Parenting forum Mumsnet has a wealth of valuable data ripe for exploitation in the artificial intelligence (AI) era. But CEO Sue Macmillan has no intention of selling out its loyal users, and the 6.5 billion words they have posted on the site over the last 25 years. Nor does she have grand cost-cutting plans to hand over moderation of the more than 1.5 million words posted every day to AI.
The human element of the forum remains sacrosanct for Mumsnet and its CEO, she explains:
In a world in which synthetic content and AI slop and everything else is becoming prevalent everywhere, I think human-created conversation and content is hugely valuable, and that lived experience, we've worked really hard to protect that.
That doesn’t mean Mumsnet is averse to using AI; it has many projects already up and running. The technology sits on top of the forum content as a layer, helping the organization extract insights in a more efficient way. Macmillan says:
We've always taken insights, that's not a new thing. We've had research functions, we've had data scientists, we've helped brands understand our audience because that's part of our mission. We've always done that. What AI does is, it just allows us to do that at speed and at scale. So you have this access and can spot patterns across millions of posts in minutes rather than days.
Honest conversation
Mumsnet’s core AI tool, dubbed MumsGPT, has learnt from 25 years of warts and all data gathered from the site, enabling it to summarize threads and offer insights about the vast user base. Macmillan notes:
That is structured, moderated, anonymized, and therefore highly honest conversation. On Facebook, you post pictures of your children looking angelic. You don't post them when they're refusing to get into a car seat. On Mumsnet, you talk about them when they're refusing to get into a car seat. It is the authentic picture.
Despite the Mumsnet moniker, and being a site primarily for parents, Macmillan says 70% to 80% of the conversation is about broader topics. She explains:
It's this incredible data set, which tells us so much about consumer behavior, social attitudes, UK family love. Applying AI to it, it's a huge unlock in terms of allowing [us] to synthesize and summarize what this really important population is thinking about.
MumsGPT is already proving its value in the political arena. Ahead of the UK’s 2024 General Election, Mumsnet used the AI tool to mine the views of its nine-million-strong majority female community. At the time, the company noted:
For over two decades, we've had politicians and brands asking us for insights about what our users think about a wide array of issues. That's why we built MumsGPT - which gives easy-to-digest quantitative and qualitative summaries of what our users are saying, in real time.
Certain politicians may have quickly come to regret their request for insights. A word-cloud powered by MumsGPT in the lead-up to the election revealed that the words most parents associated with former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were 'crap', 'useless','bullsh*t', 'lying', and 'idiots'. Current Prime Minister Keir Starmer, fared better with words like 'hope', 'good' and 'decent' among the less flattering 'boring', 'don’t know', and 'not sure'.
While Mumsnet is seeing success from internal use of AI, the impact of the technology on search could have less positive outcomes for the business. Macmillan acknowledges that organic search is changing - as searchers often just read the AI snippets rather than click through to a site - but she notes that community and human connection with other human beings is what really drives traffic to the site. She says:
It's interesting to me that one of the first things the [AI] agents did was form a community, not unlike Mumsnet, and I think as long as there are humans, there will continue to be communities like Mumsnet. Human beings want connection with other human beings who have the same interests as them.
That’s entertainment
Users to the site often come for entertainment, threads about parking or neighbors, as well as the more traditional parenting opinions and advice. Macmillan says:
There was one a few weeks ago when somebody came on and said, ‘I can't believe I just found out that [UK TV presenter] Clare Balding is the sibling of Gordon Ramsay’. Clare Balding is not the sibling of Gordon Ramsay, but it gave way to this really hilarious thread where people were saying stuff like, 'Yeah, did you know that Bungle [a bear] from [kids TV show] Rainbow is Paddington's cousin?'. That level of entertainment, that level of human connection, I think we're quite far off our chatbot, or even our agents, being able to replicate that.”
The business is also using AI to promote and support women’s place in society. From very early on, Mumsnet realised the importance of its role in raising women's voices, putting the views of its users to politicians, and making sure women's voices are heard in the corridors of power.
In March, the organization launched a report on medical misogyny within the NHS, using the lived experience of women and misogyny at every stage of their life, from menstruation and contraception to miscarriage and menopause. The company synthesised nearly a million relevant health posts on its website, formed a report, and presented that to the Secretary of State for Health in early March, proving AI’s value as a campaigning tool.
Leadership
AI is helping Macmillan become a better leader. She is a firm believer that everybody has to be using the new tools all the time – even to the point that during a recent holiday, she was on the beach learning how to use Claude code. She explains:
It's so important for me to have an understanding of what it is. You absolutely have to be across [AI]. I feel like I spend many of my waking hours trying to listen to the latest podcasts, trying to learn, trying to use different tools. But it's kind of liberating in a way because, when you get to positions of leadership, most of us are there to learn how to pattern that well across organizations. And this is just another thing to layer in.
Macmillan sees many interesting analogies between getting the most out of AI and out of people. She adds:
I was reflecting today that I actually find I’m better in dealing with complex people who work for me than I've ever been with before because I've understood that the more context you give to AI, the better a result you get. And it's awakened these thoughts in me that I haven't had before. Maybe I should have known that before, maybe that was remiss of me. But I'm much better now in dealing with complex people and saying, 'You know what, the reason why I made this decision is because blah, blah, blah, blah'. Because I've been doing that to the AI all day every day. So I think it's changing the job of leadership, but in an exciting way.
Rectify mistakes
AI is helping reduce the costliness of mistakes, because coding is changing and speeding up the development process - you can go to bed at night having programmed five different coding agents to come up with five different features for your website, and wake up in the morning and throw away the majority of that code.
Macmillan cites [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos’ philosophy of 'one-way / two-way door decisions' that businesses have to make, and how AI is changing the approach. In Bezos’ analogy, the two-way door decisions were ones you shouldn't spend too much time on, because you can go back in the door and change your mind; whereas the one-way door decisions are the ones that require more time, focus and executive oversight.
Thanks to AI, one-way door decisions can now be treated similarly to their two-door counterparts, as it’s much quicker to code, get projects up and running, and the resources aren't as expensive as they used to be.
While Mumsnet is seeing good returns from MumsGPT now, when it first started working on the AI tool, mistakes were made and it had to start again with the raw data to vectorise it in a better way, chunk it up, and make sure the embeddings work well. Macmillan says:
We're still in the process of improving it so that it gives the insight that we know we can get to. We're all feeling our way there in this new world, where AI opens up this new world.
One thing that won’t change at the site, according to Macmillan, is that it will remain user-first and user-moderated. She explains:
We’ve turned down millions of pounds over the years from brands because that did not make advertising easier. We have rejected high-format, huge advertising, huge adverts that come out of the page. We've always put our users first, and I think we will continue to do that, and I think making sure that if we are layering on AI, then anything we share is non-identifiable, is aggregated, is completely obsessed with privacy, making sure that the forums do stay human, and have confidence that they are talking to human beings, and not AI bots.
Mumsnet’s AI tools are being put to use within these boundaries with brands like Randstad to offer valuable insights. When the HR services provider spotted that a number of its clients were struggling to recruit and retain women, particularly mums, it partnered with Mumsnet to obtain targeted insights into the barriers mums face in the workplace, and how employers could address them. MumsGPT was used to data mine around 100,000 relevant Mumsnet conversations.
The partnership revealed useful insights, including that only 10% of mums feel positively about returning to work; and that mums achieve the best work-life balance when working up to 31 hours per week remotely, with the freedom to structure those hours themselves.
In moderation
The site has always paid professional moderators to moderate in a highly nuanced way, and Macmillan believes it would be unwise to change that in an AI world. She adds:
There’s probably a role for AI in making sure that there's a consistent moderation applied across the team, but it will always be the final say would be with humans.
There’s also potential for AI to support the brand’s vision to make parents' lives easier. Macmillan says:
Parenting is just a series of problems, one after the other after the other. Sometimes you have problems and you're successful but it's just another problem coming at you from somewhere else. What AI potentially allows us to do is solve some of those problems.