Latest news with #LondonTechWeek
Scotsman
2 days ago
- Business
- Scotsman
Why we need to close the AI skills gap to drive UK's growth potential
Capital investment, access to tools, and upskilling are still unbalanced in Britain, writes Helen Lindsay Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Prime Minister Keir Starmer struck a bold tone at London Tech Week by pitching Britain as an AI powerhouse. It's ambitious – but with the UK's strong heritage in tech, world-class universities and research, and a fast-growing tech sector – the goals can be attainable. Scotland has the potential to contribute significantly to the UK's advancements in AI and we're already seeing shoots of progress. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Accenture's latest UK Tech Talent Tracker research shows tech job vacancies have grown by 21 per cent from last year, with the UK expanding its tech talent pool to its highest level since 2019 – mostly driven by an appetite for AI. There is a significant increase in demand for AI skills in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with growth levels surpassing those in established centres like Oxford and Cambridge. There is a significant increase in demand for AI skills in Glasgow and Edinburgh (Picture: Yet despite this momentum, familiar patterns are forming: capital investment, access to tools, and upskilling are still unbalanced across the UK. The same research shows that London accounts for 80 per cent of all AI job postings. While demand for AI talent in Glasgow has grown by 150 per cent, and Edinburgh is not far behind, the scale of opportunity remains disproportionately concentrated in London. We are also seeing a regional divide emerge in people's access to technology and training opportunities. Less than half of workers (44 per cent) in Scotland have access to gen AI tools at work, compared to 64 per cent of workers in London. And just 36 per cent of Scottish businesses are increasing digital training, compared to 64 per cent of London firms. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad While AI is developing at pace, some firms are still at the experimentation phase. While London-based firms plan to allocate almost a fifth of their technology budgets to AI this year. In Scotland, the figure is 13 per cent. That gap matters. So too does the disparity in training. Around four in ten organisations outside London have increased training in gen AI so people can learn the fundamentals. In Scotland, the gap is wider still. Helen Lindsay, managing director for Talent & Organisation at Accenture in Scotland (Picture: John Need) This is not just an economic question. It is about resilience, opportunities, and long-term competitiveness. To fully capitalise on the economic potential of AI, regions outside of London will also need to compete for talent and infrastructure to achieve sustainable growth and unlock opportunities. The good news is that business leaders in Scotland are alert to the challenge. Leaders believe that over half of their workforce needs to be upskilled, and many are optimistic that AI can have a positive impact. Closing the skills gap is paramount. At Accenture, we are addressing digital inclusion head-on with our Regenerative AI initiative, aiming to equip over a million people with AI skills. AI has the potential to double the UK's long-term growth rate, adding up to £736 billion to annual GDP by 2038. If the UK wants to achieve this, organisations and start-ups in Scotland must be part of the engine – and not waiting in the wings. That means backing talent, innovation, and closing the skills gap.
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
The debate over whether AI will create or take over jobs is heating up. Here's what AI leaders are saying.
AI leaders are split on whether AI will take over jobs or create new roles that mitigate disruption. It's a long-running debate — but one that has been heating up in recent months. While tech leaders seem to agree that AI is shaking up jobs, they are divided over timelines and scale. From Jensen Huang to Sam Altman, here is what some of the biggest names in tech are saying about how AI will impact jobs. Dario Amodei AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. That was the stark warning from Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. I don't think this is on people's radar," Amodei told Axios in an interview published in May. He said he wanted to share his concerns to get the government and other AI companies to prepare the country for what's to come, adding that unemployment could spike to between 10% and 20% in the next five years. He said that entry-level jobs are especially at risk, adding that AI companies and the government need to stop "sugarcoating" the risks of mass job elimination in fields including technology, finance, law, and consulting. Jensen Huang Huang, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, was withering when asked about Amodei's comments. "I pretty much disagree with almost everything he says," Huang said. Amodei "thinks AI is so scary," but only Anthropic "should do it," he continued. An Anthropic spokesperson told BI that Amodei had never made that claim. "Do I think AI will change jobs? It will change everyone's — it's changed mine," Huang told reporters on the sidelines of Vivatech in Paris in June. He also said that some roles would disappear, but said that AI could also unlock creative opportunities. Yann LeCun Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, wrote a short LinkedIn post just after Huang dismissed Amodei, saying, "I agree with Jensen and, like him, pretty much disagree with everything Dario says." LeCun has previously taken a more optimistic stance on AI's impact on jobs. Speaking at Nvidia's GTC conference in March, LeCun said that AI could replace people but challenged whether humans would allow that to happen. "I mean basically our relationship with future AI systems, including superintelligence, is that we're going to be their boss," he said. Demis Hassabis Demis Hassabis, the cofounder of Google DeepMind, said in June that AI would create "very valuable jobs" and "supercharge sort of technically savvy people who are at the forefront of using these technologies." He told London Tech Week attendees that humans were "infinitely adaptable." He said he'd still recommend young people study STEM subjects, saying it was "still important to understand fundamentals" in areas including mathematics, physics, and computer science to understand "how these systems are put together." Geoffrey Hinton You would have to be "very skilled" to have an AI-proof job, Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called "Godfather of AI," has said. "For mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody," Hinton told the "Diary of a CEO" podcast in June. He flagged paralegals as at risk, and said he'd be "terrified" if he worked in a call center. Hinton said that, eventually, the technology would "get to be better than us at everything," but said some fields were safer, and that it would be, "a long time before it's as good at physical manipulation. Sam Altman "AI is for sure going to change a lot of jobs" and "totally take some jobs away, create a bunch of new ones," Altman said during a May episode of "The Circuit" podcast. The OpenAI CEO said that although people might be aware that AI can be better at some tasks, like programming or customer support, the world "is not ready for" humanoid robots. "I don't think the world has really had the humanoid robots moment yet," he said, describing a scenario where people could encounter "like seven robots that walk past you" on the street. "It's gonna feel very sci-fi. And I don't think that's very far away from like a visceral 'oh man, this is gonna do a lot of things that people used to do,'" he added.
CNBC
18-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
CNBC's UK Exchange newsletter: A quantum quandary for the UK government
Her climbdown on denying millions of pensioners the winter fuel allowance was not the only U-turn announced by Rachel Reeves, the U.K.'s chancellor of the Exchequer, this month. Less significant in political terms, but of far greater importance to the U.K.'s long-term growth potential, was an announcement on June 10 that the government would commit £750 million ($1 billion) worth of funding for a new exascale supercomputer, capable of conducting a quintillion (one billion billion) operations per second, at Edinburgh University. The news reversed a previous decision, made days after the Labour government was elected in July last year, to pull some £800 million worth of funding for the project announced by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's administration in 2023. Edinburgh had already spent an estimated £30 million on supporting infrastructure and the decision dismayed the U.K.'s scientific community which warned that, at a time when the U.S. has two exascale computers, China has two and both Japan and France are building their own, it would leave Britain lagging its peers. The timing of the U-turn was no coincidence. Just two days later, to mark the start of London Tech Week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer shared a platform with Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO, where both talked eagerly about the power of artificial intelligence to transform lives. During the session, though, Huang had a stark warning for the U.K. "The U.K. has one of the richest AI communities anywhere on the planet. The deepest thinkers, the best universities in Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, amazing startups like DeepMind, Wayve, Synthesia, an incredible research community," he said. "It's just missing one thing. This is the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure." Cynics will say that Huang's message — chipmaker urges more investment in infrastructure that requires chips — does not look that different from a stockbroker urging clients to buy stocks. It is inconceivable, though, that the government would not have been made aware of it in advance. And restoring funding for the Edinburgh supercomputer suggests the message landed with Starmer and Reeves. Yet the U.K. tech sector faces other challenges. One is that the U.K.'s AI startups are way behind their American and Chinese peers in the sums they are raising from venture capitalists. That, potentially, is as much of a weakness, longer term, as a shortage of sovereign AI computing infrastructure. However, a broader worry is that the U.K. may be losing momentum in quantum computing, the revolutionary way of processing information faster than classical computing. Just up the A40 trunk road, on the same day Starmer was on stage with Huang, the quantum hardware startup Oxford Ionics, a spin-off from the University of Oxford, agreed to a $1.1 billion takeover by Maryland-based IonQ. The sale has revived concerns, first mooted when the AI start-up DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014, that the U.K. is nothing more than a tech "incubator," where businesses are born before being scaled up elsewhere. As Tina Stowell, former chair of the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, put it: "I am genuinely sorry about its loss to the U.K. as a British business, even if, under new ownership, it continues to operate here." "What we have seen this week is another example of a worrying trend," she added. There are fears that other companies in the space may follow suit. "This [takeover] is a reflection of the top-notch quality of U.K. quantum R&D, built on decades of public funding, but also an example that will be watched closely by other quantum companies seeking capital and opportunities that can be hard to find in the U.K.," Ashley Montanaro, co-founder and CEO of the quantum software company Phasecraft, wrote in an article for the British tech industry publication UKTN. "There's already more public funding available for quantum companies in the U.S. than in the U.K., more fellowships, more state and federal grants and contracts, and more support for scale-up and deployment." "Even with President [Donald] Trump's recent pushback against universities, private capital ultimately follows public money, and several of our peers have joined us in opening labs overseas to access such support, knowledge and capital," he added. Highlighting delays to the implementation of the U.K.'s National Quantum Strategy, announced two years ago, he noted there would be no new government funding for quantum computing projects until autumn at the earliest — while at the same time, the U.S was in the process of doubling federal quantum funding and other countries, among them Canada and Finland, had stepped up investment in the field. Montanaro went on: "Once the talent, capital and momentum go elsewhere, they rarely return." The U.K. government's newly rediscovered passion for supercomputers that will help power the AI revolution is heartwarming. But AI is only one part of the U.K.'s tech ecosystem and the worry must be that, in fields like quantum computing, it is in real danger of falling behind. Meanwhile, although Starmer and his ministers now appear to see AI as an unalloyed force for good, others may disagree. This week, in a rare interview, Alison Kirkby, BT's chief executive, told the Financial Times the company's plans to cut more than 40,000 jobs and strip out £3 billion worth of costs by the end of the decade "did not reflect the full potential of AI". She told the paper: "Depending on what we learn from AI … there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade." Most of the jobs expected to go under existing plans were those of engineers specifically hired to build BT's fiber network whose roles became redundant once the project was complete. The chances are that, in this instance, Kirkby was referring to BT's call centers, which employ thousands of people in locations including Plymouth, Greenock and North Tyneside, as well as the company's HR functions. Starmer and his colleagues may need to persuade the public — and their party's traditional backers in the trade unions especially — that AI is a force for good rather than just cost-cutting.U.S. President Trump meets with UK Prime Minister Starmer at G7 summit President Donald Trump speaks and U.K. Prime Minister Starmer makes further progress on the U.K.-U.S. trade deal at the Group of Seven summit. Watch CNBC's full interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang discusses Europe's role in the AI race, the robotics and AV industries, and how U.S.-China relations could impact the future of technology with CNBC's Arjun Kharpal at the VivaTech conference in Paris. Former UK ambassador to Iran says Israel has triggered a regional - and possibly global - conflict Richard Dalton, former U.K. Ambassador to Iran, discusses Israel's strikes on the country and analyzes the potential ramifications across the Middle East.'Because I like them': The UK has a magic formula that won over Trump. Not only was the U.K. first to sign a trade deal with the president, but it also appears to have won him over on a more instinctive and emotional level. The UK insisted unpopular tax rises were a one-off but hikes now look inevitable.U.K. Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged last year that the government would not conduct another tax raid. She may not have another option. As G7 leaders meet, allies ask: Is Trump with us or against us? The problem for the Group of Seven comes from within, with President Trump's array of trade tariffs and a potential global trade war looming as very live threats for allies.U.K. stocks slipped by 0.2% over the last week, taking the FTSE 100 down to 8,834 points by end of play Tuesday. It did, however, hit a record high last Thursday before losing steam. In case you missed it, the U.S. and Britain signed an agreement on the sidelines of the G7 summit on Monday, lowering some tariffs on British exports to the United States while the two nations eye a trade deal. There were also some rumors last week that UAE oil giant ADNOC had joined the fray of firms said to be circling some of BP's highly prized assets, as takeover speculation for the embattled energy major kicks into overdrive.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nvidia (NVDA) Gains on Sovereign AI Optimism, Nears Record High
Nvidia (NVDA, Financials) shares climbed nearly 2% Monday, closing just below their all-time high, as analysts pointed to growing demand for sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure as a long-term catalyst. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Signs with NVDA. Oppenheimer estimated the global sovereign AI market could reach $1.5 trillion in a Sunday note, including $120 billion in Europe. The firm cited CEO Jensen Huang's recent European tour, during which Nvidia announced several new government-related AI partnerships. Last week, Nvidia partnered with Deutsche Telekom to support Germany's sovereign AI efforts and industrial applications. The company also launched a collaboration with the European Broadcasting Union in Paris and made an appearance at London Tech Week. Shares of Nvidia are up roughly 30% since the end of April. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Insider
17-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
I asked 4 founders if they are worried about AI taking jobs. Here's what they told me.
I asked four founders whether AI will take jobs, as tech's big guns argue about how it will transform the future of work. During his European tour last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang slapped down Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for warning AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. At London Tech Week, where Huang delivered the keynote, founders told me how they use AI day-to-day — and whether they are worried about AI's impact on the job market. They all expected some form of disruption, but some were more pessimistic than others. Isa Mutlib, CoTalent AI Isa Mutlib, founder of CoTalent AI, said he uses AI to access and process information faster in his daily work, such as coding and content generation. He estimated AI was saving his company, which deploys customizable AI agents for businesses, between 50% and 70% of time on tasks. He said this meant it could deploy minimum viable products to clients within days rather than months. Mutlib said he was "long-term optimistic, short-term pessimistic" about AI's impact on jobs. He expects "some significant job losses immediately," but he said he thought that, over the long term, AI would create new opportunities. He said this pattern was "not unusual" during past technological revolutions. He said organizations need to rethink how they approach skills and work, adding that some skills thought essential 10 years ago were "no longer relevant." "People need to understand that the future of work is changing," he added. "We've really got to think about it with a fresh new mindset." Husayn Kassai, Quench AI Husayn Kassai, founder of Quench AI, said AI threatens entry-level jobs in programming, customer service, and law, as it can do the type of work junior employees have historically done. He said this made early-stage career progression harder, adding, "The career ladder is getting lifted up." Kassai cited the example of law firms, saying they would historically have paralegals do the kind of research and administrative work that AI is now increasingly being used for. He said generative AI was accelerating a decades-long "automation trend" that was causing a global rise in "underemployment and low-wage employment." Workers wouldn't compete directly against AI but would compete with each other, he said, with those proficient in AI at an advantage. Kassai said Quench, whose platform lets employees use AI agents to handle tasks based on company data, uses AI tools widely through its operations, including Cursor among its engineers. AI means his 14-strong startup can do work that would have required "35 or 40 people" a decade ago, he said. AI won't ever be able to replace humans for "relationship-based stuff," he said. Steven Kennington, Lumico Steven Kennington, the cofounder of Lumico, said AI is "world-class" at solving technical and mathematical problems. Kennington said engineers at Lumico, which develops software and hardware for businesses, sometimes use AI tools like GitHub Copilot. He compared it to having an experienced programmer next to you. But he also said he was worried that vibe coding, where users describe what they want in plain-language prompts and AI generates code to make it happen, could lead to more junior developers implementing AI-generated code without understanding it. Kennington said he expected an "unavoidable" skills gap as more people outsource work to AI instead of learning skills, whether that's coding or students using it to do homework. He said he thought those who rely on AI for shortcuts and don't develop the right skills would be "weeded out" over time, meaning experienced engineers would remain valuable. He said the "real engineers" of the future would be the ones who "know when to use it and when to not use it." Matthew Sarre, Jumpstart Matthew Sarre, the cofounder of Jumpstart, a talent platform for startups, said he used ChatGPT for "pretty much anything and everything," including ideas for LinkedIn posts and advice on "how to pull off a marketing or sales stunt." He said he saw no direct impact on jobs for him and his company, but added he thought AI would "cause layoffs in the short term" for low-skilled roles. However, looking further ahead, Sarre said, "History has shown us time and time again that technology does not replace jobs in the long term, rather it complements jobs." He said AI was still a "dumb muscle" that relied on humans, even though it creates "awesome" things. But, he said, in light of the number of AI agents now entering the market, "I may be about to eat my words."
