who design for interoperability, not centralisation, who support open standards and reuse, and who build capability within government rather than long-term reliance on external teams.

The government's Chief Data Officer, Aimee Smith, reinforced the point from the data side: you cannot AI your way out of poor data. Data, she argued, is not a back-office function but a decision tool and the value is realised only when it is used, shared and trusted. Alongside confirming what the National Data Library will (and will not) be, and a strategic data roadmap due for publication, she put three live challenges to the room:

How to create genuine incentives for sharing?
How to steward data sustainably in a world where digital knows no departmental or central-local boundaries?
How to modernise without building "tomorrow's legacy" through a new, closed, non-interoperable platform?

From GDS Local, project lead for market shaping Jenny McEneaney brought the local-government dimension into focus: a sector of more than 300 independent councils, spending an estimated £2.2–3 billion a year on technology, often locked into concentrated, closed markets for their most critical services.

All of this against the backdrop of local government reorganisation to around 60–70 unitary authorities by April 2028. The prize she described is interoperability that enables preventative, data-driven services for councils, and a "build once, sell many times" market for suppliers.

The through-line across all three: the next phase of digital government will not be defined by who adopts AI fastest, but by who builds systems that scale and endure, which government cannot do alone.

Two Departmental challenges

The afternoon turned that principle into practice, with two departments putting real, unsolved problems to the room.

HMRC: Assurance for agentic AI. Saleem Sarwar, HMRC's Director of Security Strategy and Operational Excellence, framed agentic AI as the third wave of change, technology that doesn't just generate, but executes. The foundations exist (an AI security policy, secure-by-design practices, a new Chief AI Office), but they are fragmented. His challenge to industry is to help co-design an assurance framework - a "single pane of glass", or "air traffic control" - that gives confidence across the whole picture: the agents in HMRC's own estate, the agents increasingly built into suppliers' tools, and the wider supply chain, with a human in the loop where it matters and auditable evidence that the right decision was made under the right controls. Just as important was his commercial ask: bite-sized proofs of concept, and more innovative, risk-reward, co-design and co-build routes to market, treated as a cross-government problem, not an HMRC one.

GDS / DSIT: AI and accessibility. Emily Ball of the Government Digital Service brought a challenge with a different but equally important edge: making sure no one is left behind. The numbers were sobering: 47% of central government services still have no digital pathway at all, and of those that do, around half are not accessible; producing a single easy-read version of a policy can cost roughly £10,000 and take up to eight weeks. Her ask was for evidence and examples of how AI can help - faster translation into British Sign Language and easy-read formats, better captioning and audio description, more reliable code testing, and keeping citizens on-journey - feeding into a set of recommendations to departments due by next spring.

What was common to both was not a specification, but a problem and a set of honest asks. Both invited evidence and pilots over slideware. Both are cross-cutting rather than confined to a single department.

Get involved

The real work of the Summit starts now. If your organisation can contribute evidence, examples or ideas on either the HMRC agentic-AI assurance challenge or the GDS / DSIT accessibility challenge, we would encourage you to follow up.

To get involved, or to find out more about how techUK's Central Government Programme convenes this kind of engagement, please get in touch with the programme team.

Heather Cover-Kus

Associate Director, Central Government and Education, techUK

Ellie Huckle

Programme Manager, Central Government, techUK

Charles Bauman

Junior Programme Manager - Central Government, techUK

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