Britain ‘complacent’ on AI take-up
Matt Clifford, the prime minister’s former artificial intelligence adviser, has said Britain could face a “long, slow death” of its economic engines if it fails to adopt the technology at the pace of international competitors.
Clifford, who wrote the government’s AI action plan and advised the previous Conservative administration, said that while the UK had clear strengths in sectors most likely to be reshaped by artificial intelligence, including life sciences, media and financial services, those advantages could prove illusory if adoption of AI lags behind.
“We kid ourselves that, because we have some good tech firms, that Britain is good at tech,” he said. “The truth is we’re probably the worst adopter of new technology in the developed world. That’s a dangerous complacency.”
Speaking at the Royal Television Society’s conference in Cambridge, Clifford, who is chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), the high-risk science investment group, argued that the UK risks being left behind its global peers: “Financial services will be transformed by AI, life sciences will be transformed by AI, but our firms are slower to adapt than their international rivals, and we just lose share over time.”
A government review of technology adoption published this year found that AI could add £47 billion a year to the UK economy for the next decade, boosting productivity by 1.5 per cent a year, if the country adopted it fully and safely.
However, only 8 per cent of British manufacturers had introduced AI or machine learning, and most companies in the creative industries are small and lack the capital to invest confidently. Life sciences are held back because access to high-quality health data is limited, slowing innovation.
The review concluded that the biggest barriers in all sectors were high upfront costs, lack of workforce skills, patchy information on use-cases, and regulatory uncertainty.
A spokesman for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said the government had started to work with industry to train a fifth of the workforce in AI by 2030. He added that it was appointing “AI sector champions” and implementing an action plan “to identify and break down barriers to AI adoption”.
Separate research found that more than half of FTSE 250 executives believed that the UK could be a global leader in AI and other high-growth industries, as long as businesses have access to reliable, high-capacity power, especially for data centres.
The survey of 101 executives, led by the Energy Networks Association, the industry body, found nearly nine in ten business leaders believed upgrading the grid was essential for unlocking high-growth industries.
Eight in ten said the UK would be unable to compete globally without these upgrades.
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