TL;DR

Fresh member survey data from Scottish Engineering shows AI tools in regular use at roughly seven in ten engineering and manufacturing firms in Scotland, while 68% offer no formal training at all. Only one company in twenty has a finished AI strategy. The trade body’s chief executive, Paul Sheerin, published the figures alongside the launch of its Skills Academy.

What the members reported

Just over a fifth of firms say most of their staff use AI tools regularly, and half report a minority doing so — a combined 72% with real usage inside the business. Another 22% cannot say what their usage level is, which is arguably the more revealing number. A residual 5% prohibit the tools outright.

Training tells a different story. Two-thirds provide nothing formal, 14% train defined users only, and 13% extend training across all staff. Strategy is thinner still: 5% have one in use, 21% are drafting one, 35% intend to start, and 39% have no plans.

How this compares

Sheerin reaches for external benchmarks because his own survey series, running back to 1992, has never asked the question before. He cites figures the Office for National Statistics released last month: some 35% of British businesses have adopted AI technology in some form, and a tenth describe that deployment as extensive. The IET — the Institution of Engineering and Technology — puts regular AI use among the UK’s engineering and technology employers nearer 18%, though its survey dates from June 2025, which in this field is ancient.

Neither is a clean comparison, and Sheerin says so. Read loosely, Scottish engineering appears to be adopting faster than UK business generally.

The governance hole

The gap between a 72% usage rate and a 68% no-training rate is where shadow IT grows. Staff reaching for productivity gains before security and governance frameworks catch up is a familiar pattern, and it is worse in manufacturing than in most sectors — engineering firms hold design files, process data and customer specifications that carry commercial sensitivity well beyond ordinary office documents.

Looking forward

The interesting question for the Skills Academy is not how to deliver AI training but why firms confident enough to let staff use these tools daily have not asked for it. Adoption without a strategy is a decision too, just an unexamined one. Sheerin’s own framing has shifted over three years: the caution used to be about accuracy and ethics, and now reads more like fear of falling behind.