UK’s AI strategy is ‘ambitious’ but needs funding to match, says Faculty’s Marc Warner Posted on : Sep 24 - 2021

The UK published its first ever national AI strategy this week. The decade-long commitment by the government to levelling up domestic artificial intelligence capabilities — by directing resource and attention toward skills, talent, compute power and data access — has been broadly welcomed by the country’s tech ecosystem, as you’d expect.

But there is a question mark over how serious government is about turning the UK into a “global AI superpower” given the lack of a funding announcement to accompany the publication.

A better hint is likely to come shortly, with the spending review tabled for October 27 — which will set out public spending plans for the next three years.

Ahead of that, TechCrunch spoke to Marc Warner, CEO of UK AI startup Faculty, who said government needs to show it’s serious about providing long term support to develop the UK’s capabilities and global competitiveness with an appropriate level of funding — while welcoming the “genuine ambition” he believes the government is showing to support AI.

Warner’s startup, which closed a $42M growth round of funding earlier this year, has started its own internal education program to attract PhDs into the company and turn out future data scientists. While Warner himself is also a member of the UK’s AI Council, an expert advisory group that provides advice to government and which was consulted on the strategy.

“I think this is a really pretty good strategy,” he told TechCrunch. “There’s a genuine ambition in it which is relatively rare for government and they recognize some of the most important things that we need to fix.

“The problem — and it’s a huge problem — is that there are currently no numbers attached to this.

“So while in principle there’s lots of great stuff in there, in practice it’s totally critical that it’s actually backed by the funding that it needs — and has the commitment of the wider gov to the high quality execution that doing some of these things are going to require.”

Warner warned of the risk of the promising potential of a “pretty serious strategy” fading away if it’s not matched with an appropriate — dare we say it, ‘world beating’ — level of funding.

“That’s a question for the spending review but it seems to me very easy now that having done — what looks like a really pretty serious strategy — then… it fades into a much more generic strategy off the back of not really willing to make the funding commitments, not really willing to push through on the execution side and actually make these things happen.” View More