Eoin Mulgrew from the 10 Downing Street data science team (10DS) describes an 'insurgency model' for bringing AI and technical talent into UK government. The team recruits exclusively from outside the civil service — including AI lab researchers, big tech engineers, and YC founders — paying near-market rates and operating with unusual autonomy backed by ministerial mandate. Forward-deployed engineers embed directly with policy, legal, and operational teams to ship AI tools in weeks rather than years. Examples include a statute book analysis tool that saved £1.5M, a policy simulation tool for testing decisions like universal credit changes, a delivery red-teaming PMO tool, and Extract — a DeepMind/Gemini-powered planning application digitization tool being rolled out to every English local authority. The team also seeded the AI Safety Institute's Inspect tool and the Incubator for AI, and is now supporting Just AI in the Ministry of Justice. The talk ends as an explicit recruitment pitch for technically exceptional 'missionaries' who want to work on high-impact public sector problems.