AI Skills and Adoption Report

Introduction from the Deputy President:

If artificial intelligence is going to deliver the growth that Britain needs, it will be the professionals building and working with that technology who make it happen. This report is about those people, and what they are telling us.

Britain has a growth problem, and underneath it a productivity problem. The two are linked: our persistently low productivity is a drag on the growth every government of recent years has promised, but struggled, to deliver. The scale of it is well established: French workers, for example, produce almost a fifth more per hour than we do, despite taking more time off, and it is a long-standing weakness, compounded in recent years by the disruption of the pandemic and rising economic inactivity through ill-health.

Britain is overwhelmingly a service economy, dominated by the desk-based, office-and-knowledge  work that today's AI tools are best placed to affect. The potential prize is large: some analyses put as much as £300 billion a year on the table if AI is adopted well, and comparable risk to jobs if it is not. But a prize on that scale is not won by the technology alone. It is won or lost by the people who introduce it, and by whether they are equipped to do so.

Government has recognised the opportunity. Through the AI Opportunities Action Plan and the AI Skills Boost programme, it has set out an ambition to upskill 10 million UK workers in AI skills by 2030 — one of the largest skills drives in a generation. But an ambition to build AI skills only makes sense if we understand how those skills translate into AI being adopted, used well, and trusted on the ground. That link between AI skills and responsible, sustainable AI adoption is what BCS has set out to examine. 

BCS is the professional body for people who work in technology. Our members are not commentators on AI from the outside; they are the people who design, build, deploy, maintain and use these systems every day —  IT leaders and IT professionals alike, across organisations of every size and sector. They see what accelerates AI adoption and what holds it back, where it delivers and where it disappoints.

This annual research is part of a programme through which BCS is building a picture of how AI should be introduced effectively and ethically across the British economy. We asked our members a set of straightforward questions about AI skills and AI adoption in their organisations: how well it is going, what is getting in the way and what they are worried about. Their answers set out in the findings that follow.

Emma Logan MBCS - Deputy President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.