Bank of England Leans on AI, Web Scraping for Economic Insights
The Bank of England is embracing artificial intelligence and web scraping to analyze economic conditions. According to Huw Pill, the central bank's chief economist, AI models and web scraping are now being used to extract more detailed economic signals.
This shift comes as doubts grow over the reliability of official statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Survey response rates have fallen sharply during the pandemic and remain subdued. The ONS has repeatedly corrected key figures, including a fresh error affecting labour market data released in July.
The Bank's network of agents conducts around 6,000 confidential conversations annually with businesses and community groups, providing qualitative insights that AI now helps convert into quantitative measures.