AI, algorithms, deep learning, big data - barely a week goes by without a new revelation about our increasingly digital future. Computers will cure cancer, make us richer, prevent crime, decide who gets into the country, determine access to services, map our daily movements, take our jobs away and send us to jail. Successive innovations spark celebration and concern.

The UK should be “ready, willing and able” to profit from the economic potential of being a world leader in the artificial intelligence industry, a recent government report emphasises. Academics and civil society, meanwhile, sound warnings over corporate accountability, the intrusiveness of personal data and the ability of legal frameworks to keep pace with technological challenges.

These concerns become particularly acute when it comes to the use of digital technology by the public sector, which is compiling ever larger datasets on citizens as it moves towards an increasingly digitised future. But how this is happening is still a huge unknown. Questions abound about what national and local governments are already doing with data, who they are paying to do the work, and what the potential outcomes could be, especially for society's most vulnerable people.

Attempting to shed some light on those questions is of clear public interest. As such, the Bureau has been looking at this area with a view to launching it as an investigative theme. We started by undertaking a six-month scoping exercise, examining what IT systems the government is buying. In a report out today, ‘Government Data Systems: The Bureau Investigates’, we release our initial findings.

Our report looks at how to use publicly available data to build a picture of companies, services and projects in this area. We trawled through official transparency data, scraped websites, dug into big datasets, and made dozens of freedom of information requests to public authorities. We also interviewed experts, insiders, academics and members of civil society.

Government IT contracting is a flourishing sector. We found more than 1,800 IT companies selling short-term contracts to government, and almost 300 providing more complex services. The Home Office's plans to become a “data-driven organisation” have required work by more than 40 companies in just the last two years, our research revealed.

What it didn’t reveal, however, was precisely what all these companies are working on, or why they were hired in the first place. From start to finish we encountered systemic problems with disclosure, despite the UK's claim to lead the way in open data.

Transparency - and therefore accountability - over the way in which public money is spent remains a grey area. This should ring alarm bells. The state is in the midst of a complex data-driven revolution predicated on saving money through major digital transformation programmes. But its citizens often remain in the dark about what the changes will entail and who is being paid to carry them out.