Making AI Work for Britain
Can the UK Deliver?
Why This Book, Why Now
For more than 20 years, the UK has navigated successive waves of digital transformation. Each wave has brought genuine promise, yet each has also revealed persistent gaps between ambition and delivery, between headline announcements and experience on the ground.
The UK faces a choice between fundamentally different approaches: follow the US model of speed and platform dependency, follow the EU model of comprehensive regulation, or pursue an adaptive path — building sovereign capability in areas that matter most and using the UK’s distinctive institutional assets as proving grounds for AI that is both innovative and accountable. This book argues for the third path.
The UK’s AI Strategy: At the Crossroads
Three Parts, One Argument
What Got Us Here
The UK’s digital history — the patterns of success and failure that will determine whether AI adoption succeeds or stalls.
What Matters Now
The institutional, workforce, and governance challenges that must be addressed before path dependencies lock in.
What Comes Next
Competing international models, an adaptive path that plays to UK strengths, and practical steps to turn strategy into delivery.
Full Chapter Guide
AI and the UK Digital Economy
Why AI represents a qualitatively different phase of technological change, and why the UK must decide how much control to retain over its digital future.
Lessons from UK Digital Transformation
What decades of GDS, Universal Credit, and NHS digitisation reveal about institutional capability and recurring structural constraints.
The UK’s AI Challenge and Opportunity Today
The gap between the UK’s stated AI strategy and what is actually happening across finance, health, and infrastructure.
Adapting the UK’s Institutions
How governance, incentives, and organisational practice must change to enable AI transformation.
Building the UK’s AI Workforce
The talent, skills, and inclusive participation needed from primary education to executive leadership to workforce transition.
Governing the UK’s AI Risks and Ethics
Risk, ethics, and social sustainability as foundational principles rather than compliance checkboxes.
Where to Focus the UK’s Global Role in AI
Competing international models and the case for a distinctive UK synthesis across AI assurance, public systems, transparency, data trusts, and infrastructure sovereignty.
How to Deliver the UK’s AI Strategy
A phased five-year roadmap across five delivery strands — and why the UK must start before conditions are perfect.
Who Is This Book For?
Policymakers and Government Leaders
An evidence base for procurement reform, governance design, and regulatory choices that will define the UK’s AI trajectory.
Organisational Leaders
Practical frameworks for moving beyond pilots, building AI workforce capability, and navigating ethical complexity.
Digital and Technology Leaders
Sovereign compute architecture, data governance models, implementation roadmaps, and what distinguishes AI delivery from conventional digital transformation.
Professor Alan W. Brown
