Speed and skills are essential for the UK to realise its AI ambitions

This is a guest blogpost by David Hogan, vice-president Enterprise, EMEA at NVIDIA.

This summer, the Isambard AI supercomputer in Bristol will be fully operational, marking a significant step toward the UK’s goal of becoming, in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s words “one of the world’s great AI superpowers.”

It will provide unprecedented capabilities for researchers and industry to harness AI’s immense potential in fields like robotics, big data, climate research and drug discovery. Isambard-AI will also enable the UK’s sovereign AI capability for the first time.

Its launch is not just a technological achievement; it’s an ecosystem success story, showcasing the power of collaboration between government, private enterprise and academia. It’s an exciting and promising starting point, but it’s the tip of the iceberg.

To compete on a global stage and to achieve the ambitions of the recently announced UK AI Opportunities Plan, this ecosystem success story must be replicated across the nation and at a larger scale. We must nurture homegrown AI innovation to ensure future business growth, bolster the economy and cultivate domestic talent for sustained technological leadership.

The economic potential of AI for the UK is immense. Fully embracing AI could boost productivity by as much as 1.5 percentage points annually, potentially adding an average of £47 billion to the UK economy each year over a decade, according to IMF estimates. The Tony Blair Institute projects that AI could elevate national income by between 5 to 14 percent by 2050.

Beyond the economic benefits, AI has the potential to improve lives in a myriad of ways. In the UK today, companies and researchers are using AI to solve large, complex challenges in areas like climate research, healthcare diagnostics, hospital management, fraud detection in financial services, road safety, energy consumption, public services improvements and national security. The applications are incredibly promising and virtually limitless.

A sovereign data treasure chest

Despite the nation’s historical strengths in innovation and AI, recent evidence suggests we’re falling behind in the development and use of these powerful new tools. Fortunately, the country has every opportunity to catch up. As AI adoption and innovation accelerates around the world, the barriers to AI development drop. The UK must leverage these advancements and regain its competitive edge.

The country has a massive opportunity to integrate AI in every industry by creating new infrastructure for AI training and inferencing. Inferencing is the process of running live data through a trained AI model to make predictions or solve a task based on new, unseen data. It’s the stage where AI applies what it has learned during training to real-world situations, enabling tasks like recognizing speech, identifying objects in images or generating text.

In this context, the UK’s vast store of sovereign data across sectors like healthcare, transport, finance, and retail is a major opportunity. Our sovereign data is subject to the laws and governance structures of the country. By leveraging it for training and AI inferencing, the UK can not only preserve its cultural heritage but also gain a competitive edge in developing AI solutions tailored to our specific needs and challenges.

However, data alone is not enough. The UK must urgently address the other two pillars of AI development: compute and talent.

Rapid growth will attract investment

The proposed AI Growth Zones are a step in the right direction. The government’s commitment to foundational infrastructure will be a strong economic driver to attract investment and retain businesses in the country. These zones, with enhanced access to power and support for planning approvals, aim to accelerate the build-out of AI infrastructure on home soil.

If the government can keep up the momentum, it will enable the country to attract the inward investment in data centres it needs.

Upskilling the nation

Equally crucial is the need to upskill the nation. This involves nurturing AI research, upskilling the public sector, and creating conditions for a thriving AI startup community across public and private sectors. The expansion of the AI Research Resource (AIRR) by at least 20 times by 2030, as recommended in the Action Plan, will be central to supporting this talent development.

Recent studies have identified a significant AI skills shortage as the top challenge for UK IT leaders. Over two-thirds (68%) of IT leaders cited “insufficient skills and expertise” as the primary hindrance in rolling out AI initiatives.

A key focus should be on training the AI developers of the future and providing preferential access to AI resources for startups, experts, researchers and educators. Educating people on what AI can do, and how the current generation of AI-powered tools work, is the starting point. AI education must focus on the engine room of technological deployment and innovation – developers. Education systems in particular, must commit to building the UK’s AI skills capacity across disciplines, from scientific to cultural.

By addressing these challenges head-on, we can cultivate the next generation of ‘AI-natives’ who will drive innovations we can’t yet imagine.

The UK is on the path to becoming a global leader in AI but we’re just at the beginning. Only by creating a nationwide ecosystem that responds quickly and decisively to the opportunities of AI and that works to close the AI skills gap, can the country scale its economic growth and benefit from the opportunities of the technology revolution of our lifetime.