How UK Win AI Race?
A revolution in AI technology is occurring. AI will define this century. This presents a huge opportunity for the UK and if we act now, we can lead from the front. That is why we identified AI and data as one of the UK’s four Grand Challenges in the Industrial Strategy and why we are mobilising all of government to seize this opportunity to make the UK a global leader in this technology that will change all of our lives.
The government and UK business must take action to keep the UK at the frontier of AI advancement. The UK is an AI academic powerhouse, publishing nearly 25,000 research papers on the topic in the past ten years. This puts the UK fourth in the world when it comes to AI research. Our experts give their take on the opportunities we can grasp as a nation, and the hurdles we need to clear to keep Britain in contention.
Growing UK’s AI Industry
This demonstrates a steady increase in the number of enrolments, at Masters and Doctorate level at least, however, estimates both of potential and predicted growth in the use of AI in the UK would require significant increases in numbers at both levels to be realised in practice.
Applying forecast worldwide percentage growth rates in AI to UK enrolment numbers between now and 2020 suggests that a significant increase would be needed. The low, medium and high growth rate scenarios used are 15%,73 36%,74 and 62%,75 respectively. This methodology is crude, but goes some way to illustrating the scale of demand, see table below.
Demand for talent already outstrips supply, and average remuneration for data scientists and machine learning experts has increased substantially.
As above, AI in the UK is already used in a broad range of organisations and sectors. However, to fully realise the potential of AI in the UK, additional sectors and different categories of organisation, with a mixed ecosystem of AI provider companies, small, medium-sized and large. All of these different organisations will need access to similar sets of skills, whether by hiring
directly or contracting for services.