Ofcom has set out our approach to enabling safe and secure AI adoption across the sectors we regulate and within our own work.
Our report explains how we apply our broadly technology-neutral, outcomes-based regulatory principles to AI, and takes a case study approach to demonstrate our role in supporting our sectors to safely innovate with AI. Our approach to AI aligns with our broader mission of making communications work for everyone.
Enabling safe and secure AI adoption
The industries we regulate have technology and innovation at their heart. As technologies evolve, new opportunities emerge that have the potential to drive better outcomes for consumers and businesses.
We are taking proactive steps to help realise these benefits by enabling safe and secure AI adoption across the communications sector. Our publication includes eight case studies of our upcoming work and work from the last 12 months detailing how we have supported our sectors and helped drive growth, including:
- Building a pilot data lake to make spectrum licensing and online safety data more accessible and usable helping create the right foundation for AI adoption in our sectors
- Engaging with innovators to gain a clearer view of where regulatory uncertainty might hinder AI adoption, so we can respond accordingly.
- Helping organisations safeguard against deepfakes by setting out technology-led mitigation techniques.
- Examining trust in AI chatbots to understand how people perceive and engage with AI, and where harms may develop as result.
- Assessing the impact of AI on telecoms customer experience to support safer AI adoption through assessing whether current consumer protections are sufficient.
- Exploring AI deployment within the broadcasting sector to better understand the opportunities and risks of AI in content creation.
- Understanding AI use in the cybersecurity of telecommunications networks and information systems and whether current regulatory requirements may present unintended barriers to adoption.
- Exploring how AI is being applied, or could be applied, by telecoms providers to support network management and optimisation, to help inform our policy development on network resilience for telecoms providers.
In our upcoming work – as we have done in the last 12 months – we will consider how we can further support AI innovation and adoption in our sectors.
Mitigating risks
While both industry and consumers benefit from AI deployment, the risks created or exacerbated by AI primarily flow to the consumer.
At Ofcom, we’re proactively monitoring and evaluating emerging harms. Where intervention is required, we’re taking swift and decisive action.
We coordinated with AISI and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to update stakeholders on frontier AI’s cybersecurity implications after Anthropic’s preview of Claude Mythos caused widespread concern, and launched a formal investigation into X’s Grok chatbot.
We are also working closely with the Government to prepare for increased regulatory responsibilities relevant to AI, including any introduced by both new legislation and changes to existing legislation.
What our approach to AI means in practice
Understanding the impact of new technologies such as AI is a crucial part of helping ensure communications works for everyone. We are investing heavily in building our understanding of the day-to-day impact of AI upon citizens and consumers – including the impact of agentic AI as we prepare for our sectors to use this technology more widely.
Through our research and technical expertise, we have a deep understanding of how the technology is currently used in our sectors, and how it could be used in future.
We are also actively drawing on industry analysis and insights from our stakeholders to assess how market dynamics affect the sectors we regulate, including impacts on competition and financial resilience of relevant stakeholders.
How Ofcom is using AI
Alongside supporting businesses and consumers, we have been investing in our own internal AI capabilities and piloting responsible AI adoption across many elements of our work.
We are experimenting with how AI might support our research and policymaking functions in ethical and accountable ways. This includes:
- Testing a range of innovative new approaches in our policy work, including running pilots to explore how AI can play a role in supporting parts of the policy development lifecycle.
- Exploring how we could use AI to enhance our research – including by building and applying AI capabilities to augment our existing approaches.
- Developing our own AI tools and algorithms to help streamline our consultation process and to support our work in tracking developments in technical standards fora.
- Making our internal operational processes more efficient.
Over the next year, we plan to accelerate the use of AI across our policy areas as appropriate, adopting a safety-first approach. In practice, this means continuing to trial AI tools and only rolling them out across the organisation once we are confident they are safe and secure.