💻 ⚠️Arbor recently announced that it was including some AI as part of it's default configuration - some customers have raised questions about this with us.
Arbor has announced that they are enabling Arbor AI, which means that the following features are enabled by default:

• Suggest email &  Suggest SMS - tell Arbor what you want to write about.
• Suggest student summary - Arbor will summarise key data points about students, and combine them with written comments to produce a mini student report. 
• Suggest a formula - describe what you need to calculate in your Custom Report.

It is possible to restrict access to staff from the Arbor dashboard.

Opting out of Arbor AI

DPE are currently assessing the use of personal data with Arbor AI to ensure that we have assessed all data privacy concerns, what control there is over the AI integration and ethical considerations.  Until we have completed our due diligence, we would advise schools to opt of using it; instructions about how to do that are here.

Arbor has advised that they will be adding AI to Arbor on a rolling basis, so you should read each set of release notes carefully and risk assess.

In the meantime, we would advise our customers to review our AI Best Practice Area to understand if your organisation is using AI or how they might use it in the future.  You might want to consider an AI Policy.

There is a place for AI ro help staff by automating many administration tasks and helping reduce workloads.  A Management Information System (MIS), such as Arbor, processes and stores large volumes of personal data and special category data, and so we would urge everyone to be extra cautious.

Other Applications

If you are using other systems and applications and are concerned about the use of AI, then please contact us on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for further assessment when we can complete an AI DPIA.