Reading the 50 recommendations in the AI Opportunities Action Plan published by the British Government last January 13th has been a painful and disappointing exercise.

Very much like a proposal out of a chatbot, the document is

• Bland —  The text is full of hyperbolic language and over-the-top optimism
• General —  The 50 recommendations lack specificity to the UK context and details about ownership and the budget required to execute them.
• Contradictory  — The plan issued by a Labour government is anchored in a turbo-capitalistic ideology. Oxymoron anyone?

If I learned anything from my 12 years in Venezuela, it’s that putting all your eggs in one basket — oil, in their case — and hoping it solves all problems doesn’t work.

A credible AI strategy must (a) address both the benefits and the challenges head-on and (b) consider this technology as another asset to the human-centric flourishment of the country rather than a goal in itself that should be pursued at all costs.

But you don’t need to believe me. See it for yourself.

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What I read

Techno-speak

I was reminded of George Orwell’s 1984 Newspeak.

The text uses “AI” made works such as AI stack, frontier AI, AI-driven data cleansing tools, AI-enabled priorities, “embodied AI” without providing a clear definition.

Exaggeration

Hyperbole and metaphors are used to the extreme to overstate the benefits.

we want Britain to step up; to shape the AI revolution rather than wait to see how it shapes us. 

We should expect enormous improvements in computation over the next decade, both in research and deployment.

Change lives by embracing AI

FOMO

The text transpires FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). No option is given to adopt AI systems more gradually. It’s now or we’ll be the losers.

This is a crucial asymmetric bet — and one the UK can and must make

we need to “run to stand still”.

the UK risks falling behind the advances in Artificial Intelligence made in the USA and China.

And even a new take on Facebook’s famous “move fast and break things”:

“move fast and learn things”

Techno-solutionism

AI is going to solve all our socio-economic and political problems and transport us to a utopian future 

It is hard to imagine how we will meet the ambition for highest sustained growth in the G7 — and the countless quality-of-life benefits that flow from that — without embracing the opportunities of AI.

Our ambition is to shape the AI revolution on principles of shared economic prosperity, improved public services and increased personal opportunities so that:
• AI drives the economic growth on which the prosperity of our people and the performance of our public services depend;
• AI directly benefits working people by improving health care and education and how citizens interact with their government; and
• the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.

What’s not to like?

For a great commentary on how techno-solutionism won’t solve social problems, see 20 Petitions for AI and Public Good in 2025 by Tania Duarte.

Colonialism

Living in Venezuela for 12 years was an education on how to feel “less than” other countries even when you have the largest oil reserves in the world.

I remember new education programs announced as being a success in the US, Canada, Spain, Germany… A colonised mentality learned from centuries of Spanish oppression. The pervasive assumption that an initiative would work simply because we like the results disregarding the context they were developed for.

The AI Opportunities Action Plan reminded me of them.

Supporting universities to develop new courses co-designed with industry — such as the successful co-operative education model of Canada’s University of Waterloo, CDTM at the Technical University of Munich or France’s CIFRE PhD model

Launch a flagship undergraduate and masters AI scholarship programme on the scale of Rhodes, Marshall, or Fulbright for students to study in the UK.

Singapore, for example, developed a national AI skills online platform with multiple training offers. South Korea is integrating AI, data and digital literacy.

But the document is also keen on showing us that we’ll be the colonisers

we aspire to be one of the biggest winners from AI

Because we believe Britain has a particular responsibility to provide global leadership in fairly and effectively seizing the opportunities of AI, as we have done on AI safety

Capitulation

The document is all about surrendering the data, agency, tax money, and natural resources of citizens in the UK to the AI Gods: startups, “experts”, and investors.

Invest in becoming a great customer: government purchasing power can be a huge lever for improving public services, shaping new markets in AI

We should seek to responsibly unlock both public and private data sets to enable innovation by UK startups and researchers and to attract international talent and capital.

Couple compute allocation with access to proprietary data sets as part of an attractive offer to researchers and start-ups choosing to establish themselves in the UK and to unlock innovation.

Sprinkling AI

AI is the Pantone’s Colour of the next 5 years. All will need to have AI on it. Moreover, everything must be designed so that AI can shine.

Appointing an AI lead for each mission to help identify where AI could be a solution within the mission setting, considering the user needs from the outset.

Two-way partnerships with AI vendors and startups to anticipate future AI developments and signal public sector demand. This would involve government meeting product teams to understand upcoming releases and shape development by sharing their challenges.

AI should become core to how we think about delivering services, transforming citizens’ experiences, and improving productivity.

Brexit Denial

It’s funny to see that the text doesn’t reference the European Union and only refers to Europe as a benchmark to measure against.

Instead, the EU is hinted at as “like-minded partners” and “allies” and collaborations are thrown right and left without naming who’s the partner.

Agree international compute partnerships with like-minded countries to increase the types of compute capability available to researchers and catalyse research collaborations. This should focus on building arrangements with key allies, as well as expanding collaboration with existing partners like the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

We should proactively develop these partnerships, while also taking an active role in the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

Moreover, the text praises the mobility of researchers and wanting to attract experts forgetting the UK’s refusal to participate in the Erasmus program and the fact that it only joined Horizon Europe last year.

The UK is a medium-sized country with a tight fiscal situation. We need the best talent around the world to want to start and scale companies here.

Explore how the existing immigration system can be used to attract graduates from universities producing some of the world’s top AI talent.

Vagueness

Ideas are thrown into the text half-backed giving the idea the government has adopted the Silicon Valley strategy of “building the plane while flying”

The government must therefore secure access to a sufficient supply of compute. There is no precise mechanism to allocate the proportions

In another example, the plan advocates for open-source AI applications.

the government should support open-source solutions that can be adopted by other organisations and design processes with startups and other innovators in mind.

The AI infrastructure choice at-scale should be standardised, tools should be built with reusable modular code components, and code-base open-sourcing where possible.

At the same time, it’s adamant that it needs to attract startups and investors. Except if the startups are NGOs, who’ll then finance those open-source models?

DEI for Beginners

All of us who have been working towards a more diverse and inclusive tech for decades are in for a treat. 

First, we’re told that diversity in tech is very simple — it’s all about gender parity and pipeline.

16. Increase the diversity of the talent pool. Only 22% of people working in AI and data science are women. Achieving parity would mean thousands of additional workers. […] Government should build on this investment and promote diversity throughout the education pipeline.

Moreover, they’ve found the magic bullet.

Hackathons and competitions in schools have proven effective at getting overlooked groups into cyber and so should be considered for AI.

What about the fact that 50% of women in tech leave the sector by the age of 35?

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What I missed

Regions

The government mentions that AI “can” — please note that is not a “must” or “need” — benefit “post-industrial towns and coastal Scotland.” However, the only reference to a place is to the Culham Science Centre, which is 10 miles from Oxford — a zone that very few could consider needs “local rejuvenation” or “channelling investment”

Government can also use AIGZs [‘AI Growth Zones’] to drive local rejuvenation, channelling investment into areas with existing energy capacity such as post-industrial towns and coastal Scotland. Government should quickly nominate at least one AIGZ and work with local regions to secure buy-in for further AIGZs that contribute to local needs . Existing government sites could be prioritised as pilots, including Culham Science Centre

And it doesn’t appear to be room to involve local authorities in how AI could bring value to their regions

Drive AI adoption across the whole country. Widespread adoption of AI can address regional disparities in growth and productivity. To achieve this, government should leverage local trusted intermediaries and trade bodies

Costs

There are plenty of gigantic numbers about how much money will AI (may) bring

AI adoption could grow the UK economy by an additional £400 billion by 2030 through enhancing innovation and productivity in the workplace

but nothing about the costs…

Literacy

How will people get upskilled? We only get generic reassurances

government should encourage and promote alternative domestic routes into the AI profession — including through further education and apprenticeships, as well as employer and self-led upskilling.

Government should ensure there are sufficient opportunities for workers to reskill, both into AI and AI-enabled jobs and more widely.

Citizens

There is no indication in the document that this “AI-driven” Britain is what their citizens want. Citizens themselves don’t appear to be included in shaping AI either.

For example, it claims that teachers are already “benefiting” from AI assistants

it is helping some teachers cut down the 15+ hours a week they spend on lesson planning and marking in pilots.

However, the text doesn’t tell us that teachers want to give up class preparation.

And the text repeatedly states that the government will prioritise “innovation” (aka profit) vs safety.

My judgement is that experts, on balance, expect rapid progress to continue. The risks from underinvesting and underpreparing, though, seem much greater than the risks from the opposite.

Moreover, regulators are expected to enable innovation at all costs

Require all regulators to publish annually how they have enabled innovation and growth driven by AI in their sector. […] government should consider more radical changes to our regulatory model for AI, for example by empowering a central body with a mandate and higher risk tolerance to promote innovation across the economy.

Where did we sing for that?

Sustainability

The document waxes lyrical about building datacentres. What about the electricity and water requirements? What about the impact on our water reserves and electricity grid? What about the repercussions on our sustainability goals?

The document is done by throwing the word sustainability twice in one paragraph

Mitigate the sustainability and security risks of AI infrastructure, while positioning the UK to take advantage of opportunities to provide solutions. [..] Government should also explore ways to support novel approaches to compute hardware and, where appropriate, create partitions in national supercomputers to support new and innovative hardware. In doing so, government should look to support and partner with UK companies who can demonstrate performance, sustainability or security advancements.

Unemployment

The writers of that utopic “AI-powered” UK manifesto don’t address job losses. We only get the sentence I mentioned above

the increasing of prevalence of AI in people’s working lives opens up new opportunities rather than just threatens traditional patterns of work.

Instead, it uses language that fosters fear and builds on utopian and dystopian visions of an AI-driven future

AI systems are increasingly matching or surpassing humans across a range of tasks.

Given the pace of progress, we will also very soon see agentic systems — systems that can be given an objective, then reason, plan and act to achieve it. The chatbots we are all familiar with are just an early glimpse as to what is possible.

On the flip side, the government repeatedly reiterates their ambition of bringing talent from abroad

 Supporting UK-based AI organisations working on national priority projects to bring in overseas talent and headhunting promising founders or CEOs

How does this plan contribute to reassuring people about their jobs?

Big-picture

This techno-solutionism approach doesn’t have any regard for AI specialists in domains other than coding or IT.

To mention a few, what about sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, teachers, historians, economists, or specialists in the broad spectrum of industries in the UK? 

Don’t they belong to those think tanks where decisions are made about selling our country to the AI Gods?

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The Good News? We Can Do Better

People in Britain voted last year that they were tired of profits over people, centralism, and oligarchy. Unfortunately, this plan uses AI to reinforce the three.

The UK is full of hardworking and smart people who deserve much better than magic bullets or techno-saviours. 

Instead of shoehorning the UK’s future to AI, what if we

• abandon the false mantra that innovation comes with inequality? 
• demote AI from a “God” status to a technology as our ancestors did with the Fire Deities?
• design AI systems to empower people instead of making humans serve AI?

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WORK WITH ME

I’m a technologist with 20+ years of experience in digital transformation. I’m also an award-winning inclusion strategist and certified life and career coach.

Three ways you can work with me:

• I empower non-tech leaders to harness the potential of artificial intelligence for sustainable growth and responsible innovation through consulting and AI competency programs.
• I’m a ​sought-after international keynote speaker​ on strategies to empower women and underrepresented groups in tech, sustainable and ethical artificial intelligence, and inclusive workplaces and products.
• I help ambitious women in tech who are overwhelmed to break the glass ceiling and achieve success without burnout through bespoke coaching and mentoring.

Get in touch to discuss how I can help you achieve the success you deserve in 2025.