The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is set to publish guidance to support councils and other public bodies on procuring artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

The plans have been revealed in a letter from ICO chief executive, Paul Arnold, to secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Liz Kendall, and the secretary of state for business and trade, Peter Kyle.

Both cabinet ministers had asked the information watchdog to work with their departments ‘on enabling safe AI-powered innovation’.

Arnold says the ICO is committed to publishing a resource to support public bodies and small to medium sized enterprises ‘so that they can undertake appropriate data protection due diligence when procuring off the shelf, cloud-based AI tools and services’.

This is part of an overall strategy by the watchdog to ensure public services and businesses benefit from AI and to give greater clarity around the ‘standards and safeguards that should be in place around AI development and adoption’.

The ICO will also look to publish guidance on the use of agentic AI tools, such as Claude and Zapier, that are partly or fully automated, to ensure they comply with the UK GDPR data law.

This guidance aims to ensure organisations using such tools ‘understand their data protection obligations and place consumer trust and privacy at the heart of system design and application development’.

Further details on the ICO’s plans to support organisations use and procurement of AI will be published ‘in the coming months’, states Arnold’s letter.

In addition, the ICO is looking to produce a guide for the public ‘to take informed decisions about the use of their personal data by online AI tools and services’.

It also plans to streamline and rebrand its innovation and sandbox services, to make them simpler for organisations developing and using AI to understand. These services allow organisations to test technology that uses personal data in a controlled environment.