PathWise

1. Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

As of June 2024 there was an estimate of 13million immigrants in the UK that’s about 19% of the population[1]. For these individuals living or arriving in the UK, policy shifts directly impact their ability to work, study, and keep their families together. Because UK immigration rules change frequently and carry strict penalties for non-compliance, a migrant's level of policy literacy has major legal, financial, and psychological consequences. 

While the government publishes official policy updates, they are often written in technical language, and do not explain how changes impact an individual's immigration journey. As a result, immigrants rely on social media, or paying for professional advice simply to understand whether a policy change affects them. The issue isn’t the amount of information available, it’s the difficulty of interpreting it and identifying what’s actually relevant to your specific situation. 

2. Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

For anyone moving to or living in the UK, our platform takes the guesswork out of immigration rules. Instead of making people go through confusing government jargon or pay for expensive advice, we translate official updates into clear, personalised steps. We show you exactly what changed, whether it affects you, and what you need to do next to protect your future in the UK. 

Users create an immigration profile by selecting their current visa status and future immigration goals (like settling down in the UK). The platform then maps relevant policy updates to their immigration journey, showing what has changed, who is affected, and how those changes may impact their next steps. An AI chat assistant complements the dashboard by explaining policies in plain language and answering questions about the information displayed, making complex government updates easier to understand without replacing official guidance. The AI is also locked to official UK government websites and documents, so it won't make things up or guess.

3. Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together?

The application was built using Next.js, which made it easy to organise the project into separate routes for onboarding, the dashboard, policy pages and the AI assistant, while also giving us a scalable structure if the project were to grow.

For this MVP, the frontend is responsible for the entire user experience. It guides users through creating an account, stores basic profile information locally, and displays personalised pages based on their journey. Because of the limited hackathon timeframe, most of the policy information shown throughout the application is currently represented using carefully curated dummy data. We cross-referenced this content with official GOV.UK immigration guidance and linked users directly to the relevant government pages so they can verify the original source themselves.

Our original architecture was designed differently. The frontend would communicate with a backend that regularly retrieves the latest immigration guidance from GOV.UK. That data would then be processed and used to populate the policy dashboard automatically, ensuring users always see up-to-date information rather than static content. The AI assistant was also intended to use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), where official GOV.UK guidance would be indexed and used as the source of truth for every response. Instead of relying only on a language model's knowledge, the assistant would retrieve relevant government information based on the user's question and immigration profile before generating an answer, helping provide more accurate, transparent and trustworthy explanations.

Although we weren't able to fully implement this architecture within the hackathon timeframe, the current MVP demonstrates the core user experience and the transparency-focused concept, while the planned backend, GOV.UK integration and RAG pipeline provide a clear path towards a production-ready solution.

4. Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge we had was trying to decide what to build, each one of us had different ideas and experiences. However, while discussing we found a common ground as immigrants and the confusion we felt while coming to a new country, that was completely different from our own and that was how this idea was born. Another challenge was that we tried to balance creativity with simplicity. Each team member had different ideas they wanted to explore for the platform, but we didn’t want the concept to become too overwhelming. In the end, we focused on a core experience that every immigrant goes through, giving us a solution that was both imaginative and easy to understand. Another challenge was deciding the role of AI. Instead of positioning AI as a legal adviser, we redesigned the experience so that the dashboard remains the primary source of information while the AI acts as an explanation and navigation assistant. This keeps official government information at the centre while improving accessibility and transparency.

5. Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish?

This project has helped us learn that transparency takes different forms. It’s not only about being open or honest with information, but also about making that information accessible, understandable, and usable for the people who need it. We wanted to solve a real problem, and we successfully designed a working concept that turns confusing immigration updates into a clear, personalised timeline. A key part of our success was finding the right balance for our AI assistant, using it to explain rather than advise. In doing so, we created an intuitive experience that shifts the user's focus from decoding dense policies to clearly understanding their own next steps. 

6. Next Steps

What are the next steps? How can you improve it?

Moving forward, our immediate goal is to replace our static data with a live, real-time feed directly from government portals. We want the platform to be proactive, so we plan to build a smart alert system that texts or emails a user the second a rule changes on their timeline.

As we grow, we will expand our AI's training to handle trickier questions, add more visa types, and eventually look at supporting other countries. Long-term, we see this as a tool that universities and employers can use to support their international students and global staff, making immigration rules clear, accessible, and less stressful for everyone involved at scale.

Source

[1] E. Kirk-Wade and A. Murray, “Migration Statistics,” UK Parliament, May 27, 2026. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06077/ (accessed Jun. 28, 2026).