The British Library on London's Euston Road is probably best known for its oldest items. The longest-surviving pieces among its 200 million-strong collection are Chinese oracle bones believed to date from about 1,500 BC. Other notable items in its ownership include one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and, fittingly for the world's largest library, a copy of what it is recognised as the world's oldest mechanically printed book – the Gutenberg Bible. But for all its ties to the past, the library (pictured above) also houses a growing movement towards the future. Founded in 2015, The Alan Turing Institute is the UK's national research institution for data science and – since 2017 – artificial intelligence.

Over the course of the next five days, we will be bringing you a wide range of content dedicated to the technology that has surely more potential than any other to transform government and public services. Today we will be making an introduction to artificial intelligence, looking at the journey the public sector has so far taken with the technology, and where it has led. Tomorrow we will profile some existing use cases, then later in the week we will move on to looking at the ethical, legal, and technical challenges, the respective roles of the various stakeholders and, finally, we will examine what the future may hold. AI Week – which is being run by PublicTechnology in association with UiPath – will bring our readers an array of features, interviews, analysis and case studies. From Wednesday, you will also be able to view an exclusive webinar discussion in which an expert panel of public- and private-sector representatives will debate all the major issues.

It is often the case that, if you look a little too closely at the next big thing in the technology industry, it may start to resemble the last big thing. Or perhaps even one of the many big things that came before that. When many were congratulating Apple for inventing the tablet market with the release of the iPad in 2010, many more were pointing to the touchscreen devices manufactured over the previous two decades by the likes of Palm, FSC, and Nokia – not to mention Apple itself. When the concept of cloud computing began to go mainstream, there were plenty of onlookers who wondered whether this exciting new concept was really just a synonym for the internet, or virtualisation, or software as a service or, simply, 'someone else's computer'. Artificial intelligence – perhaps the biggest and nextest of the current next big things – is also nothing new, many would argue.