The Big Innovation Centre and Deep Knowledge Analytics, in conjunction with the All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence, has released a new report examining the state of the artificial intelligence industry in the United Kingdom. The report is titled “Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK 2018.”
The report was released on October 24, 2018. By the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence Co-Chair Lord Clement Jones CBE. The report was written by Big Innovation Centre CEO Professor Birgitte Andersen and Deep Knowledge Analytics Co-founder Dmitry Kaminskiy.
The report examines and profiles around one thousand companies, six hundred investors, and eighty identified influencers. This is put together with information garnered about technology hubs and research institutes, plus various private and government bodies. Each of these is regarded as critical for the development of the UK artificial intelligence sector.
The highlight from the report is that the U.K. has in place sufficient industry and state backing to be a major player in global artificial intelligence. This assessment notes that the U.K. will have sufficient backing to challenge both the U.S. and China in the global artificial intelligence economy by 2020.
In essence this means that the U.K. possesses an artificial intelligence economy with sufficient scale in the global economy. This is partly due to investment in the global artificial intelligence reaching $5 billion (£3.8 billion), a level of funding that looks set to increase.
In terms of regional geography, London is the leading financial global hub, support by innovations that are occurring within the university sector. Key factors that have combined to increase the capability of artificial intelligence in the U.K. in recent years include new and larger volumes of data; a good supply of experts with the specific high-level skills; and the availability of increasingly powerful computing capacity.
Commenting on the report, Lord Clement-Jones notes: “As shown in the report of the UK AI landscape, we have now reached the inflection point which can be reasonably described as the Cambrian Explosion of AI in the UK.”
He adds: “There’s been a substantial surge of activities on the part of the UK throughout the past several months, ranging from the excellent work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI to the establishment of the Government Office for AI. There are also well-funded Government and private sector partnerships and initiatives such as the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.”
