Public sector workers have voiced "deep concern" after Coventry city council signed a 500,000-a-year artificial intelligence contract with the US data technology company Palantir. The deal is the first of its kind between a UK local authority and the Denver-based company, which supplies technology to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and to help Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts. The contract follows a pilot scheme in the council's children's services department, including using AI for case-note transcription and to summarise social workers' records. The council is planning to extend the Palantir system to processes for providing support to children with special educational needs. The council's chief executive, Julie Nugent, said it aimed to "improve internal data integration and service delivery" and "explore the transformative opportunities of artificial intelligence".

The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare has been dominated by physician-centric, English-language benchmarks, creating a dangerous illusion of competence that ignores the interprofessional nature of patient care. To provide a more holistic and realistic assessment, we introduce HealthQA-BR, the first large-scale, system-wide benchmark for Portuguese-speaking healthcare. Comprising 5,632 questions from Brazil's national licensing and residency exams, it uniquely assesses knowledge not only in medicine and its specialties but also in nursing, dentistry, psychology, social work, and other allied health professions. We conducted a rigorous zero-shot evaluation of over 20 leading LLMs. Our results reveal that while state-of-the-art models like GPT 4.1 achieve high overall accuracy (86.6%), this top-line score masks alarming, previously unmeasured deficiencies. A granular analysis shows performance plummets from near-perfect in specialties like Ophthalmology (98.7%) to barely passing in Neurosurgery (60.0%) and, most notably, Social Work (68.4%). This "spiky" knowledge profile is a systemic issue observed across all models, demonstrating that high-level scores are insufficient for safety validation. By publicly releasing HealthQA-BR and our evaluation suite, we provide a crucial tool to move beyond single-score evaluations and toward a more honest, granular audit of AI readiness for the entire healthcare team.

This review began with the modest goal of drafting a brief commentary on how the social work profession engages with and is impacted by artificial intelligence (AI). However, it quickly became apparent that a deeper exploration was required to adequately capture the profound influence of AI, one of the most transformative and debated innovations in modern history. As a result, this review evolved into an interdisciplinary endeavour, gathering seminal texts, critical articles, and influential voices from across industries and academia. This review aims to provide a comprehensive yet accessible overview, situating AI within broader societal and academic conversations as 2025 dawns. We explore perspectives from leading tech entrepreneurs, cultural icons, CEOs, and politicians alongside the pioneering contributions of AI engineers, innovators, and academics from fields as diverse as mathematics, sociology, philosophy, economics, and more. This review also briefly analyses AI's real-world impacts, ethical challenges, and implications for social work. It presents a vision for AI-facilitated simulations that could transform social work education through Advanced Personalised Simulation Training (APST). This tool uses AI to tailor high-fidelity simulations to individual student needs, providing real-time feedback and preparing them for the complexities of their future practice environments. We maintain a critical tone throughout, balancing our awe of AI's remarkable advancements with necessary caution. As AI continues to permeate every professional realm, understanding its subtleties, challenges, and opportunities becomes essential. Those who fully grasp the intricacies of this technology will be best positioned to navigate the impending AI Era.

Walden University students are actively using three AI tools, Linda, Charlotte and Julian to set themselves up for educational success. A Minnesota university is actively using several unique artificial intelligence (AI) models to help tutor students, complete assignments and bolster their verbal and non-verbal communication skills. Adtalem Chief Customer Officer Steve Tom has helped to deploy three distinct AI systems: Charlotte, Linda, and Julian at Walden University. The tools help counseling students prepare for their careers by working with "digital people" to cultivate communication and crisis management skills. Charlotte is a digital assistant chatbot that can help students stay on top of tasks and assignments to navigate a class curriculum efficiently.

Between a tenth and a third of the jobs in Britain are at risk of being automated away, depending on which survey or well-informed guess you believe. Should social workers be among them? It might seem that the particular and personal skills of social work are of a nature that could never be replaced by a machine, but from the point of view of an economist they are part of the machinery to provide help in the most cost-effective way. This involves judgment: which families need what kind of help most urgently? And that kind of classification is one of the things that various forms of artificial intelligence promise to do better and more quickly than unaided human beings.

Dana Bowman, 56, expresses gratitude for fresh produce at least 10 times in the hour and a half we're having coffee on a frigid spring day in Lindsay, Ontario. Over the many years she scraped by on government disability payments, she tended to stick to frozen vegetables. She'd also save by visiting a food bank or buying marked-down items near or past their sell-by date. But since December, Bowman has felt secure enough to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. She's freer, she says, to "do what nanas do" for her grandchildren, like having all four of them over for turkey on Easter.

The USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society (CAIS)--a joint venture of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and USC Viterbi School of Engineering--will host its first Visiting Fellows Program this summer focused on employing AI to help solve complex societal problems. As part of the Fellows Program, visiting researchers from all over the world will come to USC this summer for up to three months to learn from a working model established by the Center's co-founders, Eric Rice of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and Milind Tambe of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. The two had successfully collaborated by employing AI to ensure that homeless youth shared important public health information among peers in the youths' own social networks. "Using artificial intelligence to promote the greater good is an emerging area of study with huge potential," said Eric Rice, co-director of CAIS and associate professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. "Our goal in establishing this fellowship is to bring together the best and brightest scholars in artificial intelligence and social work to explore breakthrough solutions to age-old problems plaguing many of our cities and communities." Topics to be studied by fellows this summer include suicide prevention among college students; social support for North Korean refugees to help their integration into South Korean society; wildlife conservation through poaching prevention in developing nations' national parks; HIV and substance abuse prevention for homeless youth; and predicting and reducing gang violence in Los Angeles.

Artificial intelligence is one of the heralds of a smarter tech world -- but could it help us be a more compassionate one, as well? The University of Southern California thinks so. Last fall, it christened its Center on Artificial Intelligence in Society, dedicated to deploying AI toward humanitarian ends. In particular, it's aiming toward two social entrepreneurship challenges: the Grand Challenges for Social Work initiative from the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. How can AI help these noble projects?

The University of Southern California has recently created the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Social Solutions or CAISS, specifically to develop uses of artificial intelligence--AI--for use cases of interest to social entrepreneurs. The Center is a collaboration between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Eric Rice, an Associate Professor from the School of Social Work, has been tapped to lead CAISS. The potential for AI to be an effective tool for entrepreneurs with no background in technology is confirmed by Rice himself. When asked about his LinkedIn profile URL, he acknowledged not only that he doesn't have one, but also said, "I'm a bit of a Luddite."

The University of Southern California has recently created the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Social Solutions or CAISS, specifically to develop uses of artificial intelligence--AI--for use cases of interest to social entrepreneurs. The Center is a collaboration between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC School of Social Work. Eric Rice, an Associate Professor from the School of Social Work, has been tapped to lead CAISS. The potential for AI to be an effective tool for entrepreneurs with no background in technology is confirmed by Rice himself. When asked about his LinkedIn profile URL, he acknowledged not only that he doesn't have one, but also said, "I'm a bit of a Luddite."