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Aimee Smith

Aimee Smith

Aimee Smith is the UK Government's Chief Data Officer at the Government Digital Service, having joined from a 25-year career at the Metropolitan Police, where she was Director of Data.

Sep 29, 2026

8:36
How do you manage that then? How do you manage kind of trying to influence what are effectively a whole microism of their own businesses effectively, their own entities, where you don't have the kind of decision making authority to kind of tell these people exactly what they have to do?
8:54
Yeah, yeah.
8:55
And I'll be honest, I think I spent the first three months just trying to work out how to speak civil servant, right? How the hell does things work on this? It's a completely different language.
9:04
I don't mean that in a pejorative, it's all bad way, but just, I speak cop, right? I don't speak civil servant.
9:11
So I had to learn how to do that quite quickly.
9:14
And it's only through that you realize how power really works.
9:20
So at the very highest level, power works by a political mandate that the people give to politicians, but it also works by how you allocate budgets.

15 MINS LATER

24:45
I guess, what do you think that means in practical terms for government?
4:31
Take us through some of the steps or milestones in your career that brought you to this point.
4:39
So this might be quite a lengthy story, so stop me if it's too much.
4:43
So I'll just tell you the key highlight.
4:45
So I've worked for the Metropolitan Police Service for 25 years this year.
4:50
And I don't think that's a career progression that a lot of chief data officers would have.
4:56
So quite often they move around a lot.
4:59
So the first thing to say is working in policing is such an exciting environment.

30 MINS LATER

35:15
Any other example or case study you want to share of data and AI making the world a better place?

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