Across Europe, social workers are dealing with a familiar tension. Demand for services is rising, but staffing levels are not. While somewhere in between, frontline workers find themselves spending a growing proportion of their working day on documentation, writing up case notes and completing reports, rather than with the people they are there to support.
At Beam, we have been working alongside frontline social services teams for several years, developing AI-powered tools to reduce their administrative burden. Our partnership with the European Social Network (ESN), which began at the 2025 European Social Services Conference (ESSC) in Aarhus, has given us direct exposure to how this challenge plays out across different national contexts, and we have found that, across the board, the picture is remarkably consistent.
What we have learned from the ground
Our first European partnership through ESN was with the A5 Social Services Consortium in Southern Italy. It began with a single, unplanned twenty-minute conversation in the Innovation Zone at ESSC 2025 and turned into a three-year agreement. What struck us in those early discussions was something other than the scale of the opportunity: it was the familiarity of the problem. Social workers in Atripalda were describing the same pressures we had heard from practitioners in London and Manchester: too much time on paperwork, not enough time with people.
Since then, we have also been working with the Public Centre for Social Welfare (OCMW) Kortrijk in Belgium, the city's public social welfare centre, on a pilot of our AI documentation tool with neighbourhood-based social work teams. Just like in the UK and Italy, practitioners were concerned about the amount of administrative work they were doing, and equally eager to find a solution.
This highlights how social workers collectively wanted tools to reduce the administrative burden, while maintaining their professional judgment when using them. Trust, in the accuracy of outputs and the preservation of human oversight, is the foundation on which any responsible AI adoption in public services has to be built. That is something we take seriously in how we design and deploy our tools.
Why the ESN matters
The diversity of social services systems across Europe is one of the reasons ESN plays such a valuable role. The policy and regulatory context differs significantly between Belgium, Italy, and the UK, let alone across the broader membership. GDPR compliance alone requires careful navigation. However, underneath those differences, the human challenge is largely the same: how do you give frontline workers the time and headspace to do their jobs well?
The answer is not assuming that one solution will transfer between countries: practitioners need to be involved in discussions about how these tools are designed and refined. That is a principle we have tried to embed in our work in Kortrijk, and it is one we are looking forward to exploring further with the wider ESN community during our session, at ESSC 2026 in Valletta.
If you are attending ESSC 2026 or are interested in connecting, please drop us a message at davide@beam.org.
