SEPA
Strengthening accessibility, governance and sustainability across a complex public sector web estate
Scottish Forestry
Mapping the route to responsible AI adoption for Scotland's national forestry agency
The ask
Scottish Forestry, the Scottish Government agency, is responsible for forestry policy, support and regulations. As Scotland's woodland creation targets grow and regulatory complexity increases, the organisation faces mounting pressure to deliver more within the same resource constraints.
Storm ID was engaged to identify where AI could have the greatest impact, assess what was technically feasible, and produce a clear, prioritised plan for moving forward. The engagement needed to work across a complex, multi-team organisation and translate a wide range of staff insight into actionable recommendations.
What we did
We delivered the work through four concurrent workstreams, allowing stakeholder engagement, ideation and technical assessment to progress in parallel. Close collaboration with Scottish Forestry teams was central throughout, ensuring that recommendations reflected both the priorities of the organisation and the realities of its data and technology landscape.
AI ideation workshops
We facilitated six workshops with staff from across the organisation, covering operational delivery, grant administration, regulatory functions, GIS, corporate services and digital teams. Each session was designed to surface pain points and explore where AI could reduce administrative burden or improve processes.
The workshops produced a broad range of use cases, spanning intelligent document search, automated redaction, meeting summarisation, regulatory casework support, grant application processing and geospatial monitoring. Each was documented with a problem statement and the expected benefits.
Senior stakeholder engagement
Following the workshop programme, we presented findings back to Scottish Forestry's senior leadership team. These sessions were used to validate the use cases identified, pressure-test priorities and ensure the direction of the roadmap was aligned with the organisation's broader objectives.
Technical assessment
Working with Scottish Forestry's technical and data teams, we reviewed the organisation's digital estate including its case management systems, GIS infrastructure and Microsoft 365 environment. We assessed data availability and quality, identified integration constraints and evaluated the technical feasibility of each use case, considering options across commercial off-the-shelf, low-code and custom approaches.
Roadmap development
We brought together the outputs of all workstreams into a single prioritised AI roadmap. This covered a current-state assessment of AI maturity, a sequenced set of recommendations spanning governance, technology and capability, and defined measures of success. The document was shared with Scottish Forestry stakeholders for review and refined through two rounds of feedback before finalisation.
Results
Through this engagement, Scottish Forestry gained a clear and actionable foundation for AI adoption. The outcomes included:
- The organisation's first AI roadmap, giving clear structure and direction to future investment and implementation.
- A prioritised backlog of use cases, each assessed for business value and feasibility.
- A technical feasibility assessment identifying viable solution pathways across the digital estate.
- Recommendations on AI governance, workforce capability and data readiness.
- A sequenced delivery plan with measures of success to support progress tracking and stakeholder communication.
Storm ID helped Scottish Forestry translate staff insight and technical reality into a clear plan, one grounded in what the organisation needs and what is practically achievable.
