AI drafts.
You decide.
Pebble uses AI to take some of the typing out of recording. It does not use AI to make decisions about children, families or risk. That line does not move.
This page says plainly what the AI in Pebble does, what it never does, and why we drew the line where we did. Every other mention of AI on this site points back here.
What it does, and what it never does
AI in Pebble does
- Turn your spoken or typed notes into a structured first draft
- Organise what you have recorded under safeguarding-focused headings
- Help you spot gaps before a record is finished
- Save time on the parts of recording that are typing, not thinking
AI in Pebble never
- Assesses risk or assigns a level of concern
- Makes, recommends or influences a safeguarding decision
- Determines an outcome for a child, family or case
- Writes in a voice that is not yours, or finalises anything without you
Everything the AI produces is a draft. It is presented to you, it is yours to change, and nothing is recorded until you have read it and decided it is right. The judgement in a record is always the practitioner's.
Why we draw the line here
I have watched this profession get burned by tools that promised more than they could honestly deliver. I built Pebble knowing that. The AI takes the typing off you. It does not take the judgement, because the judgement is the job.Matthew Davies, founder of Pebble — practising social worker and team manager
Pebble was built by someone who still does the work, and that shapes what the technology is allowed to do. The moments that matter in safeguarding — weighing what a child has said, deciding whether a concern is serious enough to act on, choosing what to do next — are professional judgements. They rest on relationship, context and experience. They are not problems for software to solve, and Pebble does not pretend otherwise.
Your voice stays yours
A record may be read years later by a court, a review, an inspector, or the person it is about. It needs to sound like the practitioner who was in the room. Pebble's drafts are built from what you said and what you recorded, in plain language, for you to edit. It does not add conclusions you did not reach, and it does not smooth your professional voice into something generic.
The profession is right to be cautious
Social work has good reason to be wary of AI. Professional bodies have warned against tools that play down their limitations, and against technology that quietly moves decisions away from practitioners. We think that caution is healthy, and we would rather face it directly than work around it.
So here is where Pebble stands. AI is useful for the parts of recording that are mechanical. It is not appropriate for the parts that are professional. We built Pebble to keep those two things separate, and we will keep saying so in the same words, everywhere, because a position that changes depending on the page is not a position.
For teams and organisations
If you are responsible for a team's recording, the questions you will ask are about defensibility and governance rather than convenience: is a record produced with AI support still the practitioner's record, and can we show that? In Pebble the answer is yes — the practitioner reads, edits and confirms every draft, and the AI has no route to change a record on its own. We are happy to talk through how this works in detail, and to put it in writing for your information governance team.
For how this website handles personal information, see our privacy policy. Where an organisation uses the Pebble app, that organisation controls the information within it.