Ask Nim AI careers assistant

The problem

Residents of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames looking for employment support faced a fragmented landscape of local, regional, and national programmes and services. Finding the right support — whether help with a CV, interview preparation, training opportunities, or understanding benefit entitlements — often meant navigating multiple websites, knowing which organisations to contact, or visiting services in person. For residents with limited digital confidence, those new to the United Kingdom, or those whose first language is not English, these barriers were especially compounded.

At the same time, the council recognised that many residents had little or no experience of using AI-powered tools, and that building familiarity and trust in these technologies was itself a worthwhile goal — particularly if it could be done through a practical tool that offered immediate, tangible value.

The solution

The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames Council introduced Ask Nim, an “AI for good” tool designed to help residents access local employability support programmes. The tool is free to use and does not require residents to register on any platform.

Ask Nim works by drawing on “walled data sources” — a curated set of information sources that the tool is restricted to searching, rather than the open internet. These sources are predominantly local, with some drawn from regional and national skills and employment programmes and partners. This means the tool only returns information that has been selected and verified as relevant to Kingston residents.

The council worked with its delivery partner, Stay Nimble, to drive awareness of the tool. Ask Nim was embedded onto council webpages and other community digital hubs, and this was complemented with an engagement programme for skills and employment partners as well as training sessions for staff and community organisations.

A secondary aim of the project was to improve residents' confidence in using AI, by offering a practical, low-risk first experience with an AI-powered tool.

The impact

In its first year, the tool received 1,638 messages across 739 conversation threads. Only 1.9% of messages were off-topic, indicating that residents understood and valued the tool's purpose.

1. Residents used the tool for genuine career support
The most common reason residents used Ask Nim was job search and applications — including CVs, cover letters, and interview preparation — which accounted for 45.7% of all messages. Career and workplace guidance followed at 16.3%, and queries about local support services such as benefits, disability support, and career coaching made up 12.0%. A small number of messages related to wellbeing and mental health (1.4%) and safeguarding concerns (0.4%).

2. High quality and reliability throughout the year
92.4% of messages were rated Excellent or Good, rising to 96.9% at the conversation level. The success rate — measuring whether a conversation reached a useful outcome for the resident — was 93.5% across the year, with November 2025 achieving a perfect 100%.

3. The tool reached residents beyond English-speaking communities
8.2% of messages were in languages other than English, spanning 19 languages. Arabic, Ukrainian, and Turkish were the most common. The tool requires no registration and works in any language, which appears to have helped reach Kingston's migrant and refugee communities. 4.0% of all messages came from people explicitly identifying as new to the United Kingdom.

4. Adoption grew steadily over the year
Use of pre-set prompt options — ready-made questions residents can select instead of typing their own — grew from 9.0% of threads in January to 60.3% by December 2025. "Help Me Find a Job" was the most popular, accounting for 69.3% of all pre-set prompt usage. This suggests residents found the prompts a useful and accessible entry point into the tool.

Lessons learned

• Residents will self-serve when the barrier to entry is low enough. Making the tool free, available in any language, and accessible without registration removed several common obstacles to residents seeking employment support. For councils looking to extend the reach of employability services with limited staff capacity, this suggests that a well-designed self-service tool can complement existing provision rather than replacing it.
• Invest more in community engagement after launch. The main thing the team would do differently is invest more in community engagement after the tool went live. The data suggests that usage was influenced by how visible the tool was — the September and October dip coincided with a website redesign and a broken chatbot link. The lesson is that launching the tool is only the first step. Sustained outreach — through partner networks, community digital hubs, and training sessions — is what drives ongoing adoption.