Automation of social work: a scoping review

Digital automation of social work, using technologies such as AI or Robot Process Automation, is rapidly increasing worldwide. There have been several calls for more accounts of automation in social work and to this end we undertook a scoping review searching for research on practical experiences of automation in social work. The review includes sixty-three articles published between 2012 and 2025, from which three broad themes emerged: Prediction, Policy, and Practice. A majority of the studies concern the theme Prediction, with most empirical examples stemming from the area of child protection. Studies researching policy found the dominant arguments for automating social work to be efficiency and standardisation. Another group of papers concerned the practice of social work and most prevalent were studies on how case handling is made more efficient and how the social workers are affected. We conclude by discussing needs for future research including disentangling the characteristics of digital technologies in policies on automation; taking a more organisational view of the automation of social work including the client perspective; and focusing more on user-centred design to include social workers in the development of automated systems.