This last year has seen the world catapult into a phase of rapid, exponential AI growth, both in frontier model capability and enterprise adoption.
With tech accelerating at a dizzying pace, how can business leaders and policy makers make sense of the scale of change that is either in the post, or already arriving on the doorstep?
Setting aside, if we can, the potentially epoch-defining debate on AI regulation, two key policy challenges face Scotland and the wider UK simultaneously.
First, in order to ensure global competitiveness and retain geopolitical influence, the country must rapidly enable AI infrastructure – most notably data centres. This must be done in a manner which acknowledges and addresses challenges around environmental and local community impact.
Second, we must work - immediately - to prepare for the enormous changes the AI revolution is bringing to our economy, specifically to the jobs we do, and how we do them. Reports of graduate vacancies having dropped by 50% in a single year may of course be explained in part by an increased cost of hiring, but not in whole. Few would confidently deny this trend represents a canary in the AI coalmine.
Rising to these challenges will require vision, determination, and co-ordination across all levels of government and – crucially – partnership with the business community. Whether this will be achieved though, remains to be seen.
Andrew Henderson, Director of Public Policy at Pinsent Masons
The era of perma- and polycrisis which has defined the past two decades is instructive when assessing how our governments rise, or don’t rise, to different challenges.
When a clear, existential cliff edge is presented or a wall is hit, action is taken. See banks recapitalisation when the Global Financial Crisis threatened our core economic stability, or lockdown / furlough when Covid spread with a speed and ferocity risking millions of lives.
When challenges or crises approach more gradually though, governments (of all political hues) are invariably more prone to delaying or diluting their policy response.
This is not unique to Scotland or the UK. Frogs boil around the world when problems arrive without an unpinned grenade of political peril attached.
In time, AI will unquestionably unlock enormous benefits, but that does not detract from the fact that policymakers must navigate its current challenges with urgency.
Tuesday saw the leaders of Scotland’s two national governments set out notably contrasting policy agendas to their respective parliaments.
Burnham’s decentralisation focus and Swinney’s consolidation of fragmented and inefficient national structures are each important platforms. But both administrations must also find the bandwidth and political willing to work together on the shared challenges of ensuring competitiveness by enabling AI responsibly, while also navigating the country through the major economic upheaval it is already triggering. Perhaps a topic for discussion at the National Economic Council scheduled by the Prime Minister for next month?
Intergovernmental collaboration and consistency of approach is something which the business community has been calling for throughout the devolution era, but not always seeing.
Now, more than ever, this cannot be viewed as discretionary – it is urgent and vital.