Companies providing business services and professional advice have five days to claim up to £5,000 each in grants to help to pay for artificial intelligence skills training.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology wants to accelerate the adoption of AI-driven software to improve productivity and has set aside £6.4 million under its Flexible AI Upskilling Fund.
The grants, allocated in the budget in March and closing for applications on August 18, are for small and medium-sized companies, defined as having fewer than 250 staff, that can match-fund the grant they request to pay for training. Once the impact of a pilot scheme is assessed, it may be extended to other sectors and to bigger businesses.
Companies are free to select the providers that best meet their needs, with chambers of commerce being asked to draw up lists of suitable training organisations to help those unsure where to turn. The window for applications opened on May 1.
Feryal Clark, the minister for AI, said Britain had to “squeeze every drop of AI’s potential into our economy. Cost is so often a barrier to small and medium-size businesses looking to upskill their workers, so we’re playing our part by helping them to bridge that gap and to deliver training so that employees can use AI in their day-to-day. This will boost productivity, develop their workforce and help our economy grow.”
Whitehall is worried about a low level of investment in AI capabilities by business, which it says is “hindering AI adoption”.
In the guidance to the grant scheme, officials say that skills training that qualifies for the grant money “should support employees to develop their technical skills and/or understanding of AI, helping them to develop, deploy or use AI in their role”. The department is running a webinar at 11.30am on Wednesday to answer any questions.
A survey of 1,150 businesses last year by the universities of Leeds, Sussex and Cambridge found that only 11 per cent had invested in AI-enabled technology in the previous 12 months.
Bruce Hepburn, the founder and chief executive of Mactavish, which buys insurance on behalf of companies and manages their claims, was one of them. In 2022 and 2023 he spent £2 million on a digital transformation of what at the time was a business with a £5 million turnover.
He said the investment had led to an improvement in productivity of more than 40 per cent, half of which he attributed to the use of AI. But he warned that paying for AI training in isolation would not be helpful. “You have to establish a culture that is excited about productivity improvement and understand what that means at an individual level and to not see that as a negative thing to get rid of people,” he said.
“The No 1 challenge in any skills investment, and we invest heavily in technical training at all levels, is that you know that you will be able to progress and do a better and more interesting job as a result of the training. In a normal steady-state company, that may well mean you getting promoted and the work you are doing be passed to someone more junior. But with AI it means you are teaching the tech to do your role, which allows you to focus your time on doing the things that only you can do and the tech cannot do.
“You need a culture of driving yourself to focus more and more on the things that you are uniquely good at, so rather than AI being seen as a threat it creates more time to create more job security. But you have to embrace this.”