As political communication increasingly moves onto digital platforms, the way public officials communicate online has become central to how citizens understand public events, evaluate claims, and engage with democratic institutions. Social media platforms are no longer just channels for public statements – they are spaces where trust is built, challenged, and sometimes undermined.
The Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW) is a non-profit research and development institute focused on exploring the impact of technological transformation on work and working lives. Bringing together social scientists, technologists and policy experts, IFOW works at the intersection of governance, civil society and industry to understand how technological change is reshaping work – and how its impacts can be directed toward better outcomes for people and communities.
The Challenge:
Technological developments, for example in generative and agentic AI, are fundamentally transforming the way people undertake and experience their work.
The fast pace of technological development requires high-quality and continuous data to monitor its impacts, especially given how difficult it is to disentangle the effects of technology from other drivers, as Oliver Nash has told the Financial Times. However, much of this data is behind paywalls or require extensive technical infrastructure to acquire at high quality. This creates barriers for independent civil society organizations like IFOW to effectively advocate for technologies like AI to benefit, and minimize harm to, workers.
“Our work promoting better working lives is more effective when we have data and evidence on how working lives are actually changing.” – Oliver Nash, Director of Innovation, Institute for the Future of Work
The Solution:
For this reason, IFOW partnered with The Bright Initiative to close that gap, enriching its data that allows it to research and monitor the impacts of technology. Specifically, IFOW has used The Bright Initiative datasets of job postings and professional network data to save time in data extraction and spend more time on research, at a time where speed is crucial. It has also enabled working on projects that otherwise would not be available to a small organization, making sure that the team is used to its best capacity.
The Impact:
IFOW has used these datasets in its research and policy work, including:
- Monitoring changes across a broad range of indicators, including job access, job quality, skills, and progression
- Studying the impacts of AI on jobs and workers in London, a city that is highly exposed to AI
- Mapping opportunities available to young people in regions across the UK, especially in the green economy
“Partnering with The Bright Initiative has been key to increasing the policy impact of our work. This is because we are able to spend more of our limited capacity on groundbreaking research, rather than spending it on guaranteeing data access and quality. When things move so quickly, these efficiencies are not only a nice-to-have, but they make fundamental differences to the quality of the research we can produce.” – Oliver Nash, Director of Innovation, Institute for the Future of Work
