AI boom driving tech adoption in UK industry – report

Commissioned by management consultancy Elixirr, the report sampled 501 UK business leaders in companies with £10m+ turnover across construction, manufacturing, IT, retail, finance and professional services. It found that 87 per cent plan to increase investment in new technologies to outperform competitors and meet challenges head-on. A third (33 per cent) of respondents said that cutting back on tech investment was their biggest mistake during past periods of economic uncertainty.

Hype around AI appears to be a key theme, with UK businesses looking to the nascent technology to drive revenue as well as streamline operations. Nearly two-thirds (60 per cent) of enterprises said that AI was their top investment area when it came to technology, far ahead of IoT (23 per cent), AR/VR (15 per cent) and blockchain (12 per cent).

“I think there's not a single FTSE or Fortune company out there who's not doing stuff in AI at the moment,” Rory Farquharson, head of Elixirr’s manufacturing business unit, told The Engineer ahead of the report's publication. “It's not about should we do some or should we not - that's just not true. It’s across all of these organisations.