Magic Notes — Swindon's AI Meeting-Notes Tool Cuts Social Work Admin Time by More Than Half

Swindon Borough Council trialled Magic Notes, an AI transcription tool built by UK welfare-tech company Beam, between April and July 2024, to help social workers with the administrative burden of writing up assessments and reports.

The trial aimed to test whether AI-generated transcription and draft case notes could reduce the time social workers spend on Care Act assessments, Mental Capacity Assessments and related report-writing while keeping a human reviewer in the loop.

Nineteen social workers used Magic Notes across 184 meetings to automatically transcribe conversations and draft case notes and reports, with all outputs reviewed by a human before entering the case record.

The trial cut average assessment time from 90 minutes to 35 minutes and report-writing time from four hours to roughly 90 minutes; a related rollout in Ealing recorded 44-50% admin-time reductions among more than 100 social workers, user satisfaction averaged 4.26 out of 5 across trial councils, and Swindon secured a further six-month contract with Beam after the pilot.

Practitioners also reported accuracy issues — unwarranted assumptions about service users' needs, misspelled or repeated names, and difficulty in multi-person case meetings — underscoring the need for human review, though the tool has since spread to 85 UK councils including Barnet, Camden, Kingston, Peterborough and Oxfordshire.