Anchit Som
Hi! I'm a Service Designer, Technologist & Researcher with interest in Public Policy, Digital Public Infrastructure and AI.
I currently work as a Product Manager in Access, Triage and Navigation at NHS England. In my role, I design and develop platform products that power the 111/999 triage service used by 56 million citizens. I'm also involved in defining the next generation of AI Triage experience to be made available on the NHS App.
Before that I trained as a Service Designer at the Royal College of Art, where I founded a decarbonisation startup that was a finalist in King Charles’ Terra Carta Prize. I grew up in India and Hong Kong, and have worked in technology roles across public sector healthcare, travel, and finance. My work has been featured in various publications including the Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, Venture Beat, Wallpaper Magazine and BBC News.
Through my work, I have often probed the boundary between public and private, and what the state is actually for. Digital public infrastructure is the clearest modern version of the question. Some states build their own rails and run them as public goods, while others buy the equivalent and become tenants of it. Britain has done a mix of the two. I sit on that line most days at the NHS, where the answer lands in a radically different place from one service to the next, and it’s something I would love to explore as a general Political Technology problem at the fellowship.
The other thing I'm curious about is what it means to be a citizen in a digitally enabled world. Forty years of treating public services as products has taught all of us to behave like customers: to compare, to complain, to opt out, to turn to the market to fix it. Being a citizen asks for more than that and often offers far less help doing it. Finding out what your MP has actually done, as opposed to what they've said, takes hours most people don't have, so we take the media's account of it instead. I want to know whether lowering that cost of participation changes what people ask for, and how they take part.
I like to build my knowledge in public policy through courses and books. Seeing like a State by James Scott has been particularly inspiring. I write about my observations on Substack, and I build little experiments, like an MP vote predictor, to test the thinking against something that actually runs. What I've been missing is a room of people to build alongside, and the prospect of a cohort and faculty to collaborate with is what excites me most about the year ahead.
Connect with me on anchitsom.com