The adoption of AI by UK businesses has been so rapid and successful that executives now trust the tech to make critical business decisions, and would even allow it to take charge during a crisis. 

New data from PagerDuty’s AI Resilience Survey shows that over three-quarters (76%) of UK business leaders believe AI has become so essential that their company would struggle to function without it, with projects that began as pilots and trials now viewed as mission-critical infrastructure.

When it comes to the fast-growing area of agentic AI and AI agents in particular, executives on both the business and IT side are increasingly confident that AI can protect their interests, even when things go wrong.

The report, based on a poll of 250 UK execs, found that the vast majority of executives (88%) would trust AI agents to take action on behalf of their firm during a crisis, such as an outage or security event, a striking level of trust in the machine, higher in the UK than the global average (81%). 

According to the data, that level of trust has been earned by the growing maturity of AI, with 78% of UK execs more trusting of AI-generated outputs than they were a year ago and over half (54%) citing a rise in the quality of AI outputs.

Meanwhile, 52% of leaders said they have also gained a better understanding of how AI works, helping to cement their acceptance of the tech, while the same number of UK executives (52%) are comparing their AI use to that in other teams or at other companies.

One of the reasons AI is seen as so crucial by companies is that an increasing amount of code is being created or reviewed with the help of AI. More than four in five (85%) of UK organisations said they are using AI to write, review or suggest code.

Though AI coding is becoming mainstream, companies still feel it’s necessary to make sure that the technology is doing the job well. 

To that end, they’re developing processes to test AI-generated code for accuracy and reliability, with the majority of UK organisations (88%) doing some form of AI code testing, but less than half (47%) do it consistently and through a formal process. 

PagerDuty found that the UK is lagging significantly in this area, trailing the US’s 59% lead in formal testing, though far outstripping Japan at 19%. 

Despite this growing reliance and trust, executives are also clear-eyed enough to see that AI isn’t perfect. 

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Nearly two out of five UK executives (38%) cite news they’ve read about AI models or regulations that have made them trust AI-generated outputs less in the last year, while more than a quarter (27%) worry about a lack of transparency in how AI systems generate outputs, and 35% are concerned about low-cost, lower-quality AI models becoming more widely available.

“What’s striking is that UK leaders, in particular, are placing a higher-than-average level of trust in AI agents to take action during outages or security incidents, which is a sign of how quickly organisations are moving from AI experimentation to operational reliance,” said Eduardo Crespo, VP of the EMEA region at PagerDuty.

“But trust doesn’t mean blind faith. The businesses leading in AI adoption are the ones balancing confidence with caution, building governance around their AI use while leaning into the speed, scale and resilience it can unlock.”