Growing need for AI skills

The AWS Summit coincided with the publication of the latest edition of the AWS Unlocking the UK’s AI potential report, which shines a light on how big a barrier access to skills could be for businesses wanting to adopt AI.

The report, compiled by consultancy firm Strand Partners, stated that AI literacy will be a requirement for nearly half (47%) of new UK jobs over the next three years, based on feedback received from 1,000 businesses that participated in the research.

Presently, though, just under a third (27%) of the businesses that participated in the research said they felt their workforce was adequately prepared, from a skills perspective, for AI use to become more pervasive throughout their organisation.

Just 12 months ago, we talked about the extraordinary potential of generative AI. Today, we are witnessing real, great [developments]. What was once improbable is now possible

The research also featured a call to action of sorts for enterprises to think bigger and more ambitiously about how they could put AI to use within their organisations, with its data suggesting that just 15% of large firms have a “comprehensive AI strategy”.

“Over half (55%) of large enterprises reported they are consistently using the technology, up from 41% last year; however, their use of AI remains surface-level, meaning they are focused on basic efficiency gains,” the report stated.

By contrast, many startups are whole-heartedly embracing AI by integrating the technology into the “centre of their business strategy” and using it to “develop new products, and transform their industries”, the report continued.

On this point, the research stated that 59% of startups have adopted AI, with 36% of them committing to developing new AI-driven products and services, compared with 25% of large enterprises.

“If this emerging gap is not addressed, there is a risk that a longtail of businesses, particularly large enterprises, may miss out on reaping the transformative benefits of AI,” the report warned.

“Given enterprises are responsible for 48% of UK turnover, this could prevent the UK from fully realising the economic, productive and competitive edge that AI can unlock.”

Davies said the gap exists because startups are more “digital native in their orientation”, making it easier for them to adopt and incorporate new AI functionality into their “core business applications”.

Enterprises and governments, meanwhile, are more likely to be entrenched in legacy tech and may have more complexity within their existing IT estates which makes it harder for them to move as quickly on AI as a startup could.

Even so, it’s important that enterprises do not fall too far behind. “We’re very much at an inflection point now where these things [AI] are reality – as 52% of businesses are using AI now, and that’s up significantly,” Davies continued. “This is faster [adoption] than we saw with digital mobile telecoms in the early 2000s. It’s one of the fastest growths in technology we’ve ever seen.”

And for this reason, the target audience for the AWS AI skills push is not just techies, but people in a much wider variety of job functions and roles, he said.

AI is for everyone

“Addressing the cloud skills gap was very much an initiative targeted at IT professionals, whereas AI is an everyone thing,” said Davies.

And what is heartening, he added, is the curiosity people already seem to have about using consumer-grade, generative AI tools for assistance with everyday tasks.

“I definitely don’t think that hurts because it shows that people are open to using it,” he said. “What I do think is critical is that we don’t just think about how the IT profession is going to use it, but we need to think about doctors, lawyers and social workers … that’s where we’re trying to go with Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance.”

AWS will be working in collaboration with educational institutions in the UK to achieve this, according to Davies, by getting universities to incorporate the Tech Alliance’s educational materials in courses that are seemingly unrelated to IT.

He cited the University of East London as an example, as it will be offering students optional, elective modules on AI as a companion to the degree courses they have signed up for.

“If you were studying law, you could do [an elective AI module], and when you think about the opportunities [having AI skills] would open up for people in that field to surface case precedents, for example, I think it’s the non-IT cases that have the most potential.”

Accelerating AI adoption

The pace at which AI adoption is progressing was a key theme of the AWS Summit keynote, with Alison Kay, vice-president and managing director for the UK and Ireland at AWS, shining a light on how various startups are using AI to their advantage.

“Just 12 months ago, we talked about the extraordinary potential of generative AI, and today we are no longer just talking about the potential, but witnessing real, great [developments],” she said. “What was once improbable is now possible.”

Kay went on to reference the work that UK-based AWS customer Sonrai Analytics is doing with AI in the life sciences sector to accelerate research into disease.

“Research timelines have been reduced by 50%, error rates have dropped by 80%, and each experiment [the company does] is saving over $20,000 in costs.”

The company, founded in 2018, is an AI precision medicine startup whose multi-modal platform is used by biotech and pharmaceutical companies to manage, process and analyse clinical, genomic, image and patient data to accelerate new drug discoveries and disease detection.

Speaking to Computer Weekly at the summit, Gerard Loughran, head of engineering at Sonrai Analytics, said it is fair to say that enterprises in the healthcare and biotech space are slower to adopt new technologies.

“Some of the hospitals, biotech and medtech companies that I previously worked with didn’t even adopt cloud in some cases, back in the 2010s, and for good reasons,” he said.

“A lot of the biotech and pharma companies we work with have a lot of biologists, mathematicians and very capable individuals who understand cancer and disease types, but they don’t necessarily have the same investment for having cloud, datacentre and other technical engineers [on staff].”

So, while the AWS research highlights the drawbacks of enterprises falling behind startups that are already building whole businesses on AI technologies, Loughran suggests the situation is a little more nuanced than the cloud giant’s data suggests. 

This situation creates opportunities for companies like Sonrai to plug the tech skills gaps to help large healthcare companies thrive and excel in the AI era. “A lot of our work is about removing the engineering complexity so they can just focus on the science,” he said.  

New roles, opportunities and innovations

Scott Marcar, group CIO of NatWest Bank, told Computer Weekly that not all enterprises are lagging behind their startup counterparts when it comes to AI adoption, with the banking sector being a prime example of a vertical market that has a long history of using the technology.

“There’s nothing new in banks using AI. If you think about the way the market works, trading, and how we price risk, for example, there has been AI embedded in banks for a very long time,” said Marcar.

“Most of [NatWest] has AI embedded in it in one shape or form, and where generative AI is concerned, I would say we are reasonably advanced. And if you look at the Evident AI index, we are ranked 18th in the world.”

AI is such an amazing capability for people to have at their fingertips. Everyone should be using it

On this point, he said the bank has “hundreds of use cases already” for AI, and the company is “investing significant amounts of money with OpenAI”.

The company has also rolled out Microsoft Copilot to its staff and has its own “safe-wrapped” version of ChatGPT called AI-Den that is available for tens of thousands of its staff to use.

“Also, around 26% of our Java code today is already generated by AI, which is a pretty impressive stat given we’ve only really been using it about six months,” continued Marcar.

“I’m pretty sure that every role we have today will be fundamentally transformed [by AI], but I also think we’re going to see a massive new set of roles created, as well as lots of new opportunities and innovations.”

He also shares AWS’s confidence that the UK is in a prime position to lead on AI. “For an industry [tech] that has been dominated by the positioning of Silicon Valley [as the epicentre] … I think we can lead on AI and become a real centre around the world for AI expertise,” he said.

“And with the country’s heritage [in this field], with things like DeepMind, we’ve got a history of doing great things, and I think we’ve got a responsibility to really take advantage of that.”

NatWest is doing its bit by teaching all 70,000 of its staff how to use AI. “It’s such an amazing capability for people to have at their fingertips. Everyone should be using it,” he said. “Because the reality is, there are going to be two types of roles in the world: those who use AI and those who don’t. And those who don’t will be left behind very quickly.”