Government backs £200m drive to get UK business using AI

TL;DR:

• The government has launched a national initiative backed by more than £200m to accelerate AI adoption across UK businesses and train workers.
• £100m will expand the Bridge AI scheme connecting firms with British AI developers; a new AI Economics Institute will track AI’s effect on jobs and growth.
• Announced at the inaugural AI Adoption Summit, the package targets smaller firms that lack the confidence and resources to deploy AI.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves used the inaugural AI Adoption Summit to commit more than £200m to driving AI uptake across British business, framing adoption — not invention — as where the biggest economic gains lie. She restated the goal for the UK to be “the fastest adopter of AI in the G7”, citing OECD estimates that AI could add up to £140bn to annual output by 2035.

Funding aimed at smaller firms

The centrepiece is £100m to expand Bridge AI, which connects British companies with domestic AI developers and offers help with skills and assurance. A further £53m is ringfenced for innovation initiatives including the Tech Town programme, with £5m for each designated AI Growth Zone. The joint government-industry AI Skills Boost — already past 1.7 million completed courses — will expand, with IBM, Cisco and Deloitte widening training toward a target of 10 million UK workers by 2030.

Nobel laureate Simon Johnson will chair a new AI Economics Institute, a joint Treasury–DSIT body monitoring AI’s impact on employment and growth. The government also signed a joint statement with US labs Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI on evidence-based policymaking, while more than 30 firms including Rolls-Royce and EDF agreed to share internal AI-use data.

The summit ran alongside the separately announced AI Growth Labs and the government’s £1.1bn British chip plan.

Looking forward

The bet is that adoption by smaller firms, not frontier research, decides whether the UK captures AI’s productivity dividend. The harder question — flagged repeatedly in recent pilot-stall and regional-gap data — is whether funding and training translate into deployment beyond London and big employers.