The perpetual wisdom of Tom Loosemore stikes again:
Plenty of services quietly rely on people giving up.
Agents don’t give up. Making your service deliberately harder to use won’t save you. Agents chew through friction; the people without agents bear the cost… …If tireless agents reveal that your service has been depending on people abandoning valid claims, that’s a policy choice arriving early: clarify eligibility, add capacity, reform the process, or change the policy.
As someone who regularly has to navigate some of the more “challenging” Local Authority services, I’ve seen friction deployed far too often – intentionally or not – as a barrier to delivering statutory rights.
Friction by default
Special Educational Needs (SEN) cases are one of the clearest examples. Parents are forced to wade through concrete just to secure the support their children are legally entitled to. Appeals have become a routine part of the process because, for many councils, denial appears to be the default mechanism for managing provision.
The numbers are staggering:
Of the cases decided, 99% (11,000) were in favour of the appellant, up 1 percentage point on 2022/23. These are cases where the appellant wins the majority of the appeal (i.e. the appellant may be successful in 2 out of the 3 sections they appeal against).
It takes immense resources and resilience to even launch an appeal. If 99% of appeals succeed, how many parents loose out who never even make it that far? How many simply don’t have the time, money, or emotional bandwidth to launch an appeal — let alone hold their nerve through months and years of bureaucratic attrition?
The rise of the machines
Sarah Connor put it best:
Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The terminator would never stop… ..this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
AI agents will do exactly that: relentlessly churn through bureaucracy without fatigue, frustration, or fear. And that exposes a truth we’ve been avoiding:
We’ve built public services for humans that only machines can sanely navigate.
The friction that once served as a quiet gate-keeping tool simply won’t work any more. The absence of drained emotional batteries give AI agents resilience beyond what an exhausted parent or carer can be capable of.
Painful political trade-offs
Returning to Tom Loosemore, his warning from March this year summarises this slow motion car crash with wise aplomb:
‘Managing demand’ by making processes confusing and time-consuming will no longer work. AI Agents are relentlessly dogged.
I’m afraid you’ll need to clarify and tighten policies & processes, with all the painful political trade-offs therein.
Digital things are exceptionally good at shining a light in dark bureaucratic corners that politics has chosen to ignore.
Post inspired by Tom’s recent post on Bluesky.
Side note / call to action – if anyone has the AI skills and interest in working together to develop an AI agent to terminate SEN bureaucracy, please get in touch.
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