AI boom driving tech adoption in UK industry – report

Commissioned by management consultancy Elixirr, the report sampled 501 UK business leaders in companies with £10m+ turnover across construction, manufacturing, IT, retail, finance and professional services. It found that 87 per cent plan to increase investment in new technologies to outperform competitors and meet challenges head-on. A third (33 per cent) of respondents said that cutting back on tech investment was their biggest mistake during past periods of economic uncertainty.

AI 

Hype around AI appears to be a key theme, with UK businesses looking to the nascent technology to drive revenue as well as streamline operations. Nearly two-thirds (60 per cent) of enterprises said that AI was their top investment area when it came to technology, far ahead of IoT (23 per cent), AR/VR (15 per cent) and blockchain (12 per cent).

“I think there's not a single FTSE or Fortune company out there who's not doing stuff in AI at the moment,” Rory Farquharson, head of Elixirr’s manufacturing business unit, told The Engineer ahead of the report's publication. “It's not about should we do some or should we not - that's just not true. It’s across all of these organisations.

“Everyone always likes to think of the Amazon factory, how automated it is and the AI that exists there. Actually, some of the more back and middle office, those less sexy areas, are really prime for the application of AI. And I think that's where you're seeing probably companies drive a lot of the short-term value.”

Risk

AI’s influence on attitudes to risk is also hinted at in Elixirr’s report. Against a fear of being left behind in the AI race, 86 per cent of industry leaders said they had taken a calculated risk that helped the business grow in the past 12 months, compared to just 11 per cent who hadn’t. While these numbers themselves may not be surprising, Farquharson believes the appetite for risk is being driven by CIOs leaning into new technology like never before.

“When we looked at the findings…a large number of business leaders are of the view that risk-taking is good,” he said.

“That in itself doesn't come as a surprise, right? Business leaders would always say that risk-taking is good. Where it gets interesting is then the gap between the translation of that and the teams below. And actually, I think what you're seeing is the transcending of the CIO and the role of technology, because everything now touches technology.”

UK 

This risk-on attitude to tech is something of a departure for UK businesses, which have typically been viewed as slower to adopt innovative practices compared to countries such as Germany and Japan. But while technologies like AI have the potential to be transformative, the UK’s competitors are in many ways already ahead of the game.

“You've seen those other geographies, those other economies, accelerate and they are likely to double down,” said Farquharson. “I think it's probably wrong [to think] that the UK is suddenly going to hockey stick and really, really accelerate…but I’d love to be proved wrong.”