The U.K. government has just released its AI Opportunities Action Plan and response, which includes 50 recommendations to boost the use of AI. Watch the video for extended highlights, but here’s a brief summary:

Adopting AI talent

Universities will work with industry to create new AI courses and reskill workers for AI-related jobs, with the high-potential individual visa being expanded to attract top talent from abroad.

Availability of data to train AI models

A National Data Library will be established, making high-potential public data sets available to AI researchers and innovators. All public sector projects will be exposed through APIs to the private sector, if deemed appropriate.

Supporting & scaling AI adoption

A good proportion of AI-related projects fail to scale, so the action plan has identified several recommendations to support organizations in the public sector in identifying and scaling opportunities for AI. This includes:

• Appointing AI sector champions in key industries to work with the government in developing AI adoption plans
• A faster, multi-stage AI procurement process to streamline the funding of projects and pilot projects with stricter controls on larger investments.
• The creation of a U.K. Sovereign AI body to partner with private sector companies investing in AI ventures and adopting an AI scan, pilot and scale approach to develop AI applications. Undoubtedly there is an opportunity to use technologies such as task and process mining to highlight areas of improvements that can benefit from AI. For an example, see my blog on task mining within the NHS: Harnessing Process Mining Data to Transform the NHS.

Investments in AI infrastructure

Recommendations include expanding the AI Research Resource (AIRR) to at least 20 times its capacity by 2030. The AIRR's expanded scale would allow it to run more AI research and mission-oriented clusters, each led by a program director for the likes of model training and establishing AI growth zones, with streamlined planning permission approvals to build the necessary data centers to support these investments.

Initiatives already in play include:

• The creation of an AI growth zone in Oxfordshire
• N-scale planning to build its first U.K. data center in Essex as part of a £1.2bn investment to scale up to 50MW in AI and high performance computing capacity
• Vantage building a large campus in Bridgend, Wales, offering up to 150MW in AI compute capacity over the next 10 to 15 years
• In mid-2024, Blackstone announcing its plan to create ten data centers in Northumberland as part of a £10bn investment
• Kyndryl announcing its plan to create up to 1k AI-related jobs in Liverpool over the next three years
• In December 2024, the government greenlighting a previously blocked 140MW Corscale data center in Buckinghamshire
• The government designating data centers as critical infrastructure that will benefit from relaxed planning regulations.

As soon as the individual strategies for the AI Opportunities Action Plan’s recommendations emerge, I'll be providing more detailed analysis.