The government has moved to “turbocharge” UK productivity with plans to boost AI skills, infrastructure and investment in the UK.
With its 50-point AI Opportunities Action Plan, the government wants to drive UK AI deployment in a more strategic direction.
However, the AI action plan, drawn up by Matt Clifford, tech entrepreneur and chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), said the UK must be prepared to train tens of thousands of additional AI professionals in the next five years.
“Setting a short-term target to train tens of thousands of AI professionals by 2030 will help bridge the estimated gap between supply and demand,” Clifford said in his plan.
Such a move would align the UK with France where its National AI Commission has calculated that the number of French AI graduates would need to triple over the next decade to match estimated demand.
Concrete skills number
Accurately assessing the size of the UK’s AI skills gap will be a priority as the most recent government AI labour market survey was in 2020. Clifford said the plan’s success depends on accurately understanding the skills gap, “so government must make efforts to come to a concrete and up-to-date number”.
Once the true gap is known, the government will be able to support higher education institutions in boosting numbers of AI graduates and teach industry-relevant skills.
Universities will be expected to develop new courses co-designed with industry to emulate the successes of the co-operative education model of Canada’s University of Waterloo, CDTM at the Technical University of Munich or France’s CIFRE PhD model.
DEI valued
Another key part of the AI plan is to increase the diversity of the AI talent pool. In the context of the ongoing retreat of big tech from ‘corporate diversity, equity and inclusion’ in the United States, this shows the UK continues to understand and appreciate the value of diverse talent.
“Only 22 percent of people working in AI and data science are women. Achieving parity would mean thousands of additional workers,” according to the action plan.
“The AI conversion courses have helped to diversify the AI pipeline, but only at the top end. Government should build on this investment and promote diversity throughout the education pipeline. Interventions must be tailored – there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Hackathons and competitions in schools have proven effective at getting overlooked groups into cyber and so should be considered for AI.”
Education routes into AI will be further expanded to encompass apprenticeships, and employer and self-led upskilling. To attract AI talent from outside the country, the government will launch undergraduate and masters AI scholarship programmes for students to study in the UK. These will be akin to the Rhodes, Marshall, or Fulbright scholarships.
Reskill options
AI is predicted to continue to change the labour market, with some jobs being replaced by AI, many augmented and an unknown number will be created. Under the plan, the government will manage this evolution by ensuring there are sufficient opportunities for workers to reskill, both into AI and AI-enabled jobs.
The UK can learn from countries like Singapore, which has developed a national AI skills online platform with multiple training offers. In South Korea, AI, data and digital literacy is being integrated into its education pipelines using an AI curriculum and a variety of training and education programmes.
The plan said: “Skills England and the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review present an opportunity to consider the merit of such approaches in our system.”
Clifford has also recommended that the UK should “rapidly increase the number of top AI research talents” who work here. There are very few leading AI scientists and engineers worldwide and competition to attract them is fierce. Clifford said countries that attract them will play an outsized role in the future of AI. For example, if the UK attracts one individual who founds the next DeepMind or OpenAI the benefits could be huge.
To help the UK do this, the government will establish an internal headhunting capability similar to those of top AI firms to entice elite individuals to come to the UK.
Changes to the immigration system to attract graduates from universities producing some of the world’s top AI talent will be explored and expanding the Turing AI Fellowship will also be examined.
Data unlocked
As part of this AI revolution, the government will build a new supercomputer to increase the public computing capacity by twentyfold to provide the processing power needed.
Further changes include “responsibly unlocking” public and private data to realise the value of UK data assets. This data would be made accessible through the new National Data Library (NDL), which will be set up as part of the plan. Guidelines and best practices for releasing open government datasets for AI training will be developed and published.
More public sector data will be collected to create new high-value datasets that meet public sector, academia and startup needs, and researchers and industry will be “actively incentivised and rewarded” for curating and unlocking private datasets.
To support the growth of AI infrastructure, the UK will establish ‘AI Growth Zones’ (AIGZs) to build AI data centres. To do this, the UK has secured £14 billion investment from three tech firms – Vantage Data Centres, Nscale and Kyndryl – in addition to the £25 billion of AI investment announced at the International Investment Summit. Delivering this infrastructure will create 13,250 UK jobs, the government said.
Job losses or economic gains?
With such ambitious plans, employers, HR and employees will be watching closely.
Carsten Jung, head of AI at IPPR, said: “AI has the power to either disrupt our economy or drive its positive transformation. Our previous research found that AI could either lead to eight million job losses and no GDP gains, or no job losses and GDP gains worth up to £306bn a year. The government has made it clear that it has understood this potential and the need to steer AI towards a positive scenario.
“The government has fired the starting gun on giving AI deployment more strategic direction. Next to productivity, AI should also help solve big social challenges such as poor health and the energy transition. Rather than a scattergun approach, AI should be laser focussed on delivering the government’s missions. This will require big changes to the way tech policy is run.”
Jung said the action plan to invest big in public and private AI infrastructure will be crucial to achieve this.
“Running public AI on public computers will also be key to ensure citizens’ trust in the technology. Similarly, investing in our regulators so they’re equipped to regulate AI properly will need to go hand in hand with this.”
CIPD senior policy and practice adviser for technology Hayfa Mohdzaini said the increased use of AI across UK public services could bring significant productivity gains for the economy.
“Letting AI handle repetitive and administrative tasks can help workers deliver more human public services. Used well, AI can enhance jobs to make them more fulfilling for people.
“However, it will be important for employers to monitor how the technology is used and manage risk.”
Human oversight
Mohdzaini pointed to a CIPD poll of more than 1,500 people in January 2025 which showed that six in 10 respondents would trust AI to inform, but not make, important decisions at work. She said this highlights the importance of human oversight when introducing this technology.
“The HR profession should be at the forefront of discussions about AI implementation in their organisations. Employers and their HR teams should introduce clear guidance covering the ethical and responsible use of AI at work, data security and fair treatment of people.
“Organisations should foster a culture of cross-team collaboration, helping employees develop their skills or reskill as necessary to ensure no one gets left behind as AI transforms workplaces and careers.”
Proper protections
Sharon Graham, general secretary of the Unite union, said: “The UK needs to embrace new technologies, but we also need proper protections from AI’s pitfalls and workers must have a say in how that happens.
“Our members are already reporting major changes to working conditions due to the introduction of AI, which creates new risks and all too often results in workers feeling alienated and demotivated. We also have serious concerns about matters such as AI-powered surveillance and discrimination by algorithm, particularly with ‘high-risk’ decisions like recruitment, performance assessments and discipline.
“After years of fighting against discrimination, there is now the genuine threat of it being further embedded through AI, against women, Black and Asian ethnic minority, disabled and LGBTQ+ workers.
“The introduction of AI in the workplace must be something that happens with workers and not to workers. Government, employers, and unions all need to be working together to avoid the potential dangers of workplace AI.”
