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The UK is facing a critical shortage of Artificial Intelligence skills that threatens to undermine the government’s ambitious plans to harness the technology for national growth and resilience. As global instability rises, the UK is looking to Artificial Intelligence as a key driver for economic transformation, with the Prime Minister’s AI Opportunities Action Plan identifying the technology as pivotal. Projections from LinkedIn’s new report indicate that generative Artificial Intelligence could add up to £400 billion to the UK economy — 16 percent of 2023 GDP — with significant impacts expected in education, health, and social work sectors.
However, adoption rates in the UK are lagging, with only 40 percent of businesses currently integrating Artificial Intelligence into their operations, behind counterparts in the US, India, and Germany. The shortage is especially acute for Artificial Intelligence-literate talent: fewer than one in 100 professionals nationwide are properly skilled to build and maintain this technology. While innovation hubs like Cambridge are emerging as global leaders, the overall talent pipeline remains insufficient, with notable skills gaps persisting outside these hotspots. Business leaders increasingly prioritize Artificial Intelligence literacy in hiring decisions, but a six-fold increase in job requirements over the past year has not closed the skills gap.
To address this, the article calls for systemic changes: national banks for Artificial Intelligence skills integrated into government job reforms, partnerships to track talent distribution, and better labor market data on technology-driven job changes. Crucially, it advocates for a shift away from traditional experience-based hiring to a skills-based approach, which data suggests could increase the talent pool for Artificial Intelligence roles by a quarter. Nearly half of businesses support skills-based hiring as a way to access missing talent. Such moves, combined with targeted campaigns to educate the public on Artificial Intelligence’s potential, tax incentives for skills training, and real-time tracking of the technology´s impact on jobs, are described as essential to realizing the transformative promise of Artificial Intelligence. Without deliberate, joint action from both government and business, the UK risks missing out on the economic and societal benefits that Artificial Intelligence can deliver.
