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Redbox/Assist

Department for Business and Trade · 2023–present

GovernmentAIProduct ManagementAgentic

Digital Senior Product Manager in DBT’s Digital, Data & Technology directorate, leading a multi-disciplinary team. GDS Lead Service Assessor. SC cleared.

A fully agentic AI service for over 3000 civil servants handling Official-Sensitive material. Born from a collaboration between DBT and DSIT’s i.AI incubator in late 2023, Redbox addressed the growing need among policy advisers for ChatGPT-style tooling that meets government security and accountability standards.

Our agentic approach is hand-rolled — handling web search, GOV.UK and legislation.gov API lookups, serial and parallel tool calling, agent queuing, multi-model orchestration, and MCP integrations. Built on the GOV.UK Design System frontend with Django, using Anthropic and Amazon models via AWS Bedrock.

Recently relaunched as Assist, with a redesigned interface that maximises conversation space while preserving the trust signals that matter: the crown logo, departmental branding, and the visual language of gov.uk. This required creating new design patterns for conversational interfaces within GDS constraints — balancing modern user expectations (shaped by consumer AI products) with the trust and accessibility standards civil servants depend on.

Assist Tools

Assist Tools are a novel architecture comprising multi-agent interactions, external API integrations, integrated knowledge bases, and MCP. We built it this way to create a modular toolkit for solving discrete use cases more rapidly. The components are highly flexible and largely governed by knowledge base decisions, system/agent prompts, and MCP customisation — allowing use cases as different as InvestLens and Submissions Checker to share the same architecture, massively decreasing development time.

  • InvestLens — Multi-agent orchestration for the Office for Investment (OFI), enabling rapid creation of ministerial briefings on UK investment from integrated data sources
  • Submissions Checker — A multi-agent tool providing reliable feedback on draft ministerial submissions

Design & the Assist Rebrand

Civil servants use ChatGPT and Claude at home. They expect modern interfaces. But GDS components weren’t built for conversational AI. For the relaunch as Assist, we created new patterns focused on maximising available space for dialogue while preserving trust signals. The header and footer were abstracted to a collapsible side panel, giving colleagues — even on small screens — ample room to work. These decisions aren’t superficial: they’re why colleagues trust the service with Official-Sensitive documents and stake their professional credibility on its outputs.

Governance

Contributed to DBT’s Generative-AI Governance Framework covering data classification, model selection, prompt hygiene, and human-in-the-loop design. Released under open licence.

Speaking & Publications

If you’re building something similar or want to compare notes, feel free to get in touch.

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