On average, enterprises spend 11 person-hours investigating and remediating a single critical identity-related security alert, according to a new Enterprise Strategy Group study.
This response time bottlenecks the capacity of security teams to manage alert volume, and this is only made worse in the age of AI. Not only does AI introduce a new type of identity, but in many organizations, its rapid innovation is outpacing organizational oversight and creating new attack vectors.
Enhancing security teams’ ability to provide insights into suspicious activity is critical in this market context. Identity is already fragmented across cloud services, developer platforms, identity providers, and infrastructure resources. This fragmentation obscures the pathway any engineer or user – human or AI – uses to access resources.
“When it only takes minutes for threat actors to move laterally across your infrastructure, 11 hours to investigate an identity-related incident simply isn’t good enough,” Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport, a sponsor of Enterprise Strategy Group’s research, said.
“As we move deeper into the age of AI, we must remember that AI dramatically lowers the cost of identity attacks, and we must expect the frequency of them to increase.
“We must improve the trustworthiness of computing environments. We can only achieve this by eliminating anonymity and human error, and by unifying identity to simplify policy enforcement and enhance visibility of what each identity is doing.”
Additionally, the ease with which criminals can obtain valid static credentials (e.g. passwords, API keys) to impersonate identities only heightens the difficulty of investigations, making contextual insights essential. Credential theft now accounts for one-in-five data breaches, with the number of compromised credentials having surged 160% in 2025 so far.
Comprehensive identity management will be particularly crucial as businesses deploy AI agents that interact with core enterprise systems.
The study found that nearly half (44%) of businesses have already deployed AI, which risks creating yet another identity silo involving potentially over-privileged access to sensitive data and resources across infrastructure. Over half of respondents echo this concern, with 52% ranking ‘data privacy issues’ as the biggest risk related to AI.
The significant fragmentation of identities is also reflected in the tools that enterprises use to manage them. In fact, the study found that workforce identity teams use an average of 11 tools to trace identity-related security issues, suggesting companies require a more cohesive approach to manage identities in a unified way.
“Most cybersecurity solutions only see part of the picture,” says Todd Thiemann, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
“Few organisations understand the scale of the threat, let alone how quickly malicious actors can move laterally and disrupt systems.
“Each application expands a company’s security and compliance surface area, often faster than they can govern it, and few are easily integrated with identity tools. This leaves blind spots, orphaned accounts, inconsistent access privileges, and gaps in auditability, which significantly raises the risk of breaches and regulatory penalties.”
Kontsevoy added: “The blind spots created by complex IT aren’t just a danger to security. They’re bottlenecking the productivity of engineers and security professionals. They need a way to quickly answer vital questions.
“Who accessed database X and with what permissions? Is this behaviour unusual for the identity in question? What’s the full summary of what an identity did in a single session across platforms?
“To answer these questions, we need a different approach to cybersecurity, one that isn’t based on secrets and siloed identities, but on combining unified, cryptographic identity with just-in-time access. That’s how we minimise the attack surface.”
Entry-level workers are rapidly adopting AI tools – but the technology is exposing some divides between those confidently using AI and those not yet there.
A report from Generation, which draws on the AI experience of 5,500 entry-level workers, most without a college degree, across a range of industries and 17 economies, offers a fresh perspective on how AI is impacting workers.
The analysis shows that AI use is widespread among entry-level employees, with 65% reporting that they use AI at work. Half are adopting AI on their own initiative, while the rest use tools provided by their employers or a combination of the two.
Among AI users, 79% engage with AI tools at least once a week, rising to 89% in the tech sector. More than a third (37%) use AI daily.
Men Use AI More than Women
AI use among women lags that among men, with 53% of women across sectors saying they use it at work versus 76% of men. This gap narrows when you look specifically at the tech sector, with 80% of women saying they are using AI and 86% of men.
Sector differences are strong. Within tech and customer service & sales sectors, adoption across genders is high – 87% and 80% respectively. However, adoption in the green economy and skilled trades remains low, with just 12% and 10% of entry-level employees in these sectors using AI.
Multiple Uses
Entry-level employees are using AI for a broad range of tasks. In the tech sector, for example, 67% of respondents use AI for multiple functions – including learning (61%), content creation (49%), and administrative tasks (44%). In customer service and sales, content creation (43%) and learning (35%) are the top uses.
And while use is lower in green jobs and skilled trades, early adopters in these fields are using AI to primarily learn new skills and create content.
Despite uneven uptake, most users are seeing clear benefits, with 94% reporting that AI has improved their ability to do their job – including 63% who say it helped a lot. Perhaps even more striking: 91% say AI has made their work more enjoyable, with 59% reporting a significant increase in job satisfaction.
However, the perceived value of AI varies across countries. In upper-middle-income countries, 70% of entry-level workers say AI has greatly improved their job performance – compared to 64% in lower-middle-income countries and 49% in high-income countries. Similar trends hold for enjoyment: employees in emerging economies are more likely to say AI has made their work more fulfilling.
Barriers to Adoption
While adoption is strong overall, 35% of entry-level employees surveyed are not yet using AI at work. Among this group, 72% say they’re interested – but face barriers including a lack of training (30%), uncertainty about how AI applies to their role (30%), and not having enough time to learn (12%). Only a small share cite trust issues or a lack of clear benefit.
“AI is reshaping the workplace — and across our thousands of alumni, most of whom do not have a college degree, we see entry-level employees are charging ahead, using tools to learn faster, work smarter, and enjoy their jobs more,” Dr. Mona Mourshed, Founding Global CEO of Generation, said.
“We need to ensure every worker, in every sector, has the access and support to begin harnessing the power of AI in their roles.”
The Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics (CAP) is using fresh funding from the the Scottish government and Scottish Enterprise to expand its presence in Glasgow.
The centre currently leases six laboratories and spaces for about 80 employees and doctoral students at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre, focusing on developing and using lasers in industrial applications.
Since its inception in 2012, the CAP has expanded into the second floor of the Inovo Building at the University, doubling its office and lab capacity.
With additional government funding of £500,000 and £300,000 from Scottish Enterprise, Fraunhofer CAP will support student training, research and development, and aims to go on to win contracts and grants.
The centre delivered over £5m of applied R&D projects for industry in just the last year.
The name Fraunhofer, from the Germany physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer, has been bestowed to a range of research organisations across the globe.
The Glasgow centre specialises in lasers and optical systems, addressing challenges in security, defence, renewable energy, healthcare, and communications.
“The Scottish Government is a proud supporter of Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics, having providing core funding for the Institute since its inception in 2012,“ minister for business and employment Richard Lochhead said.
“As the only Fraunhofer in the UK, it plays an important role in turning cutting-edge research into real-world industrial solutions across critical industries.
“I am pleased that increased Scottish Government funding this year has helped it expand operations in Glasgow, increasing its capacity to support vital projects across energy, net zero and space, while growing Scotland’s Critical Technologies Supercluster.
“The Supercluster is strategically important to the Scottish economy and the Scottish Government will continue to support the incredible capability, talent and innovation across the industry as it pursues ambitious growth over the coming decade.”
Lochhead refers to the Scottish Critical Technologies Supercluster which was recently convened to promote key technical areas in Scotland’s tech ecosystem, including photonics, semiconductors, sensing, and quantum.
“We have proven the success of the Fraunhofer model here in Scotland, as evidenced by the large number of projects we deliver for industrial partners,” Simon Andrews, executive director of Fraunhofer UK research said.
“Our photonics and quantum expertise is helping industry stay at the forefront of innovation and this ministerial visit demonstrates the importance of the part we have to play in the economy.
“Both the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise are key stakeholders for our organisation and have provided support since our inception in 2012.“
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has called on the Metropolitan Police to ensure that its use of live facial recognition technology complies with human rights law.
The human rights regulator has been granted permission to intervene in an upcoming judicial review examining whether the Met Police’s use of the technology complies with human rights law.
While the EHRC acknowledges the potential value of live facial recognition technology in policing, it believes the Met’s governance policy is incompatible with European Convention on Human Rights articles guaranteeing a right to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly and association.
Live facial recognition technology (LFTR) captures and analyses the faces of individuals passing in front of real-time CCTV cameras, extracting unique biometric data from each face and comparing it to a watchlist of people sought by police.
The Met Police has previously used live facial recognition technology at public events, and has announced their intention to use the technology at the Notting Hill Carnival.
Currently, there is no specific domestic legislation regulation the police use of LFRT, meaning that police instead rely on common law powers.
The EHRC says that the increased use of LFRT by police means the use of the technology poses a threat to human rights, as thousands of faces are often being scanned per deployment. The 2020 case brought against the South Wales Police found that the use of LFRT was unlawful at the time.
The EHRC is issuing submissions and evidence showing how intrusive the use of LFRT by police has been in an effort to protect against human rights infringements.
The EHRC’s submission stresses that LFRT can be intrusive, especially so when used on a large scale, and warns that its use at protests could have a “chilling effect” on individuals’ rights under freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. These rights are fundamental to democratic society.
Data shows that the number of black men triggering an ‘alert’ is higher than would be expected proportionally, when compared to the population of London. The EHRC welcomes that the Met, since 25 July 2024, has adopted a minimum accuracy threshold which it has said will limit the adverse impact on certain protected groups.
However, the regulator notes that the accuracy of the technology is paramount and even low error rates can translate to significant numbers of false identifications when using large watchlists. The consequence of false alerts can be significant for individuals such as for Mr Thompson, who is bringing the judicial review, as he was wrongly identified by LFRT leading to significant disruption.
The UK is however, continuing with its rollout of the technology, with the government announcing an increase in LFRT-equipped vans to various constituencies in England.
This is despite international legal policy developments, such as the EU AI Act, rating the use of LFRT by law enforcement as ‘high risk’.
“Live facial recognition technology is a tool which, when used responsibly, can help to combat serious crime and keep people safe. But the data this technology processes is biometric data, which is deeply personal,” John Kilpatrick, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said.
“The law is clear: everyone has the right to privacy, to freedom of expression and to freedom of assembly. These rights are vital for any democratic society.
“As such, there must be clear rules which guarantee that live facial recognition technology is used only where necessary, proportionate and constrained by appropriate safeguards. We believe that the Metropolitan Police’s current policy falls short of this standard. The Met, and other forces using this technology, need to ensure they deploy it in ways which are consistent with the law and with human rights.”
Gordon Baggott has been appointed as Edinburgh-based Smart Data Foundry’s new Chief Data Scientist.
He will be responsible for the development of the data science strategy for the University of Edinburgh subsidiary, driving forward research that promotes financial wellbeing, economic resilience and policy change.
Baggott has more than 20 years’ experience across healthcare, banking and insurance, employing data science, machine learning and generative AI approaches to derive insight from all kinds of data. He has helped pioneer the use of machine learning and AI in major high street banks in areas such as risk operations, insider fraud and cybersecurity.
He is also the co-founder and commissioning editor for the Business AI Alliance, a cross-party parliamentary group which is helping small and medium organisations to safely harness the power of AI and drive growth in the UK.
Dougie Robb, CEO of Smart Data Foundry said: “Gordon’s skills and ambitions fit perfectly with our mission to unlock financial data for the good of all and to drive real societal change. His technical expertise coupled with his commercial acumen will play a key role as we develop our range of data services into new areas.
“This a pivotal time for the business as we get ready to expand our Economic Wellbeing Explorer from Scotland to the whole of Great Britain and continue our work as the Financial Data Service (FINDS), one of the six research data services which form Smart Data Research UK.”
Launched in April, the Economic Wellbeing Explorer uses near real time data from over 5 million bank accounts to track economic resilience and wellbeing at national, regional and local levels and between age groups and income ranges.
Baggott added: “I’m thrilled to be joining Smart Data Foundry as Chief Data Scientist. It’s a great opportunity to bring my experience of analytics, machine learning and AI to help the team unlock the huge potential that financial data holds.
“With much of the focus of modern data technology being applied to the accumulation of wealth for the few, it’s critical to use our capability to better support positive societal change and work towards a more equitable UK.”
Smart Data Foundry has established a growing reputation through its work delivering pioneering projects that drive social impact, such as the ground breaking project with Joseph Rowntree Foundation to tackle income volatility – a growing challenge for many households- and the Cost of Living dashboard for East Renfrewshire Council, which supported the council to adapt its services to tackle hidden poverty.
It also collaborates with Sage UK and cebr, using Sage UK small business productivity data to produce vital insights on how small businesses in the UK are faring in the current economic climate.
UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are losing faith in the government’s ability to support them—and it’s threatening the country’s economic future. That’s the warning from new research by Umazi, a digital identity platform for business verification, which reveals a troubling disconnect between government ambition and real-world delivery.
According to the findings in the Umazi report, Broken ID, Broken Growth: The UK’s Verification Chokehold, based on a survey of 500 SMEs, over 60% say there is little to no meaningful government innovation aimed at helping them thrive. A further 38% believe progress is too slow, and 28% point out a lack of coordination between agencies as a critical obstacle.
“The UK government talks about innovation, but SMEs are still stuck in a system built for the last century,” said Cindy van Niekerk, CEO and Founder of Umazi.
“Our most dynamic businesses are wasting time, money, and momentum fighting outdated processes, while policies remain in permanent planning mode.”
Confidence in the UK as a business-friendly environment is slipping. Only 32% of SMEs believe the government genuinely prioritises creating a climate for prosperity, and 22% now see other European countries as offering better growth opportunities.
Strategies like the UK Digital Strategy 2025 and the AI Playbook showcase long-term vision. Digital integration is also keystone in the UK Industrial Strategy 2025 being recognised as essential to unlock productivity, sustainability, resilience, and innovation across the economy. Yet over 70% of SMEs say they haven’t seen these initiatives deliver practical change. On the ground, business leaders still face basic barriers—weeks of paperwork, repeated verification, and fractured support systems.
“AI might be transforming public services,” van Niekerk added, “If SMEs still can’t open a bank account or access funding without being buried in documents, what’s the point? There’s a glaring gap between ambition and execution, and it’s growing wider by the day.”
The report outlines how fundamental processes—verifying a business identity, applying for a loan, and onboarding with suppliers remain inefficient and uncoordinated. For SMEs, these delays don’t just mean frustration, they mean missed growth, lost contracts, and declining confidence.
“The message from SMEs couldn’t be clearer: government support isn’t reaching them,” van Niekerk said.
“We’re calling on the government to move beyond strategy papers and deliver real, joined-up, digital-first infrastructure that empowers businesses to scale—quickly, efficiently, and confidently.”
While departments publish roadmaps and commit to transformation, SMEs remain trapped in systems that no longer serve them. Red tape, disjointed infrastructure, and slow policy delivery are not just stalling growth, they’re weakening the UK’s economic resilience.
Van Niekerk concluded: “Across the world, business is being rewritten in real time—driven by data, speed, and seamless digital infrastructure. Yet while other nations equip their entrepreneurs with the tools to thrive, UK businesses are being held back by paper-heavy systems and policy inertia. Entrepreneurs cannot power recovery or innovation when they’re still battling processes designed for a different era.
If the UK is to remain a serious player on the world stage, it must back its entrepreneurs with more than ambition. It must provide the tools, the reform, and the accountability that turn strategy into progress. Businesses have waited long enough.”
Researchers from Scottish universities have developed an innovative way to breathe new life into outdated robot pets and toys using augmented reality technology.
The researchers – from the University of Glasgow and Abertay University – have prototyped a new software system which can overlay a wide range of new virtual behaviours on commercially-available robot pets and toys which are designed to look like animals and mimic their actions.
The system, called Augmenting Zoomorphic Robotics with Affect (AZRA), aims to address the shortcomings of the current generation of these ‘zoomorphic’ robots, which often have very limited options for interactivity.
In the future, AZRA-based systems could enable older robot pets, and even previously non-interactive toys like plush dolls, to provide experiences which are much closer to those provided by real animal companions.
The richer experiences AZRA enables could help provide more pet-like experiences for people who are unable to keep real animals for reasons of health, cost, or restrictions on rental properties.
When users of the AZRA system wear augmented reality devices like Meta’s Quest headset around their robot pets and toys, it projects a sophisticated overlay of virtual facial expressions, light, sound and thought bubbles onto the toy’s surfaces and surroundings.
AZRA is underpinned by a sophisticated simulation of emotions based on studies of real animal behaviour. It can make robots seem more convincingly ‘alive’ by imbuing them with moods which fluctuate unpredictably and can be affected by the touch or voice of their owner.
Eye contact detection and spatial awareness features means it knows when it is being looked at, and touch detection enables it to respond to strokes – even protesting when it is stroked against its preferred direction. It can request attention when ignored, or relax peacefully when sensing its owner is busy with other activities.
The system can also adjust the enhanced pet’s behaviour to better suit their owners’ personality and preferences. If users are high-energy and playful, the robot slowly adapts to become more excitable. In quieter households, it becomes more relaxed and contemplative.
The team say their research could also help cut down on electronic waste by reducing the likelihood of robot pets and toys being disposed of after their owners become tired of them.
The development of AZRA will be presented as a paper at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication in the Netherlands on26th August.
Dr Shaun Macdonald, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, is the paper’s lead author and led the development of AZRA. He was initially inspired to develop the system after receiving a less-than-inspiring gift.
He said: “I was given a little robot pet that had a very basic set of movements and potential interactions. It was fun for a few days, but I quickly ended up losing interest because I had seen everything it had to offer.
“I was a bit disappointed to realise that, despite all the major developments in technology over the last 25 years, zoomorphic robots haven’t developed much at all since I was a child. It’s all but impossible to build a relationship with a robot pet in the way you might with a real animal, because they have so few behaviours and they become over-familiar very quickly.
“As a researcher in human-computer interaction, I started to wonder whether I could build a system which could overlay much more complex behaviours and interactions on the toy using augmented reality. Being able to imbue older robots and pets with new life could also help reduce the carbon footprint of unwanted devices by keeping them from landfill for longer.”
Dr Macdonald used a simple off-the-shelf zoomorphic pet, the Petit Qoobo, as the basic real-world platform on which to overlay the augmented reality elements during the development of the system.
Guided by previous research into the emotional needs of dogs, Dr Macdonald developed Zoomorphic Robot Affect and Agency Mind Architecture, or ZAMA. ZAMA provides the AZRA system with a kind of artificial emotional intelligence, giving it a series of simulated emotional states which can change in response to its environment.
Rather than simple stimulus-response patterns, the system provides the augmented reality pet with an ongoing temperament based around combinations of nine personality traits including ‘gloomy’, ‘relaxed’ or ‘irritable’. It has daily moods that fluctuate naturally, and a long-term personality which develops over time through interactions with its owner.
It simulates desires for touch, rest, food, and socialisation which are subtly randomised each day. When its needs aren’t met, the AR robot will actively seek interaction, displaying emojis and thought bubbles to communicate what it wants.
The researchers are already working to explore the future potential of the technology, including participatory studies where volunteers can interact with the robot and then adjust its emotional parameters in real-time to explore what feels natural versus artificial in robot behaviour.
Dr Macdonald added: “AZRA turns a robot from being a device that I almost entirely choose to interact with into a device which can engage me in interaction itself. It feels more like me and another entity attempting to interact and communicate, rather than me make-believing almost all of that interaction myself.
“One of the main advantages of this system is that we don’t have a fixed ‘this is how this should work’ approach. What we have is a really great development test bed where we can try different ideas quickly and see what works. As AR glasses become more mainstream, this could become a way to breathe new life into existing robots without having to replace them entirely.”
Dr Salma ElSayed of Abertay University and Dr Mark McGill of the University of Glasgow are co-authors of the paper. The team’s paper, titled ‘AZRA: Extending the Affective Capabilities of Zoomorphic Robots using Augmented Reality’, will be presented at the IEEE RO-MAN 2025 conference at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands on Tuesday 26th August.
The children’s commissioner for England has urged the government to take action to prevent children from circumventing the Online Safety Act’s age checks by using a VPN.
VPN searches and downloads surged after age verification requirements came into effect under the Online Safety Act, require websites showing adult content to verify the age of users. VPNs allow internet users to shield their IP address and view a site as if they were in a different country and therefore, under different internet regulations.
In a new report, Dame Rachel de Souza has urged that ministers take action to prevent children from using VPNs to avoid the age checks, saying that VPN providers themselves should issue affective age assurance methods to prevent under-18s from accessing prohibited websites.
She warned that if the government does not take action in this key issue, the Online Safety Act’s age verification requirements would be “inadequate.”
The children’s commissioner’s survey of 16 to 21 year olds is a sober reality check for legislators trying to regulate the internet. More young people said they had seen pornography before they were 18 years old than in 2023, with more than one in four saying they had seen pornography before they were 11, and about seven in ten seeing porn prior to turning 18.
Since the UK age verification requirements came into effect, sites showing pornography have taken a hit, with Pornhub’s daily traffic falling 47% in around the first week of the new regime.
However, VPN use could be altering these view figures, giving adults and children an easily accessible loophole to the rules.
The Commissioner is therefore urging lawmakers to investigate technical options to make sure VPNs and other tools are not being used to circumvent the rules. She suggested this could mean that VPNs be required to put “highly effective age assurance” tools in place to screen for underage users and further prevent them from accessing these tools.
The UK is backing down from its demand for Apple to create a backdoor to its end-to-end encryption, according to the US director of National Intelligence.
Tulsi Gabbard in a post on X said that she had been working with the UK in discussions regarding data privacy and the “constitutional rights” of Americans.
Since the back door push from the UK was exposed, US officials have come out in hard opposition to the push on the American tech company.
Gabbard said that “the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’ that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens and encroached on our civil liberties.”
Over the past few months, I’ve been working closely with our partners in the UK, alongside @POTUS and @VP, to ensure Americans' private data remains private and our Constitutional rights and civil liberties are protected.
As a result, the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for…
Earlier this year, the Home Office allegedly issued an order to Apple to create a back door to its encrypted data, specifically to its Advanced Data Protection tool used on cloud data by Apple device users.
Apple has since refused to abide by the order, and instead has opted to remove the ADP tool from UK users rather than create a backdoor.
Apple has also taken legal action against the demands made by the Home Office, with backing from other tech giants and US government officials.
Since the social media post from Gabbard, a UK government spokesperson said: “We do not comment on operational matters, including confirming or denying the existence of such notices,” as reported by the BBC.
The demand from the UK government would have required Apple to break its own encryption methods, which prevents anyone other than the individual users from seeing encrypted data, even Apple itself. Breaking encryption would dismantle the point of the privacy-ensuring tool.
The order was issued under the Investigatory Powers Act, which affords the government a level of secrecy and restricts the publication of the order by targeted companies. Therefore, it is currently uncertain if other tech companies have received a similar order.
The NHS is trialling new AI tools that could help doctors, nurses, and administrators write documents faster to speed up hospital discharges, making the NHS more efficient.
The cutting-edge technology could help cut waiting lists, by giving frontline staff the precious gift of time and making care more efficient so that loved ones return to the comfort of their homes quickly.
Currently being developed at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust, it is one of many projects to receive backing from the Prime Minister as part of the AI Exemplars programme.
The AI-assisted tool could deliver the support that NHS staff have been crying out for – helping doctors to draft discharge documents faster by extracting key details from medical records, such as diagnoses and test results, using a large language model.
After a full review from a medical expert responsible for the patient, these documents are then used to discharge a patient from a ward and refer them to other care services that may be needed.
It would radically improve the outdated system that can leave patients on wards unnecessarily for hours, waiting for time-pressed doctors providing urgent care to sit down and fill in forms before they can go home.
In some cases, the current system for writing discharge summaries can also inaccurately record basic patient details – like what treatment they’ve had, or changed to medication – and put them in harms way.
At the same time, the UK government is launching the ‘Justice Transcribe’ project for Probation Officers, which will help transcribe and take notes in their meetings with offenders after they leave prison.
“This is exactly the kind of change we need: AI being used to give doctors, probation officers and other key workers more time to focus on delivering better outcomes and speeding up vital services,” technology secretary Peter Kyle said.
“This government inherited a public sector decimated by years of under-investment and is crying out for reform. These AI Exemplars show the best ways in which we’re using tech to build a smarter, more efficient state.
“When we get this right across government, we’re talking about unlocking £45 billion in productivity gains – delivering our Plan for Change and investing in growth not bureaucracy.”
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “This potentially transformational discharge tool is a prime example of how we’re shifting from analogue to digital as part of our 10 Year Health Plan.
“We’re using cutting-edge technology to build an NHS fit for the future and tackle the hospital backlogs that have left too many people waiting too long.
“Doctors will spend less time on paperwork and more time with patients, getting people home to their families faster and freeing up beds for those who need them most.”
Maven Capital Partners (“Maven”), one of the UK’s most active private equity firms, has invested £2.6 million in PowerPhotonic, a leading provider of precision optics for high-power laser systems.
The funding, which follows £2.7m investment by Archangels and Scottish Enterprise over the last 24 months, includes investment from the Maven Income and Growth VCTs and IFS Maven Equity Finance – part of the Investment Fund for Scotland managed by Maven and delivered by the British Business Bank – will enable PowerPhotonic to scale operations across its UK and US facilities.
Headquartered in Dalgety Bay, Scotland, with a high-volume manufacturing facility in Arizona, USA, PowerPhotonic is a global leader in precision micro-optics for laser applications.
The company designs and manufactures complex freeform optics that are essential to enhancing the performance and reliability of laser systems used in demanding sectors such as aerospace, defence, medical devices, and semiconductor manufacturing.
PowerPhotonic’s proprietary, IP-rich technology enables it to manufacture highly complex glass optics with exceptional precision.
Unlike traditional methods, its innovative process can deliver high efficiency, high performance freeform optics, resulting in more reliable, efficient components that enhance laser performance. This unique capability has positioned PowerPhotonic as a trusted partner to some of the world’s leading technology firms
The business is strategically positioned within high-growth sectors where lasers are being increasingly adopted to drive innovation and operational efficiency. Maven’s investment will support further revenue growth across the company’s UK and US operations, fund expansion in sales and marketing, and help target new high-growth verticals.
“PowerPhotonic’s commercially proven technology, strong IP portfolio and experienced team underpin a highly scalable business with significant global potential,” David Milroy, partner at Maven, said.
“The company operates in sectors where demand for precision optics is accelerating, and its ability to deliver complex, high-performance components sets it apart.
“We are excited to support PowerPhotonic’s next phase of growth and believe the business will significantly benefit from the value-add of a strategic investor with significant experience in growing businesses globally.”
Amanda Robertson, group CEO at PowerPhotonic said: “Joining PowerPhotonic at this exciting juncture is a real privilege.
“The momentum created by this investment opens the door to cutting-edge innovation and deeper collaboration. I’m looking forward to building on the company’s strong foundation and working with our exceptional team to shape the next chapter of our growth.”
A new, free investment programme designed for startups and founders seeking their first round of investment has now opened, with just ten spots available for interested firms.
The pre-seed startup programme is being delivered by Ecosystem Builders Network and Sun & Planet, with support from the RBS Accelerator and The Scottish Government Ecosystem Fund.
Round One will deliver its peer-led investment readiness programme to just ten selected startups, with applications open now to ambitious founders.
The eight-week programme will include three hour sessions each week which will explore a different topic like getting prepared, identifying investors, outreach, culminating in a demo day. Participating startups will also be given connections to pre-seed investors across the UK and Europe.
Round One of the new programme will be led by Bruce Walker, founder of Ecosystem Builders, and Alex Rowe, founder of Sun & Planet. Walker has spent over a decade supporting platforms supporting early-stage founders, and Rowe has worked with over 40 startups, bringing deep fundraising expertise.
In order to apply, startups must have raised less than £100,000 to date and be based in Scotland with a minimum viable product, at the post-concept stage, and be aiming to raise at least £250K in the next 12 to 18 months.
“Far too many talented founders in Scotland are missing out on the investment they need, not because their ideas aren’t strong, but because they haven’t had access to the right networks, knowledge and preparation,” said Bruce Walker, founder of Ecosystem Builders. “Round One is here to change that, levelling the playing field and helping founders raise with confidence.”
Alex Rowe, programme lead and founder of Sun & Planet, added: “Round One is built for founders, by founders.
“We’re taking the lived experiences of people who’ve successfully raised millions and putting them in the room with entrepreneurs who are just starting their funding journey.”
Ecosystem Builders says that their selection process will give priority to underrepresented founders, including women, minority ethnic, disabled, neurodiverse, and rural entrepreneurs.
Scottish charity TechFest, is launching its design competition ‘Innovation in Action’ for S4-S6 students across Scotland to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.
The project is open for school registration now and invites students to design a practical and sustainable product or app that improves life for visually impaired people.
Teams of 2 to 6 students will plan every detail, conduct market research, investigate materials and the costs of various production methods, before documenting their journey in a 10-page report and in a 3-minute video.
Pupils will be supported with both a guidebook and expert-led pre-recorded masterclasses on entrepreneurship, sustainable manufacturing, finance, visual impairment and market research. They will also be invited to attend live, online ‘Ask the Expert’ sessions where they can directly ask these experts questions.
The selected finalists will deliver a 10-minute online sales pitch to the judges in December 2025.
TechFest is a charity that inspires people of all ages to engage with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). Through interactive activities, they show how STEM builds transferable skills and opens doors to diverse careers, proving that STEM is exciting, relevant and essential to everyday life.
The Innovation in Action Competition, supported by the NCR Foundation, helps to develop skills in design, sustainable manufacturing, teamwork and communication; all tailored to meet the needs of diverse audiences, including people with visual impairments.
Wendy Findlay, national programme manager at TechFest, said: “Too many young people turn away from STEM because they can’t see themselves in it. They think it’s boring, too hard or doesn’t matter. We aim to change that.
“This project shows them that STEM is a way to be creative, to care and to change lives, including their own. It’s about turning ideas into reality and showing every student that their ideas can truly make a difference.”
Yvonne Whitaker, Director at NCR Foundation, said: “At NCR Foundation, we believe every pupil has the potential to use their STEM skills to build something great. Innovation in Action is designed to nurture that potential by giving every student the opportunity, support and tools to bring their ideas to life, so no child’s STEM talents go undiscovered.”
This CREST Award aligned programme will run online to ensure accessibility to schools across Scotland, including those in the most rural areas.
Candidates in the winning teams will each receive an Amazon voucher, and the 1st place winners will receive a trophy to keep at their school.
Schools that wish to take part must register via the TechFest website by the 27th of August.
The Council for Science and Technology has published a report recognising the critical role of semiconductors in achieving the UK’s economic and security goals and has set out the opportunity for the UK to build a globally competitive AI chip design industry.
The Council, which provides independent advice to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, highlights that the UK is uniquely positioned to build an AI chip design industry with the right investment and capabilities in place.
Recommendations in the report cover the skills and training required to build an AI chip workforce, finance and investment needs, and the infrastructure capabilities the UK requires to achieve this.
The Council has provided six recommendations for the UK to build its own sovereign chip design industry.
More Chip Designers
Firstly, it recommends the department of science, innovation and technology (DSIT) and the department for education (DfE) to increase the number of new chip designers in the UK workforce by 2030. This should be achieved through an increased number of bursaries and fellowships for students to pursue this careers path, as well as commissioning a nationally curated, high quality chip design course to be replicated across UK universities.
Optoelectronics
The Council also recommends that DSIT and DfE consider how to expand investment in training and skills for optoelectronics, in particular through the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC). The report says that it is widely predicted that AI chips will increasingly be interconnected using optical communications, which will drive the need for skills and training in this expanding industry.
MOD and DSIT Collaboration
The Council found that currently, the ministry of defence (MOD) and DSIT appear to work independent from each other in their analysis of the semiconductor industry, in what is a lost opportunity of coordination.
To combat this, the Council recommends that DSIT and MOD collaborate to set clear strategic objectives on semiconductors to send a strong signal to the UK semiconductor industry on where activity is most useful. Both departments should collaborate more closely to analyse the risks and opportunities in semiconductors and coordinate investment, with a view to creating early-stage, dual-use opportunities.
Innovation Pipeline
Next, the science Council is urging the government to go further in its support of the AI chip innovation pipeline in the UK by coordinating investment through the entire journey. While it has promising plans in its Spending Review to increase funding in UK tech companies, the Council thinks it should deliver a prioritised list of sectors for strategic investment. This may include deprioritising funding where there is less growth, the Council emphasised.
Current catapult platforms meant to support the semiconductor industry are not best serving SME chip companies and academics, the Council has found. The Council recommends that DSIT should ensure the UK’s semiconductor infrastructure provides SME chip companies and academics with affordable and timely access to facilities. This can be accomplished through the UK Semiconductor Centre, which can provide coordination and a clear, measurable metric for success.
Startup Support
UK startups entering the semiconductor industry will require access to leading-edge technologies such as masks and multi-project wafers (MPWs), and licenses for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools and Process Design Kit (PDKs).
The Council advises DSIT, MOD, and Department for Business and Trade (DBT) should explore UK access to the leading-edge technology required by UK startups.
Four in five (81%) UK CISOs believe DeepSeek — a China-based AI chatbot raising global security concerns due to its data handling practices and vulnerability to misuse — must be urgently regulated by the UK Government before it sparks a full-scale national cyber crisis, according to Absolute Security’s UK Resilience Risk Index Report.
In response to these growing risks, over a third (34 per cent) have implemented full bans on AI due to cyber security concerns, while 30 per cent of CISOs say they’ve already pulled the plug on AI tools within their organisation.
The findings come from a recent survey commissioned by Absolute Security, which polled 250 UK CISOs at enterprise organisations via independent research agency Censuswide, to assess how businesses are coping with accelerating cyber challenges in an increasingly AI-powered world.
DeepSeek, the rapidly rising new cutting-edge AI platform, has raised significant cybersecurity concerns due to its potential to expose sensitive data and be misused by cybercriminals. These issues have led organisations and governments to reconsider their cybersecurity strategies.
Businesses are already struggling to cope with the increasing complexity of cyber threats, as shown by the recent Harrods breach. As CISOs grapple with this evolving landscape, the added layer of AI-powered threats is prompting a re-evaluation of cyber defences.
Three out of five (60 per cent) UK CISOs now predict a rise in cyber-attacks as a direct result of DeepSeek, with another 60% saying this AI technology is already complicating privacy and governance frameworks, making their job more difficult.
These concerns reflect a clear shift in mindset, with 42% of CISOs now seeing AI as a bigger threat than a help to cybersecurity.
The readiness gap is just as concerning, with nearly half (46%) of security leaders admitting their teams are not prepared to handle AI-driven threats, such as those posed by tools like DeepSeek. The rapid development of DeepSeek is outpacing their defences, according to survey findings, creating a growing risk that many believe can only be managed through government regulation.
“Our research highlights the significant risks posed by emerging AI tools like DeepSeek, which are rapidly reshaping the cyber threat landscape,” Andy Ward, SVP International of Absolute Security commented.
“As concerns grow over their potential to accelerate attacks and compromise sensitive data, organisations must act now to strengthen their cyber resilience and adapt security frameworks to keep pace with these AI-driven threats. That’s why four in five UK CISOs are urgently calling for government regulation. They’ve witnessed how quickly this technology is advancing and how easily it can outpace existing cybersecurity defences.
“These are not hypothetical risks. The fact that organisations are already banning AI tools outright and rethinking their security strategies in response to the risks posed by LLMs like DeepSeek demonstrates the urgency of the situation.
“Without a national regulatory framework—one that sets clear guidelines for how these tools are deployed, governed, and monitored—we risk widespread disruption across every sector of the UK economy. The time for debate is over. We need immediate action, policy, and oversight to ensure AI remains a force for progress, not a catalyst for crisis.”
Despite the risks, investment in AI talent is accelerating. Eighty-four per cent of organisations are prioritising the hiring of AI specialists in 2025, and 80 per cent have committed to AI training at the C-suite level, hoping that upskilling AI talent can outweigh any increasing threats.
Most companies don’t intend to retreat from AI—they want to face it head-on. To use AI safely, CISOs say they need clear rules, stronger government oversight, a skilled AI workforce, and a national plan to deal with the specific risks of DeepSeek and similar tools.
Artificial intelligence experts will discuss the impact of the rapidly advancing technology on learning, teaching and research at an event at the University of Glasgow this autumn.
The University will host the second Lovelace-Hodgkin Symposium on Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd October, showcasing speakers from industry, academia and government.
The event builds on the success of last year’s inaugural symposium, which focused on building an ethical framework for inclusive AI.
This year’s two-day event at the Advanced Research Centre (ARC), which is free to attend, will explore what trustworthy AI really means, and how AI can be developed and used responsibly in early education, universities and lifelong learning.
The event will include three keynote addresses from representatives of the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the Research-on-Research Institute’s (RoRI) GRAIL Project.
Global AI equity thought-leader, Aanya Niaz, will discuss what equitable and responsible AI in education looks like from both global and institutional perspectives, covering pre-university, university and post-university education contexts.
Professor Maggi Savin-Baden of the University of Oxford’s keynote will examine questions of truth and institutional responsibility in the age of AI, including how academic institutions define truth in an AI-driven world.
Dr Denis Newman-Griffis, University of Sheffield & RoRI GRAIL Project Lead, will explore responsible use of AI in research funding and evaluation.
Professor Ana Basiri, the director of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Data Science & AI, will deliver the symposium’s opening and closing remarks.
“We were delighted by the positive response to last year’s symposium and we’ve taken the lessons learned from that experience to deliver an even more impactful lineup of speakers for this year,” she said.
“We’re looking forward to welcoming attendees from across the UK to our campus for engaging sessions exploring the impact of artificial intelligence on how we will learn, teach, and conduct research in the years ahead.
Dr Jake Lever from the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science will present a talk called ‘Can ChatGPT do my degree for me?’, confronting the challenges that large language models can pose for educators.
Dr Chris Burr from the Alan Turing Institute will examine what it means to build ethical, trustworthy AI from a technical perspective, while his colleague Dr Mhairi Aitken will present on children-centred AI and the importance of centring their feedback and experiences in the future of education.
Professor Martin Hendry, Vice-Principal Academic Practice at the University of Glasgow and chair of the university’s AI working group, will draw on his work with the Royal Society of Edinburgh on ethical and digital literacies for children to examine how students navigate AI ethics across Scotland’s education system from primary school through university.
Author and podcaster Dr Andy McMahon, who is principal engineer at Barclays, will help attendees understand the skills that are important in the age of AI and what employers really value in human workers.
Dr Dan Burkwood, Director of Research Operations & Communications at Cancer Research UK, will discuss CRUK’s development of responsible AI policies and funding guidelines, and the ongoing development of research funding bodies’ approach to the use of AI.
Clare Adamson MSP, Chair of the Scottish Parliament’s Cross-Party STEM Committee, will deliver the closing remarks on the final day of the symposium.
A workshop and Panel Discussion on the second day of the symposium, led by senior figures at the University of Glasgow, will explore how the themes of the symposium could help inform future institutional policy developments. Dr Dan Burkwood, Director of Research Operations & Communications at Cancer Research UK will join University of Glasgow Vice-Principals during the panel session.
The symposium will also feature presentations from University of Glasgow students who co-created an online FutureLearn course titled ‘AI, Ethics, Inclusion and Society’ based on some of the discussions at last year’s symposium. The course, which launched in May, has already attracted nearly 600 participants from around the world.
Student presenters will share research on biodiversity and environmental impacts of AI, as well as findings from surveys examining student concerns about AI and education ethics.
Dr Ciorsdaidh Watts, of the University’s School of Chemistry, and Dr Lydia Bach, of the University’s People & Organisational Development team, led the development of the symposium’s programme.
Dr Watts said: “The field of AI is expanding and evolving so rapidly that it’s crucial we maintain focus on how it can be developed and implemented responsibly. This symposium provides a vital platform for examining the many ways that AI impacts education from childhood through to lifelong learning and employment, both today and in the years to come.”
The event is named in honour of Ada Lovelace, the pioneering 19th-century mathematician who recognised the early potential of computing, and Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who made key contributions to the development of X-ray crystallography and who advocated for social justice throughout her life.
Investigations from techUK has revealed that most of the UK’s data centres use minimal water, despite recent studies pointing to the high energy and water use of data centres supporting AI technology.
techUK embarked on the research amid the growing public and political interest in the water usage of data centres, based on a survey run in collaborate with the Environment Agency.
The survey was anonymous, voluntary, and self-reported, and included 73 co-locational data centre facilities in the UK. No on-premise of enterprise data centres were included in the study. Further, while techUK reviewed the survey responses, no independent review was conducted to evaluate the self-assessments.
The results reveal that most surveyed data centres are currently low water users, with 51% of surveyed data centres using waterless cooling systems.
The research found that 64% of the 73 data centres use less than 10,000 cubic metres of water per year, which is less than the typical leisure centre and on par with a Premier League Football Club.
The vast majority of surveyed data centres (89%) either measure water use or do not need to thanks to a closed-loop water cooling system.
Only 4% of data centres reported using over 100,000m³ per year, which is in line with industrial manufacturing requirements.
With the UK government aiming to expand sovereign compute capacity 20-fold by 2030, these findings suggest that commercial data centres are, in many cases, actively minimising water use through smart design and cooling choices to minimise their environmental impact, particularly in areas with water stress or power constraints.
The report highlights major data and planning gaps in the industry, calling for urgent collaboration between governments, regulators, and the data centre industry to ensure sustainable digital infrastructure growth.
Further, the UK is actually facing a water crisis at the moment – five regions in England are currently in drought status, with the local and wider authorities urging people to cut back on their water usage.
“Data centres are the backbone of the UK’s digital economy and will be central to delivering our AI and innovation ambitions,” Matthew Evans, director of markets and COO of techUK said.
“This report shows that, contrary to some public perceptions, most commercial data centres are actively innovating to use minimal water.
“But as demand for compute grows, we must plan ahead. We need smart policies, resilient infrastructure, and stronger data to ensure digital and environmental resilience go hand in hand.”
Richard Thompson, the Environment Agency’s deputy director for Water Resources, said: “I am encouraged by the work techUK have undertaken to better understand water usage – the findings suggest UK data centres are utilising a range of cooling technologies and becoming more water conscious.
“Advancements in technology must go hand-in-hand with protecting public water supplies, food security and the environment. It is vital the sector puts sustainability at its heart, and minimises water use in line with evolving standards.
“We are working with industry and other regulators to raise these to secure the best outcomes for our environment and our water supply for future generations.”
techUK has made several recommendations to ensure data centre growth is aligned with long-term water sustainability, with specific advice for government and industry.
The government is advised to invest in more water infrastructure, create a digital-first water strategy, and develop a UK-wide water exploitation index for each major river basin.
Industry should measure and report their water usage, adopt advanced cooling technologies, and commit to water efficiency targets by joining the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact.
techUK recommends the government and industry collaborate to develop standardised AI cooling requirements to reduce energy and water demands, establish a public-private partnership to coordinate infrastructure, and ensure early coordination between infrastructure partners.
While techUK is clear that the report is not a definitive snapshot of the UK’s data centre ecosystem due to several caveats, it does provide an important starting point for dialogue, regulation, and strategic investment.
More than nine in ten (94%) private business owners in Scotland are confident in delivering growth in 2025, with technology dominating as a top investment priority.
This is according to KPMG‘s mid-year Private Enterprise Barometer, which was launched earlier this year as an annual survey capturing the perspectives of 1,500 privately owned businesses, including 128 in Scotland, from across various industries.
Following a challenging six months of economic headwinds, KPMG has revisited businesses to understand how developments in the first half of 2025 may have influenced their outlook.
Earlier this year, nine in 10 (90%) private businesses in Scotland expressed confidence in their growth prospects for 2025. By the mid-year mark, this sentiment has grown, with confidence levels rising to 94%, reflecting an enhanced outlook regarding their growth ambitions.
Technology continued to dominate as a leading investment priority for Scottish businesses, with almost two-thirds (64%) identifying areas such as AI, cybersecurity, and broader digital transformation as key focuses.
This significantly outpaces other priorities, such as workforce and skills development (38%), and innovation (35%).
Diversification is also high on the agenda for private businesses across Scotland. A growing number of firms (71%) are looking to enter new markets, meanwhile seven in 10 (70%) want to introduce new service lines and expand their client offering. Both of these figures show an increase (from 70% and 66%, respectively), compared to the start of 2025.
When it comes to external challenges, inflation remains the most pressing concern, cited by almost half (45%) of respondents. This is followed by potential tax rises in the Autumn Budget, which a third (34%) of business leaders flagged as a key risk.
The appetite for alternative funding options is also gaining momentum, with almost half (47%) of the nation’s businesses now open to private equity investment. This growing interest reflects a broader willingness among firms to explore new sources of capital in support of innovation, growth and long-term resilience.
“These latest findings reflect the growing optimism across Scotland’s private business community, even amid a complex economic backdrop,” Vishal Chopra, Scotland Office senior partner at KPMG UK, said.
“The uplift in growth confidence, now at 94%, speaks volumes about the determination and adaptability of these firms.
“What stands out is the continued prioritisation of technology and diversification, with businesses clearly focused on long-term transformation, market expansion and resilience. It’s a signal that Scotland’s business leaders aren’t just navigating change, they’re actively embracing it.”
Nationally, the mid-year check-in saw a rise in confidence, with 93% of respondents confident in their growth prospects for the months ahead. Earlier this year, 92% were confident of their firm’s growth prospects in the next 12 months.
Business priorities remained the same, with tech, skills and innovation still dominant. However, there was a slight dip in interest when it came to the areas of ESG and sustainability.
Looking ahead, private businesses highlighted a range of areas they see as key to helping build this planned growth in the upcoming Autumn Budget.
These included the faster adoption of new technology and subsequent investment in research and development, fresh measures to help with business profitability, support to help nurture skills and talent, and the continued focus on a renewed industrial strategy.
“2025 has been filled with many challenges at home and abroad for firms of all shapes and sizes,” said Euan West, Head of KPMG Private Enterprise in the UK and EMA.
“Private businesses have continued to show resilience and adaptability in the face of these challenges, which is reflected in their steady levels of confidence about the future.
“The results of this survey show that the UK is seen as a stable environment for business, providing a strong launch pad for future growth, but there are still challenges, particularly when it comes to ongoing inflation conditions.
The UK government is partnering with TikTok in a new initiative to provide more reliable and accurate information to those using social media to plan cosmetic procedures.
More people are using social media apps like TikTok to research potentially risky cosmetic surgeries, such as hair transplants and dental work, abroad as they are often cheaper or more readily available than in the UK. This surgeries, however, are also often presented with slick marketing campaigns that may not highlight the potential risk inherent in these surgeries and procedures.
In an effort to keep patients better informed, TikTok and the government have partnered with medical influences, like Midwife Marley and Doc Tally to create content to show the risks, help carry out thorough research and provide advice on how to make trips as safe as possible.
The Foreign Office will also provide more detailed travel advice for those seeking to travel abroad for what they call ‘tweakments.’
“Too many people are being left with life-altering injuries after going abroad for medical procedures, without access to proper advice or safeguards,” health minister Karin Smyth said.
“Often drawn in by deals too good to be true and promoted by influencers – some of whom have never been to the practice in question.
“By partnering with TikTok, we’re helping people make safer, more informed choices before they go under the knife – wherever that may be.”
The campaign warns that when it comes to cosmetic surgery abroad, the lowest price can come at the highest cost.
It urges people to think beyond the slick brochures and marketing, and to consider clinical standards, complication risks, and language barriers.
It will urge potential patients to speak to a UK doctor, take out travel insurance, and steer clear of package holidays that bundle in procedures.
The medics will provide a check list to go through before considering booking a procedure abroad: research thoroughly, check the clinic’s regulation and the surgeon’s credentials, know the full cost, understand the aftercare, and ask the vital question – if it goes wrong, who will fix it?
The online campaign is part of wider government efforts to curb medical tourism. Work is underway to stop events in the UK that promote procedures abroad and the government is working with other countries to improve patient care from initial consultations to post-surgery recovery.
The government is looking at additional ways of protecting patients who go abroad for these types of procedures, while ensuring the NHS is not left to pick up the tab of botched or harmful work.
Challenger banks continue to lead the way in the latest set of banking satisfaction results published by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The league table is the 14th of its kind and sees Monzo ranked as number one for consumers in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while traditional banks generally scored lower than their digital rivals.
The banking satisfaction survey is an annual review conducted by independent research companies Ipsos and BVA-BDRC as part of the CMA’s Retail Banking Order.
Th large-scale survey ranks the service quality of personal and business current account providers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
It is designed to highlight how banks are serving their customers and scores them on a range of banking services – such as online and mobile banking, overdrafts, and in-store experience. For small business customers, it also considers the role and service provided by their account manager.
There is one new entrant in this year’s survey, Mettle, a new online business current account provider from NatWest for sole traders and companies of up to two owners.
For personal and business current accounts in Great Britain, Monzo came out on top in both categories.
Chase and Starling Bank came in joint second when it comes to personal current accounts, while Mettle and Starling Bank came in second and third in business current accounts.
The Royal Bank of Scotland came last out of the 17 banks rated for personal accounts in Great Britain with Virgin Money (16th) and The Co-operative Bank (15th) rounding out the bottom ranks.
For Business current accounts, Barclays, HSBC UK and the Bank of Scotland (tied for 14th) as well as The Co-operative Bank (17th) were rated last.
“This data puts power into customers’ hands,” Daniel Turnbull, senior directors of markets at the CMA, said.
“Whether it’s for a personal or business account, people can see how their bank fares against others – and stay or switch, according to their needs.
“It also puts pressure on banks to listen to feedback and think about whether the services they provide are really working for customers.”
Women’s Enterprise Scotland (WES) is calling for urgent action to tackle the high levels of women-led businesses failing to progress beyond the startup phase, with the need for a strategic, long-term solutions to boost women-centric business support.
The authors of the survey highlight that whilst more women are starting up in business than men, proportionately few women-led businesses are making it through the post-startup phase to establish and grow.
While women-led business startups have increased to 54% of all startups in Scotland (2025), the post-startup pipeline has a high attrition rate of 61% (2023-24), and women-led employer businesses have dropped to just 20% of all employer businesses.
This declining trend in Scotland is at odds with the global increase in established women-led businesses and exposes a key disconnect between Scotland’s thriving startup culture and the failure of many of these businesses to move through to the established and growing phase.
“A perfect storm of economic conditions and structural inequalities is halting the progress of women-led businesses, despite their startup successes,” Carolyn Currie, CEO of Women’s Enterprise Scotland, said.
“What we are seeing is an alarming number of new women-led businesses failing to thrive.
“They are simply falling into an abyss, leaving their economic potential and the ambitions of their founders unfulfilled. The WES survey reveals a clear demand for needs-based business support, with the majority of respondents advocating for a Women’s Business Centre model.
“Many of the issues – and suggested actions that need to be taken – have been highlighted in research numerous times over the past 30 years.
“We can continue to watch talented women entrepreneurs leave the market, taking billions in economic potential with them, or we can implement the evidence-based solutions this study provides.
“The choice is clear – the community has spoken, and we need to listen. The time for action is now.”
Tackling this declining trend and improving current outcomes for women-led startup businesses has the potential to unlock an estimated £17bn reward for the Scottish economy every year.
This would eliminate almost two-thirds of the current public sector spending deficit, which now stands at £26.2billion, according to the latest Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) report. Achieving parity would eliminate over 80% of the deficit.
Successive governments in Scotland have committed to inclusive growth and women’s entrepreneurship, most recently in response to the Pathways Report, with up to £2.6m released for support in 2024 to 2025 and at least £4m pledged for support in 2025 to 2026.
However, women’s entrepreneurship has not benefitted from long-term investment in support provision anywhere near the levels seen in other areas of business, despite the economic opportunity represented by women as 51% of the population.
The WES survey found that economic conditions are threatening business sustainability and reveals a devastating cost for women-led businesses; 78% cannot recover all their increased costs, 41% cannot recover any cost increases, 55% are using personal savings to capitalise their businesses and 52% are making no pension provision, threatening retirement security.
The study also highlighted inequities in COVID-19 business relief distribution, with women-led businesses receiving only 10.6% of grant funds, despite comprising 15.4% of all businesses – an inequality that remains unaddressed three years later.
Experiences of discrimination have doubled since 2016, with 68% of survey respondents reporting that they had experienced discrimination as a woman business owner.
Key structural challenges identified include funding inequalities, with women-led businesses receiving just 2.8% of equity investment; caring commitments, with 29% starting up to work around care responsibilities; support mis-match, with 58% saying mainstream support does not meet their needs, and a digital divide with just 15% being able to access relevant funding, despite 78% wanting digital investment.
Despite these conditions, aspirations for growth are evident, with 62% of respondents anticipating a degree of growth in turnover over the next 12 months, underlining the potential to boost the potential economic contribution presented by women-led businesses if they were able to access strategic, tailored business support.
“In the eleven years since launching Beauty Kitchen, I’ve seen how women-led businesses can transform our economy when the right support is in place,” Jo Chidley, founder of Beauty Kitchen and WES Ambassador, commented.
“The latest WES Survey makes it clear that we’re still falling short, relying on short bursts of activity and disconnected programmes when we could be building something far greater.
“There is a clear appetite from women entrepreneurs for a strategic, long-term model of support, with gender focus embedded at every level.
“If we settle for mediocrity, we accept wasted potential and lost opportunity. Together, we can build an enterprise ecosystem that nurtures ambition, unlocks talent, and ensures women-led businesses thrive for the long term.”
The WES Survey of Women in Enterprise 2025 was funded by the Scottish Government. It provides a practical resource for policymakers and the wider business support landscape to close the ongoing gender gap in enterprise participation. It considers the social, economic, business and policy conditions in Scotland and reviews international comparators.
The report makes a range of vital policy recommendations. These include nationwide coverage of expert, women-centric business support through digital and hybrid models, structured mentorship and role model programmes, strengthened financial support and investment access, as well as mandated gender-disaggregated data collection for 100% of publicly funded business grants and investment.
A Scottish schoolgirl named one of the first ever Time magazine Girls of the Year after designing a solar-powered blanket for unhoused people says the award proves that young people can make a difference despite their age.
Rebecca Young, now 13 and a pupil at Kelvinside Academy in Glasgow, has been included in the inaugural list honouring 10 young people from across the globe for extraordinary achievements.
Rebecca rose to global attention aged just 11, when she beat more than 70,000 UK entrants in the UK Primary Engineer competition for her invention – a heated blanket built into a backpack and powered by solar panels.
Her idea was made into a prototype, before winning silver at the prestigious MacRobert awards a year later. She also won the commendation award which was chosen by a public vote. The design was later turned into a working model by engineering firm Thales and is now being trialled by a Scottish charity supporting people experiencing homelessness in Glasgow.
“I was stunned when I found out,” she said. “I can’t believe I am one of the first Time Girls of the Year. It’s simply incredible. To be named alongside nine other girls who have achieved so much is one of the most special experiences of my life.
“In my wildest dreams I’d never imagined being in this position when I came up with the design. I’m most proud of how the idea is now helping homeless people in real life – which was my inspiration all along – and I hope this can help shine a brighter light on an issue we should all care deeply about.”
As part of the Time recognition, a Lego figure has been created in Rebecca’s image – which formed part of a special edition front page for the iconic magazine. Rebecca’s model doesn’t just depict an engineer, however – because her career ambitions lie elsewhere.
She continued: “I am so proud of my achievement, but engineering is just one of the things I’m interested in, and my real passion is music and the creative arts. It’s obviously really early to be looking at my future, but my dream is to be a drummer, and that’s what I’m most focused on at the moment.
“I think there’s a really important message for any young person to look at what you’re interested in and follow your dreams. If you see a problem you think you can fix or contribute to, you can do something about it. And whatever you do, you should always follow your own path to what you want to achieve.”
Rebecca’s mum Louise, 49, who runs an MOT centre in Hillington, Glasgow, with her husband James, said the whole family was ‘over the moon’ with her daughter’s achievement – and equally proud of her determination to choose her own path.
She said: “The attention Rebecca has received since she won the Primary Engineer prize is unbelievable, and we’re all so proud of her. She was just 11 when she designed the blanket, and already she’s decided she wants to follow a different path – and we couldn’t be more supportive.
“Even at just 13, she’s already made such an impact, and we know she can do the same in whatever she goes on to achieve. The most important thing is she’s happy – and following her passions is how she’ll achieve that. ”
Rebecca’s invention was inspired by seeing people sleeping rough on the streets of Glasgow. As part of her school project, she was tasked with designing something to address a social issue, and she chose homelessness as a pressing problem she could help to tackle.
She researched existing products such as sleeping bags and backpacks before coming up with her final design – a heated blanket integrated into a portable backpack, using copper wiring for warmth, flexible frames for portability, and solar panels for power.
Rebecca’s design, which Thales engineers, who support the initiative, selected to be developed into a working prototype, was first unveiled at Kelvinside Academy’s Innovation School earlier this year, giving Rebecca the chance to see and hold her idea brought to life.
Professional services firms are grappling with significant new networking and security challenges as they transition towards digital-first operations.
This is according to a report from Aryaka which surveyed senior IT and infrastructure leaders working in the industry.
The business services sector is evolving to accommodate modern business needs. Legal, consulting, HR, property management and other services companies are delivering solutions through the cloud and ramping us SaaS adoption to support remote and hybrid work. These decentralised, complex, cloud-based environments are harder to secure than traditional environments, introducing a range of new attack surfaces.
Resource-constrained IT teams are struggling to protect apps and infrastructure in these settings, which can grow quickly in scale.
Services organisations are looking to modernise their networks to support remote and hybrid work while ensuring consistent service quality across cloud-native applications and client-facing platforms.
Survey respondents said their top strategic networking and security priority was improving application and SaaS performance (72%), followed by gaining network and security observability (68%), and simplifying operations and reducing IT burden (48%). These priorities underscore that the sector is optimising for user experience and operational agility.
But day-to-day networking and security hurdles are making it difficult to accomplish these strategic goals. Overall, complexity and staffing gaps have created blind spots for services firms that affect both performance and protection.
When asked about top networking and security challenges, respondents identified securing SaaS and public cloud apps (66%) as their top struggle, followed by managing remote user access (58%), and operating with limited IT staff (54%).
Survey respondents also noted managing too many vendor/support contracts (46%) and gas in performance and threat visibility (43%).
Organisations are also concerningly failing to prioritise edge security, the survey found. Despite the rise of SaaS and remote work, only 38% of business services leaders view edge security as ‘mission-critical.’ While cloud maturity is rising, edge-layer protections – like ZeroTrust, secure web gateways, and firewall technologies – are often fragmented or under-deployed.
Services organisations are moving to solve these network performance and security issues by deploying Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions, with 44% of respondents planning to adopt SASE in the next 12 months.
These companies hope to unify security and network policy enforcement, improve user experience across SaaS and cloud, and reduce burden on internal IT teams.
“Professional services firms are under immense pressure to deliver seamless digital experiences while protecting an extremely sophisticated and decentralised environment. This survey confirms what we’re hearing from the market every day: IT teams are overwhelmed by SaaS technology sprawl, latency issues, and managing disparate security solutions,” said Ken Rutsky, CMO, Aryaka.
While AI code becomes increasingly mainstream, governance, lags, with rising security threats from shadow APIs, code sharing, and the unregulated use of AI assistants.
This is according to Checkmarx, an agentic AI-powered security firm, which surveyed more than 1,500 CISOs, AppSec managers and developers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific to understand how organisations are adapting to a world where software is increasingly written by machines.
The findings paint a stark picture, with half of respondents already using AI security code assistance and 34% admitting that more than 60% of their code is AI-generated.
Yet, only 18% have policies governing this use, with the growing adoption of AI coding assistants is eroding developer ownership and expanding the attack surface.
The research also shows that business pressure is normalising risky practices. Eighty-one per cent of organisations knowingly ship vulnerable code, and 98% experienced a breach stemming from vulnerable code in the past year – a rise from 91% in 2024.
Within the next 12 to 18 months, nearly a third (32%) of respondents expect API breaches via shadow APIs or business logic attacks.
Despite these realities, fewer than half of the respondents report deploying foundational security tools, such as using mature application security tools such as dynamic application security testing (DAST) or infrastructure‑as‑code scanning.
While DevSecOps is widely discussed industry-wide, only half of organisations surveyed actively use core tools and just 51% of North American organizations report adopting DevSecOps.
“The velocity of AI‑assisted development means security can no longer be a bolt‑on practice. It has to be embedded from code to cloud,” said Eran Kinsbruner, vice president of portfolio marketing.
“Our research shows that developers are already letting AI write much of their code, yet most organisations lack governance around these tools. Combine that with the fact that 81% knowingly ship vulnerable code and you have a perfect storm. It’s only a matter of time before a crisis is at hand.”
The report outlines six strategic imperatives for closing the application security readiness gap: move from awareness to action, embed “code‑to‑cloud” security, govern AI use in development, operationalise security tools, prepare for agentic AI in AppSec, and cultivate a culture of developer empowerment.
Kinsbruner added, “To stay ahead, organisations must operationalise security tooling that is focused on prevention. They need to establish policies for AI usage and invest in agentic AI that can automatically analyse and fix issues real-time. AI generated code will continue to proliferate; secure software will be the competitive differentiator in the coming years.”
Chris Ledingham, Director Northern Europe, comments: “Our research found that nearly one third, 32%, of European respondents say their organisation often deploys code with known vulnerabilities, compared with 24% of those in North America. This suggests the need for a stronger focus across our region on embedding security into development.
With AI now writing much of the code base, security leaders face heightened accountability. Boards and regulators will rightly expect CISOs to implement robust governance for AI generated code and to ensure vulnerable software isn’t being pushed to production.”
Virgin Media O2 has created a new £1 million talent fund to help charities, local authorities, small businesses and social enterprises train apprentices.
The fund aims to remove financial and structural barriers that have long held smaller organisations back from investing in early careers talent.
Organisations will be able to access Virgin Media O2’s apprenticeship levy fund, using this to cover the full cost of apprenticeship training for eligible roles. The programme is specifically designed to support women and people from global majority backgrounds looking to progress in STEM-based roles and will help build a diverse talent pipeline for leaders of the future.
The fund, which will provide the full cost of training for eligible apprenticeships, has been developed in response to significant barriers identified in recent research.
More than three million SMEs say hiring apprentices is simply not financially viable right now, according to Government figures, with 35% citing cost pressures, 30% complexity of training programmes and over 800,000 (15%) saying insufficient levy funds are their key challenges.
With nearly four in five employers (79%) saying they would be more likely to hire apprentices if additional financial support was available, the scheme could unlock hundreds of retraining opportunities for young people and career-changers.
Apprenticeship levy rules allow large employers to share up to 50% of their levy funds with other organisations.
“We’re committed to backing the next generation of talent and creating opportunities for people to access the value of apprenticeships,” Philipp Wohland, chief people officer, Virgin Media O2 said.
“By creating a £1 million fund to turbocharge these schemes, we’re investing in people as they build their skills and helping create a more inclusive, skilled workforce. We know apprenticeships change lives, and we’re proud to be opening doors and backing the next generation to create meaningful, long-term opportunities in the communities we serve.”
Organisations are now able to apply to draw down funding from the levy pot to fully cover the cost of apprenticeship training, with opportunities available in areas such as digital, engineering and data analysis.
CreateFuture has secured a technology partnership with Skyscanner which will see the digital consultancy work closely with the global travel marketplace’s tech teams across its Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, and Barcelona officers in areas including audience experience, data, and AI tooling and app experience.
CreateFuture was appointed after a multi-stage process from a national and international pool of consultancies and was recognised for its engineering expertise, cultural alignments, and track record around delivery.
“Skyscanner began life here in Scotland, and is now the leading global travel app that scans over 80 billion prices daily. We are excited to be working with their world-class engineering team to accelerate, grow, and contribute to their future success,” Euan Andrews, CEO and founder of CreateFuture, said.
Andrew Phillips, chief technology officer at Skyscanner, said: “CreateFuture’s proven capabilities, culture match, and overall collaborative approach made them the ideal choice for us, and we fully expect their team to be instrumental in helping us to achieve our engineering goals.”
Skyscanner joins CreateFuture’s client list which includes PayPal, adidas, NatWest, Baillie Gifford, MoneySavingExpert, Penguin Random House, Simple Online Healthcare, Multiverse, and FanDuel.
“As a Scotland-headquartered company, we think it’s notable that we’re now working with the country’s two tech unicorns – Skyscanner and FanDuel – and that this says something about the continuing evolution of the Scottish technology ecosystem as a whole,” Andrews added.
“And for our business, it not only strengthens our position at the forefront of digital transformation in Scotland, but helps to lay the ground for further expansion across the UK and internationally.”
Founded in 2010 by CEO Euan Andrews, CreateFuture now has around 500 people working across 3 UK offices plus a European base. The company rebranded from xDesign following the acquisition of CreateFuture in 2023, and is backed by investment firm Soho Square Capital.
UK porn site traffic has plummeted as the Online Safety Act’s age verification requirements come into full swing.
While first days of the act saw a surge in searches for VPNs, the world’s most popular porn sites are taking a major hit in UK viewership as Brits are reluctant to share their identity or credit card information to verify their age with the platforms under the new regime.
The Online Safety Act requires a number of sites that show content deemed harmful for children to verify user age. Porn sites will now have to ensure any user traffic coming from the UK is from users 18 and up.
Platforms can decide their own method of age verification, whether it be through credit cards, ID verification, or facial scanning. Still, many Brits are on the fence about sharing personal data with the sites.
Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn website, and other adult websites have seen their traffic decrease dramatically in the first week of August compared to the July average, data traffic experts Similarweb found.
Pornhub saw a 47% decrease in traffic between 24 July, a day before the new rules came into effect, and the 8th of August. XVideos, another porn site, was also down by 47%, and OnlyFans saw their traffic decrease by over 10%.
The data does show, however, that viewership of other smaller sites offering adult content, that are often less regulated, has increased.
Further, many social media sites, including X and Reddit, have also introduced age checks under the new rules, and did not see the same slump in traffic.
A Pornhub spokesperson said: “As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.”
While many children’s advocacy groups are supportive of the law, it does leave many loopholes. Many are concerned that the law will encourage more people to use smaller, unregulated and underground sites to avoid age verification, either because they are underage or have privacy concerns. Others are concerned that the use of personal data for age verification is a serious security risk.
The rise of VPN downloads sparks fears that the legislation may be ineffective, or at least easily-evaded
Global spend on AI every minute skyrocketed by over 300% last year, new research on AI growth from Domo found.
The firm’s Data Never Sleeps: AI Edition report provides a deep dive into the immense amount of AI data generated on the internet every minute, as well as its impact on our everyday lives.
“Over the past year, we’ve witnessed AI move from the periphery to the centre of how we create, work, and solve problems,” said Ben Schein, SVP of product at Domo.
“What’s fascinating isn’t just the technology itself, but how quickly people have woven AI into the fabric of their daily lives. This report showcases that transformation in real-time, showing us the human behaviours behind the AI revolution.”
Global spend on AI every minute grew from $293k last year to over $1.21M, an increase of 312%. Additionally, AI startups raised $184,046 in VC funding, and 1.9M computer chips are sold every sixty seconds.
The last year also saw some major AI breakthroughs. From the rise of LLM DeepSeek, which now processes over 347k queries every minute and uses a fraction of the compute power used by its competitors, to Agentic AI, with nearly agents created as Customer GPTs every 60 seconds.
However, there is a double-edged sword to advancing AI. For every productivity increase, organisations and individuals can use AI for irritating or illegal means. For instance, American received 109,444 robocalls each minute.
As AI grows more common in the workplace, every minute employees save 1.23 million hours, adding up to over 140 years of productivity gained. And, as the workforce continues to desire AI skills more, six people enroll in GenAI courses every sixty seconds.
“The data highlights the hunger people have for tools that amplify their capabilities,” Schein said. “Whether it’s a student getting help with homework or an employee using AI agents to streamline their workflow, people are embracing AI not as a replacement for human intelligence, but as a partner in getting things done.”
The Academy Software Foundation has released an updated inclusive language guide which takes aim at some ‘problematic’ but common coding terms.
The guide aims to replace exclusionary or offensive language in coding and documentation, but also general language often used in corporate or business settings.
In conjunction with the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), the guide attempts to increase awareness and provide a base for teams to start integrating more inclusive language in their practices and documentation.
The guide relies first on old, more obvious examples of terms to avoid, referencing master, slave, as major no-nos. Further, it says that black and white should not be used to denote negative or positive characteristics, but rather just reflect physical colours.
Coders should also stay away from using ‘native’ or ‘powow’, and are urged to replace ‘culture fit’ with ‘values fit’. ‘Housekeeping’ was also deemed as inappropriate.
The guide also references gendered language, such as ‘man hours’, ‘manpower’, and ‘middleman’. It also references gendered group terms to avoid, such as referring to a group of people as ‘guys’, referring to women as ‘girls’, or using gendered pronouns when gender neutral pronouns would suffice.
It also referenced ablest language, such as ‘abnormal’, ‘sanity check’, and ‘dummy’, as well as ageist language, such as ‘grandfathering’ and ‘legacy’, to avoid.
Interestingly, the guide is coming after some commonly used terms and phrases, labelling them as violent. While ‘crushing it’ and ‘killing it’, as well as ‘hung’ do reference violent acts, they are generally not thought of as violent in common conversation.
Among these specific call outs, the updated reference also provides some general guidance to teams. They include avoiding terms that have a social history that may be sensitive to certain ethnicities or nationalities, and avoiding idioms or jargons that may exclude some people with different backgrounds.
Providing inclusive examples, with varied names, genders, and a lack of cultural-specifications is also recommended to keep things more inclusive.
UK visa sponsor licence holders are being targeted in a new phishing campaign which uses Home Office branding.
Specifically, organisations that hold a UK visa sponsor licence and partake in the government’s Sponsorship Management System (SMS), which is used by sponsors of worker, temporary worker, student, and child visas to manage sponsorship certificates and report any changes to sponsored people.
The phishing campaign was uncovered by the threat research team at Mimecast, which identified fraudulent emails that used Home Office logos and closely mimic official Home Office emails. The messages appear to be urgent, directing victims to a fake login page to steal their credentials.
Mimecast found that these URLs are captcha-gated, which then direct users to the phishing pages that appear to be direct copies of genuine UK Home Office pages, with exact copying of the HTML.
Once the SMS credentials are stolen, threat actors were found to take a number of methods to monetise the theft. This ranges from selling compromised accounts on the dark web, facilitating fraudulent issues of sponsorship certificates, or extortion schemes on targeted organisations.
Mimecast found that the most lucrative scheme was the creation of fake job offers and visa sponsorship schemes. Threat actors charged victims between £15,000 to £20,000 for fake job opportunities by leveraging compromised sponsor accounts to create fake visa documents to support immigration scheme scams.
“We are aware of sponsors who have been targeted by these phishing scams and an unfortunate few who have had their systems breached,” Natasha Chell, partner and head of risk and compliance at Laura Devine Immigration said.
“As gatekeepers of the sponsorship system, sponsors need to protect their Home Office online accounts by having robust IT practices, regular training for Key Personnel who have access to the accounts and they should always contact the official Home Office channels to verify any suspicious requests.”
Mimecast researchers have said that this campaign is active, and has released a number of indicators of compromise and malicious URLs associated with the phishing scheme.
Researchers suggested deploying advanced email security capabilities, and establishing multi-factor authentication for all SMS systems, as well as conducting user awareness training to avoid the fallout of targeted phishing campaigns.
The UK is expanding its use of facial recognition among law enforcement, rolling out more live facial recognition vans across seven police forces in England.
A total of ten new vans have been sent out, equipped with targeted, cutting-edge technology. The new vans will operate under strict rules, the Home Office says, to ensure they are only deployed when there is specific intelligence.
These vehicles enable law enforcement to target and locate wanted criminals, and existing safeguards require checks only to be done against police watchlists of wanted criminals, suspects, and those subject to bail or court order conditions.
Watchlists are bespoke to each deployment, with officers following strict guidance from the College of Policing.
The expanded rollout of facial recognition technology comes as the UK government ushers in a new era of policing, aiming to have 3,000 new neighbourhood officers and police community support officers in place.
“Facial recognition will be used in a targeted way to identify sex offenders or people wanted for the most serious crimes who the police have not been able to find,” home secretary Yvette Cooper said. “That’s why we’re funding 10 vans and also drawing up a new legal framework, so we’ve got proper safeguards and checks in place so that we can use the technology to go after the most dangerous criminals.”
Th Met police have reported success with the deployment of facial recognition, saying it accounted for 580 arrests made in 12 months.
However, the Big Brother Watch has called the “unprecedented” rollout a “frightening expansion” of the technology, branding it as “worrying for our democracy.”
Big Brother Watch pointed out that, despite the expansion, the UK elected officials have never voted to authorise police use of live facial recognition technology, meaning that the police instead rely on various existing laws to justify its use.
The Ada Lovelace Institute has recently called out the UK government for their “piecemeal” approach to facial recognition governance, saying that it is “inadequate” and creates “legal uncertainty, putting fundamental rights at risk and undermining public trust.”
Opponents of the technology are also concerned regarding who may end up on the police facial recognition watchlists, which can include vulnerable people and victims of crimes. In one case, an anti-knife crime community worker was picked and questioned by police in 2024 using live facial recognition, despite committing no crime.
The independent watchdog also warned on how the increased surveillance could impact protestors and people with mental illnesses.
“This unprecedented escalation in the use of facial recognition technology across the UK is alarming, and represents a significant expansion of the surveillance state. Live facial recognition turns every passerby into a walking barcode and treats us all as a nation of suspects,” Rebecca Vincent, interim director of Big Brother Watch, said.
Thew government is set to roll out new units to police forces in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey and Sussex, and Thames Valley and Hampshire.
The facial recognition algorithm used in the new vans has been independently tested for bias by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), which found that the algorithm is accurate, and that there is no bias for ethnicity, age, or gender at the settings used by the police.
While the mobile units are deployed in the coming weeks, a consultation will be launched in the autumn seeking views on how the technology should be used.
“The increased access to Live Facial Recognition vehicles to forces that previously did not have the capability is an excellent opportunity for policing,” Lindsey Chiswick, NPCC lead for facial recognition, said. “Each Live Facial Recognition deployment will be targeted, intelligence-led, within a set geographical location and for defined period of time, ensuring deployments are proportionate, lawful and necessary.
As AI adoption accelerates across the globe, organisations are confronting new security challenges, redefining identity management and navigating the emergence of AI agents and non-human identities (NHIs).
This is according to Okta, which explored how business leaders around the world are adopting and thinking about AI in the workplace in its new survey.
The research uncovers a complex landscape where efficiency and speed are top priorities but security remains critical to realising AI’s full value.
Security and Identity Are Top Priorities
Globally, AI adoption has surged from 64% to 80% in the past year, with 62% of organisations citing security or threat detection as their top AI goal for the year ahead.
In EMEA, AI adoption closely matches the global rate, but country-level variation is significant, France is leading with 83%, followed by Germany (77%), the Netherlands (70%), and the UK (70%). Despite this, only 9% of global respondents describe themselves as “very prepared” to defend against AI-driven threats.
Eighty-five per cent of global respondents new view Identity and Access Management (IAM) as important to their security posture, up from 79% last year. While the percentage of companies using AI for security purposes slightly decreased from 71% in 2024 to 65% in 2025, the proportion of respondents who ‘strongly agree’ with the view that “AI is the best defence against AI” rose sharply from 18% to 41%.
In EMEA specifically, the use of AI for security remains strong, with 70% of UK organisations exploring AI-driven security solutions, and France (63%), Germany (57%) and the Netherlands (57%) also showing uptake. These figures, while high, still trail global leaders such as the US and India.
Rapid growth in AI agents and NHIs
In 2025, 42% of organisations globally report widespread use of NHIs across multiple business functions, with an additional 55% noting moderate use in specific cases. In EMEA, widespread adoption is lower at 22.5%, with the Netherlands leading at 30% and the UK, France and Germany each at 20%.
AI agents are increasingly complementing human workforces. The most common benefit from integrating with AI agents is increased productivity, followed by cost savings. For 2025, 47% of companies expect AI agents to have a moderate impact on operational efficiency, and 55% believe these agents will complement human roles, while only 5% see AI agents replacing human workers. Top trends for AI agents include automating repetitive tasks, enhancing customer service and optimising workflows.
The primary security concern related to AI agents over the next three years is governance and oversight, cited by 58% of organisations, followed by compliance and regulatory requirements at 50%. Securing NHIs is now a critical or very significant priority for 76% of organisations globally, with 78% citing control of NHI access and permissions as their leading concern.
Access management and visibility are top needs for managing NHIs, with APIs and tokens rated most important, just ahead of service accounts. 89% of respondents globally say they have at least an intermediate understanding of NHIs, with 20% claiming expert knowledge. Despite this, 42% of organisations admit they have only limited exploration or awareness of a formal strategy for managing NHIs.
Organisations are responding with improved governance. 36% now have a centralised AI governance model, and another 42% have one in progress. 32% of organisations always treat digital labour forces with the same degree of governance as human workforces, and a further 25% do so often. Despite this, only 10% of organisations have a governance strategy in place for managing NHIs, while 91% are already deploying AI agents.
“The rise of AI agents and non-human identities (NHI) underscores the urgent need for new security and governance frameworks. AI adoption is more than a technical upgrade – to maximise its strategic value, organisations must define clear use cases and build solid foundations from the start,” said Stephen McDermid, EMEA CSO at Okta.
“Whether it’s using AI for customer support interactions, sales & marketing initiatives or security enhancements, identity is fundamental to how businesses will optimise their use of AI, whilst also keeping their data safe.”
Workers are willing to work with AI agents, but are showing resistance to working for AI agents, research from Workday, Inc shows.
According to the firm’s report, 75% of workers are comfortable teaming up with AI agents, but only 30% say they are comfortable being managed by one. This signals a key challenge for businesses in harnessing AI power without losing a human touch.
The research underscores that while widespread optimism is driving the rapid adoption of AI agents – 82% of organisations are expanding their use of agents – employees are clearly drawing a line between how they are and are not willing to work with AI.
“We’re entering a new era of work where AI can be an incredible partner, and a complement to human judgement, leadership, and empathy,” said Kathy Pham, vice president, AI, Workday. “Building trust means being intentional in how AI is used and keeping people at the centre of every decision.”
The report found that three in four employees are highly comfortable with AI agents working alongside them and recommending new skills – but only 30% are comfortable with an AI agent managing them. A mere 24% are comfortable with AI agents operating in the background without human knowledge. Establishing clear boundaries for AI is key to building employee trust and driving greater adoption.
While more than one-quarter of respondents still believe agents are overhyped, trust in agents rises dramatically with increased use. For instance, only 36% of those exploring AI agents trust their organisation to use them responsibly, but that number jumps to 95% among those further along. Direct experience with AI agents builds confidence.
Nearly 90% of employees believe AI agents will help them get more done, but many are also concerned that these productivity gains will lead to increase pressure (48%), a decline in critical thinking (48%), and less human interaction (36%). This underscores the need for thoughtful implementation that prioritises employee well-being.
Finance could reap big rewards with the successful implementation of AI agents. With the industry facing a shortage of CPAs and finance professionals, more than three-quarters (76%) of finance workers believe AI agents will help close the gap and only 12% are worried about job loss.
This research underscores a crucial path forward: to harness the potential of AI, organisations must focus on building trust through transparency and empowering their people.
This isn’t just about deploying new technology. It’s about thoughtfully designing a future where AI agents enhance human capabilities, enabling a more productive and fulfilling work experience for all.
The UK needs to overhaul its outdated and obsolete training systems if it is to secure its need for cybersecurity professionals, industry experts warn.
The UK is facing a major shortfall in the number of cybersecurity professionals, but sector sepcialists from De Montfort University Leicester warn that the UK’s training systems are simply not equipped to make up the gap.
Sector specialists say that an outmoded and fragmented 20th Century training ecosystem risks leaving UK businesses dangerously exposed to 21st Century cyber threats. Government intervention is urgently needed to build the inclusive and sustainable cyber workforce of the future. A new approach would provide consistent role definitions, skills standards, and career progression across sectors.
The UK’s digital economy is growing rapidly and is central to the Industrial Strategy 2030 – yet cybersecurity remains one of the UK’s greatest skills challenges of the age.
High profile cyber-attacks are escalating – often resulting in devastating consequences to businesses as they introduce digital systems at speed.
The UK’s fragmented cyber education and training system is leaving the country dangerously exposed.
As the UK government prepares its updated National Cyber Strategy, experts warn that joined-up thinking is urgently required to address the short-termism that has led to a national shortage of qualified cyber professionals and the absence of a unified skills framework.
A parliamentary Roundtable on the Cyber Workforce earlier this year brought together a select group of senior directors from organisations including
DSIT, UK Cyber Security Council, UKC3, SASIG, CIISec, BCS, and a host of other industry leaders and leading academic figures to look at ways of creating a future-ready UK cyber workforce.
A White Paper, published by a leading cyber academic in collaboration with the APPG on Cyber Innovation, sets out five steps for the Government to secure UK cyber security skills for decades to come.
According to the report, the government should establish a DSIT-led taskforce to co-create a UK Cyber Skills Taxonomy, as well as a national delivery body to govern this taxonomy.
The government should also incentivise employer adoption of standardised, skills-based recruitment, and align education and career pathways to real-world cyber roles.
“Recent arrests in relation to cyber-attacks on M&S and Co-op show the real and growing threat faced by UK citizens and businesses,” Dr Ismini Vasileiou, director of East Midlands Cyber Security Cluster, co-chair, UK Cyber Cluster Collaboration (UKC3), and associate professor, De Montfort University Leicester, author of the paper, said.
“What doesn’t make the headlines is the UK’s chronic shortage of cyber professionals.
“There’s currently a mismatch between Government industrial ambition and educational reality. We won’t secure a 21st Century digital economy with a 20th Century skills pipeline.
“This is emerging as a critical situation for SMEs, which are the backbone of the UK economy but which are increasingly exposed as they race to meet modern digital expectations and standards.”
Dan Aldridge MP, chair, APPG for Cyber Innovation, said: “Building a resilient and digitally capable workforce is fundamental to our country’s economy, and future workforce.
“As members of Parliament, ensuring everyone has the opportunity to develop cyber skills matters to keep our constituents and local businesses safe. Without such a foundation, we risk perpetuating the very gaps we are striving to close, and undermining the government’s mission of sustainable digital transformation.
“This White Paper highlights widespread consensus on the need for a shared language and structure for cyber skills, and we urge our colleagues across Parliament to treat this white paper not as another strategy, but as a call to action, to help build a cyber workforce that is as dynamic and diverse as the challenges we face.”
Gartner has recommended three actions to improve legal technology outcomes in general counsel departments as more and more legal departments look for solid returns on their tech investments.
“General counsels and legal leaders often have a poor understanding of what is needed for effective technology implementation and use in their functions,” said Maesea McCalpin, senior principal, research in Gartner’s Assurance Practice.
“Many are unaware of necessary workflow changes, lack a realistic view of how systems can improve workflows, do not fully grasp the obstacles to implementation and effective use, and few have plans to address these challenges.”
While legal departments have seen some good results from their technology investments, a September 2024 survey by Gartner of 140 legal functions showed that most have failed to capture the full benefits.
Digital Readiness
“Laying the groundwork for digital technology adoption in legal departments means ensuring digital readiness in people, processes and data,” said McCalpin. “Just 23% of the departments in this study achieved high scores for digital readiness.”
Specifically, the following prerequisites of a digitally ready legal team have the biggest impact on the effectiveness of technology implementations:
Data readiness: The data necessary to get value out of the system is accessible, high-quality and routinely improved and maintained.
Process readiness: The process that incorporates the technology system is standardised, documented and routinely followed.
People readiness: Department employees know how to use the system, have the necessary resources and support and know their role in system implementation.
General Counsels Drive Readiness
Gartner has also identified three actions that General Counsels can take that have an above average impact on digital readiness.
1. Address Employee Concerns About the System
Only a third of legal leaders surveyed asked for employee concerns about using a technology system. Concerns can vary, ranging from worries that the system will create delays to fears that system reports will be used to over monitor employee performance.
“GC should organise listening sessions to try to resolve issues without compromising business priorities, demonstrate how leadership will use the technology and its metrics, and reinforce system use by clarifying expectations and accountability,” said McCalpin.
Thirty-seven percent of legal leaders proactively sought employee input on potential barriers to system implementation, meaning the majority had missed an opportunity for quick resolution of workflow and data challenges before the introduction of the system.
“Potential issues include technology incompatibilities, outdated data, and inconsistent workflows,” said McCalpin. “Identifying these requires a broad group of stakeholders, including IT, data staff, legal operations, system users, and business partners. GCs should establish communication channels like implementation meetings, focus groups, and reporting repositories.”
3. Clarifying Responsibilities for Data Management
Six key data management responsibilities throughout a technology system’s lifecycle include identifying data needs, mapping sources, addressing gaps, documenting processes, collecting data, and maintaining its quality.
“To ensure these activities occur, GCs should integrate them into routine workflows by assigning responsibilities, incorporating tasks into performance reviews, emphasising leadership’s reliance on quality data, and embedding digital competencies into advancement criteria with training opportunities. This approach ensures effective data management and accountability,” said McCalpin.
Techscaler, the Scottish Government’s programme for creating, developing, and scaling tech startups run by CodeBase, has selected founders from 22 Scotland-based tech startups and scaleups for its forthcoming international programmes taking place in Silicon Valley and Singapore.
Tech founders will have the opportunity to meet investors, potential customers, and peers in two of the most dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems worldwide.
Cleanifiq, Stamp Free, Valla, Tyre Runner, VanFill, Amytis, 20 Photos, NeuroBright, Neon Circle/Neon Guard, Applo, NoLogo, and Aethernova will be participating in the Techscaler Silicon Valley cohort 4 programme between 24th October and 14th November.
Cleanifiq, an instant price cleaning marketplace for businesses, will be represented by CEO and founder Vladimir Scutelnic.
Stamp Free, AI technology enabling parcels, letters, and returns to be sent via smartphone, will be led by CEO and founder Hugh Craigie Halkett.
Valla, which provides instant access to intelligent legal support, will be led by CEO and founder Danae Shell.
Tyre Runner, which helps vehicle fleet companies monitor, predict, and replace tyres, will be led by CEO and founder Bryan MacMillan.
VanFill, an AI-driven logistics platform that helps move goods by matching delivery needs with spare vehicle space, is led by CEO and founder Aleksandra Czech-Seklecka.
Amytis, who are developing a next generation digital workspace for scientific research, is represented by CEO and co-founder Eva Steele.
20 Photos, a photo platform that turns photo libraries into story-driven collections, is led by founder Jo Tennant.
NeuroBright, a health wearable startup helping people manage mental wellbeing and brain performance, is led by CEO and founder Stephen Elliot.
Neon Guard, an AI-powered system that enables platforms to meet global safety laws without collecting personal data, is represented by founder Chelsea Jarvie.
Appio, which adds mobile widgets and enables native push notifications for web apps without the need for a developer or app store, is led by CEO and founder Michal Gondar.
NoLogo, an advertising company building AI infrastructure for creator brand partnerships, is represented by CEO and founder Nicholas Guy.
Aethernova, a medtech company developing an AI-powered extended reality platform aimed at transforming how neurodevelopmental conditions are assessed, is led by CEO and founder Aphrodite Yao.
“You can only get so far aiming to be a big fish in a small pond,” Jo Tennant, founder of 20 Photos, said. “This trip is about putting 20 Photos in the rooms where the pace, mindset, and ambition of world-class B2C products are shaped and laying the foundations to compete at a global scale.”
Natalie Garry, a former Scottish ballet dancer and CEO and founder of DanceSing, which runs online choir and fitness classes, said: “Silicon Valley was genuinely transformative for us. We arrived with no US clients, and we now have contracts signed, a clear strategy to scale in the US, and an invaluable network of connections.”
Rethink Carbon, Seluna, ThermaFY Eco Solutions, Tiny Air, Virtual Reality Empathy Platform, Wristbud/Interactive Health, Danu Insights, Connecting Hands, Trials Link, and MyWayDigitalHealth will be taking part in the Techscaler Singapore cohort 2 programme between 26th October and 14th November.
Rethink Carbon, a climate tech startup helping landowners, communities, investors and policymakers make smarter, faster and more sustainable land use decisions, will be represented by COO and co-founder Zoë Russell.
Seluna, a medtech startup using ethical, clinician-focused machine learning to accelerate diagnosis of paediatric sleep apnoea and respiratory disorders, will be led by CTO and co-founder Yola Jones.
ThermaFY Eco Solutions, a climate tech company empowering households and communities to live in energy efficient homes, is led by COO and founder Amanda Pickford.
Tiny Air, which is developing technology to decontaminate and inspect surgical instruments , is represented by director and co-founder Christopher Helson.
Virtual Reality Empathy Platform, which is developing a VR learning platform called LifeLens to raise awareness of lesser known sensory and cognitive challenges of dementia and ageing, will be led by CEO and co-founder Kevin Gordon.
Wristbud/Interactive Health, which is developing wearable technology to support mental health, will be represented by COO and co-founder Jay Evans.
Danu Insights, building AI-powered tools to accelerate innovation by helping scientists design faster, smarter, and more impactful experiments, will be represented by CEO and co-founder Stefan Bostock.
Connecting Hands, building a culturally responsive digital health platform that empowers mothers affected by postnatal depression, is led by founder Tolulope Abikoye.
Trials Link, a digital platform for clinical trials recruitment platform enabling real time clinician and patient engagement, is represented by CEO and co-founder Osman El-Koubani.
MyWayDigitalHealth, a company creating innovative software to manage long-term health conditions , is represented by CTO and co-founder Scott Cunningham.
“The second Singapore programme offers a unique opportunity to explore one of Asia’s most dynamic startup ecosystems, where our focus in this cohort is around growth stage medical and health tech plus climate and energy tech companies looking to expand into Asian markets,” Anais Guillemaud, head of Scaleup Growth Acceleration Programmes at CodeBase, said.
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes said: “This marks another bold step in empowering Scotland’s most promising tech founders. By connecting them with global peers, customers and investors, we’re creating pathways for innovation, collaboration and growth that extend far beyond our borders.
“These international opportunities are not just about scaling businesses, but about building lasting relationships that showcase Scotland’s entrepreneurial talent on the world stage.”
Employees of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national AI organisation, have expressed “serious and escalating concerns” over their jobs in a complaint to the Charity Commission.
Seen by the BBC, the complaint issues a series of accusations surrounding a misuse of public funds, a toxic work culture, and an overall failure in delivering the Institute’s mission.
The complaint comes weeks after Secretary of Science, Innovation, and Technology urged the Alan Turing Institute to change its areas of focus to defence rather than AI innovation risks, or potentially see its funding pulled.
A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) said that the Turing Institute “has been consulting on changes to refocus its work under its Turning 2.0 strategy.”
The Alan Turing Institute was not made aware of the complaint letter, which workers told the BBC was purposeful to avoid any retaliation.
The letter seen by the BBC marked a range of issues with the institute, ranging from poor leadership to a lack of transparency over spending.
Workers lamented about the Institute’s delivery failures, the instability of its governance and leadership, as well as mounting concern from its funders.
The internal culture was described as being “defined by fear and defensiveness.”
Workers wrote in the letter that they had brought these complaints to leadership, but “no meaningful action has been taken” since then.
As AI technology continues to emerge, the Alan Turing Institute, which was founded in 2015, has been rocked by changes. Staff cuts and leadership changes have seen the Institute transform in recent years as many question its research acumen and prioritisation.
Co-directs Helen Margetts and Cosmina Dorobantu left the organisations in July, and former chief technology officer Jonathan Stark left his position in May.
Before the insistence from Kyle to focus on defence, the data science and AI research group had three key priorities – environmental sustainability, health, and national security.
As the UK attempts to champion AI and become an AI superpower, the independent charity has garnered renewed focus and scrutiny. The Turning 2.0 plan will see the Institute focus on defence and security applications of AI, and could see an spending review of its funding in the near future.
Now, the Charity Commission has said it is in the early stages of its assessment of the letter, but had yet to make any formal decisions regarding an investigation.
Scotland’s labour market continued to show some resilience as the second half of the year got underway, with job creation in the service sector partially offsetting lower manufacturing payroll numbers. Following two months of growth, business activity across the Scottish private sector slipped slightly in July.
The headline Royal Bank of Scotland Growth Tracker– a seasonally adjusted index that measures the month-on-month change in the combined output of the region’s manufacturing and service sectors – fell to 48.7 in July from 50.9 in June.
This signalled a renewed fall in private sector activity following two consecutive months of growth. Positively, underlying data showed that the recent decline in manufacturing output had slowed, while services activity ticked down slightly after growing solidly in both May and June.
Businesses continued to report challenges securing new work, though July’s reduction in new orders was only modest and less pronounced than the average recorded over the first six months of 2025.
“The start of the second half of the year largely mirrored the conditions observed in the first six months of 2025, with some positive signs in the services sector seen alongside more challenging conditions facing manufacturers,” Judith Cruickshank, chair, One Bank Scotland Board, Royal Bank of Scotland, said.
“Encouragingly, the accumulation of outstanding work, which points to pressure on business capacity, could create opportunities for job growth in the coming months. Notably, the uptick in backlogs marked the first increase in 14 months, with Scotland defying the broader UK trend. Moreover, while nearly all parts of the UK highlighted challenges facing local labour markets, Scotland emerged as one of the few areas demonstrating resilience.
“Scottish firms have also displayed flexibility regarding pricing. Although cost pressures have intensified, charges for Scottish goods and services increased at a softer pace, marking the weakest rise in a year. In light of current demand headwinds, Scottish firms are trying to stay competitive, even at the expense of their own profit margins it may seem.”
Scotland In the UK
Scottish firms recorded a tenth straight monthly fall in new business during July. The pace of decline was modest and broadly similar to that seen in June. Firms cited that weakening client demand and political uncertainty led to the latest drop in sales.
That said, the downturn was weaker than that recorded across the UK as a whole.
Scotland-based firms continued to project an expansion of output over the next year in July. Plans to introduce new products and hopes of improved demand from both domestic and international markets underpinned positive sentiment.
The level of optimism across Scotland did however tick down slightly from June’s eight-month high. Of the 12 monitored UK regions and nations, Northern Ireland recorded weakest outlook, and the South East the strongest.
The seasonally adjusted Employment Index posted slightly below the neutral mark of 50.0 in July, indicated a dip in Scottish private sector payroll numbers. Some survey respondents reduced their workers in line with reduced production requirements.
Service sector employment showed a further, albeit slower, increase. Moreover, while only Northern Ireland recorded a rise in employment of the 12 monitored UK regions and nations, Scotland observed the least pronounced drop.
Scottish private sector firms recorded a marginal rise in the level of outstanding work during July, ending a run of decline since June 2024. The uptick was solely centred at service providers where fractional growth in new work fed through to firms accumulating backlogs.
Moreover, Scotland was the only one of the 12 monitored that saw a rise in outstanding business.
July data showed a marked rise in costs faced by Scottish private sector firms. The rate of inflation was the fastest in three months and in line with the UK rate.
Rising supplier price, global uncertainty and higher labour costs arising from an increase in National Insurance contributions and minimum wages, were reasons said to have pushed up expenses.
Average charges levied by Scottish private sector companies rose modestly in July. According to anecdotal evidence, rising supplier costs, and general inflationary pressures were cited as reasons driving up output prices.
Nonetheless, the overall rate of output price inflation eased for a third successive month to the slowest for a year. It was also the joint slowest of the 12 monitored UK nations and regions.
Wikipedia has lost its High Court challenge against the UK government over the Online Safety Act and some of its user verification requirements.
The online encyclopaedia launched the challenge in an attempt to exempt it from some of the Online Safety Act’s regulations that would target large online platforms – mainly user verification services.
Wikipedia said that the provisions would potentially limit monthly users of the site in the UK, and potentially hurt its platform as unverified users, or users who wished to remain completely anonymous, would not be able to make edits to, add to, or mediate posts.
Wikipedia’s online offering relies on a wide array of volunteer editors and content moderators who aim to keep the site accurate and free from misinformation and disinformation, as well as harmful content. These users may make profiles with Wikipedia to edit the site, but users and editors are not required to make a free account with Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s main concerns assumes that the website would be classified as a Category 1 platform, which it has yet to be identified as. If this is the case however, the Wikipedia fears it may force users to make accounts to then verify their identity, even potentially needing to verify ages for certain content pages.
Wikipedia says that since it operates as a “public interest site” and does not run ads, generate profit, or sell personal data, that it should be considered separately from other major platforms such as Facebook and X.
“We do not dispute the need for sensible online regulation. Wikimedia’s free knowledge projects are safe and important resources through which people across the UK—and the wider world—learn, share knowledge, collaborate, and gain media literacy, in over 300 languages,” Phil Bradley-Shmeig, lead council for the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote in a blog post when Wikipedia first brought up its challenge.
“But for services like Wikipedia to thrive, it is essential that new laws do not endanger charities and public interest projects.”
However, the court decided that the Online Safety Act should target sites like Wikipedia, and that the decision on whether to categorise Wikipedia as a Category 1 platform should be left up to Ofcom.
Mr Justice Johnson of the High Court said that Wikipedia may operate within the law “without causing undue damage to Wikipedia’s operations.”
While he ultimately rejected the Wikimedia Foundation’s claims, he did say that the ruling “does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations.”
Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) have fundamentally shifted their approach to AI, according to new research from Salesforce, moving from cautious spenders to strategic investors who are betting on AI not just for cost-cutting, but as a crucial engine for long-term revenue growth.
A striking 70% of the 261 global CFOs surveyed reported having a conservative AI strategy in 2020. Fast forward to today, and that number has plummeted to a mere 4%.
This rapid transformation highlights a widespread recognition among financial leaders that AI is no longer just an emerging technology but a crucial tool for enhancing efficiency, optimising operations, and, critically, driving long-term growth.
CFO’s fundamental rethinking of tech investment ROI, according to the data, explains this transformation.
More than half (61%) of CFOs say AI agents, digital labour capable of performing tasks autonomously, are changing how they evaluate ROI, measuring the success of technology investments beyond traditional metrics to encompass a broader range of business outcomes.
“The introduction of digital labour isn’t just a technical upgrade, it represents a decisive and strategic shift for CFOs,” said Robin Washington, president and chief operational and financial officer at Salesforce.
“With AI agents, we’re not merely transforming business models; we’re fundamentally reshaping the entire scope of the CFO function. This demands a new mindset as we expand beyond financial stewards to also become architects of agentic enterprise value.”
Last year, in fact, 65% of CFOs faced pressure to accelerate tech investment ROI. Today, they recognize the value of AI isn’t just about short-term cost-cutting, but also long-term business outcomes like revenue generation, productivity gains, and improved decision-making – things AI agents are uniquely suited to improve.
“The ROI of older technology often depends on immediate, measurable results,” said one CFO survey respondent. “While AI’s returns may accrue over the long term through an ongoing process and new business models.”
AI Risk Outweighed By Competitive Reward
Further, CFOs have changed how they view AI risk versus AI reward. Just as recently as January 2025, CFOs were undecided about AI’s cost compared to its risk, focusing on moderate investments and risks.
Now, CFOs report dedicating 25% on average of their current, total AI budgets in AI agents, a relatively emerging branch of AI technology. About six in ten (61%) of CFOs say AI agents and digital labour are critical, and will continue to be critical, to compete in the current economic environment.
Nearly two-thirds (64%) say AI agents/digital labour are changing their perspective on how their business spends money. Over a third (35%) say AI requires them to have a riskier mindset around technology investments.
Cutting Costs, Driving Revenue?
About three quarters (74%) of CFOs also report that AI agents are not only cutting costs, but driving revenue.
CFOs that are implementing AI agents have high hopes, as they expect these tools will increase company revenue by almost a fifth.
The appeal of AI agents goes beyond this, as CFOs count on them for transformation: 74% say AI agents will transform their business model, while 55% think AI agents will take on more strategic work than routine tasks.
Nearly eight in ten (78%) of CFOs are increasingly using AI to make business decisions. Salesforce found that the top three tasks CFOs are delegating to AI agents are risk assessments (74%), financial forecasting (58%), and expense management (54%).
Measuring ROI
About six in ten (61%) of CFOs say AI agents have changed how they evaluate ROI.
“Traditional technology investments mainly focus on immediate financial returns that can be easily visible, but AI benefits are a mix of long and short term duration. KPIs are focused based on business outcomes,” a CFO responded to Salesforces’ survey.
With the introduction of agents, top factors to evaluate AI ROI are now more expansive, encompassing things like direct savings and near-term benefits, including cost savings, risk and compliance improvements, and revenue growth, followed by productivity or efficiency improvements, and improved decision-making.
CFOs also view AI as a valuable way to ensure ROI through better financial control.
“AI provides real-time budget tracking, which improves forecasting accuracy and helps protect ROI from overspending through better financial control,” a CFO told Salesforce in the survey.
For CFOs, redefining ROI requires a mindset shift from valuing short-term to long-term success.
The two main concerns keeping CFOs up at night regarding their AI strategy are security or privacy threats (66%), and the long time to ROI (56%).
“Other technology does not typically involve the ethical risks AI does, if AI goes wrong, the reputational cost affects ROI in ways regular tools never would,” one CFO survey respondent said.
Another added: “The ongoing investment required for retraining, monitoring, and improving AI models makes ROI more fluid than for fixed-function tools.”
Just over half (53%) of developers think that large language models can already code better than most people, new research from Clutch reveals, though AI is still controversial across the developer community.
Clutch surveyed 800 senior developers and engineering managers, 75% of which said they expect AI to significantly reshape software development in the next five years. How transformation will look, however, remains in question.
The survey found that AI is already a part of developer’s day-to-day, as 78% use AI several times a week or even more, especially in coding, testing, and reviewing stages. 49% of senior developers and team leads told Clutch that they use AI tools every day.
As AI is used more generally, sentiments regarding its use are more commonly positive. 42% of respondents had a positive feeling about AI, as opposed to the 10% who felt concerned, and the 8% who were sceptical about its use.
Still, despite this positivity, most respondents had concerns regarding AI’s proliferation. Topping the list of concerns was data privacy (24%), as many feared if AI was appropriate to use when handling sensitive data.
Following this was job displacement (14%), inaccuracy (14%), and a loss of creativity (13%). Only 8% of those surveyed showed no concerns over AI.
Job displacement appears to be a valid concern, as AI skills are quickly becoming a requirement. Around three quarters of developers say that being proficient with AI tools can impact recruitment. Nearly half of respondents said that AI could threaten the entire software development field.
When it comes to entering the field, feelings around AI’s potential impact were mixed. 45% of respondents believe that AI may lower the barrier for entry for junior developers as they may learn faster and have better access to vital tools. However, 37% said that AI would be a barrier to entry, as newcomers could more readily be out-performed or even replaced by AI.
This climbs up the ladder as well – while some more senior leaders think AI may level the playing field, others are concerned it could gate-keep the status quo and remove existing stepping stones in work progression.
AI is changing how recruitment works as well. About eight in ten (79%) of respondents said that AI skills will soon be essential for developers, with 76% saying they would be likely to hire someone if they had AI expertise.
Despite this, 80% of developers see AI as an enabler, rather than a threat.
Still, seeing as AI has gone through major transformations in just the last three years, achieving AI expertise is an evolving game with ever-changing goal posts.
Over half (59%) of developers admitted that they have relied on AI-generated code without fully understanding it, leaving a potentially disastrous gap.
Digital transformation and AI can make or break Scotland’s local councils as they grapple with workforce woes, according to Audit Scotland.
Staff are councils’ most important resource and are vital in delivering and meeting Scotland’s changing and increasing needs. While the number of staff employed by councils has rise, this has not kept pace with ever-rising demand.
As well as increasing demand for services, councils are facing challenges in recruiting and retaining staff, and sickness absence rates are at a record high.
Many councils have initiatives in place to address challenges with recruitment and retaining staff, but urgent progress is needed to have robust workforce plans in place at every council. This needs to: help financial sustainability; address wellbeing; link to future skill needs and drive many more shared services and roles across the public sector.
In many cases, digital solutions are being used to support staff delivering frontline services. Audit Scotland’s report suggested that local governments be innovative in their use of technology, and build on new working practices that emerged during the pandemic.
“To achieve the change required, councils need to make good use of digital technology and use their workforces in flexible ways,” Audit Scotland’s report said.
Suggested digital solutions range from online services, mobile devices, and AI applications. While Audit Scotland found that all councils have some form of a digital strategy, these are in varying degrees of integration, with some councils falling behind. Many councils have also reported challenges in getting the necessary resources for their digital plans.
Audit Scotland found that around half of Scottish councils had introduced digital initiatives and developments which have delivered some workforce benefits, increased productivity, and improved services. These often included the use of digital champions, the use of sensors for social care, environmental monitoring in home, and even pilot programmes like using drones to deliver school meals.
Councils like Dundee City, City of Edinburgh and East Lothian are investing in digital tools, training, and infrastructure to enhance service delivery and workforce efficiency. Projects across these and other councils include developing AI chatbots, digital skills teams and smart city initiatives.
Notably, Aberdeen City Council has partnered with Microsoft to launch an AI chatbot service for its constituents to access services and answer questions surrounding council activity.
While integration of digital technology is beneficial, Audit Scotland does point out that a skilled workforce is essential in successfully rolling out these transformations.
“We all benefit from a skilled and motivated local government workforce; staff are the most important resource that councils have. Councils must fundamentally reform how they deliver services, and Scotland’s 260,000 council workers are crucial to this,” Jennifer Henderson, member of the Accounts Commission, said.
“Councils need to align their existing workforce plans with their priorities so they can ensure their workforces are the right size and shape, and their staff have the skills they will need.
“In particular, they need to ensure workers have the digital skills necessary for the scale of changes ahead. We have seen many councils already responding to this challenge, and there are valuable opportunities for local bodies to learn from each other
TalkTalk was the most complained about broadband provider in the UK, according to new figures released by Ofcom, the telecommunications and online regulator.
The new figures cover the first quarter of 2025, from January to March, which had similar figures to the previous quarter. Complaints about fixed broadband and pay-TV increased and complaints about landline and mobile generally stayed the same.
When it came to mobile providers, O2, Three, and iD Mobile were the most complained about. Customer complaints were mainly about how complaints were handled (O2), problems with billing, pricing and charges (Three), and issues with faults, services and provisioning (iD Mobile).
EE, Sky Mobile, Tesco Mobile, and Vodafone were, conversely, the least complained-about mobile providers.
When it came to landlines, however EE and TalkTalk dominated the complaints. While EE’s complaint figures were maintained from the previous quarter, TalkTalk saw an increase in complaints.
Despite years of digital transformation, IT resilience remains a critical vulnerability for UK enterprises.
According to the latest research from Asanti, 72% of senior IT decision makers reported experiencing significant disruption or downtime in the past year due to IT resilience issues with only 31% expressing extreme confidence in their current disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
The research, conducted by Vanson Bourne, surveyed 100 senior IT leaders across public and private sector organisations. The findings reveal a concerning disconnect between perceived and actual resilience performance.
The study revealed major gaps in recovery preparedness, with only 56% of organisations surveyed having fully defined and regularly tested recovery time objectives (RTOs), and just 36% say the same for recovery point objectives – the core thresholds set for acceptable downtime and data loss.
It also revealed significant operational fallout, with 60% of businesses struggling to return to normal operations after a major resilience disruption, while 58% admitted to suffering substantial financial losses.
This is all contributing to crisis of confidence when it comes to risk recovery, as over half of respondents reported only low or medium confidence in handling major risks like cyber breaches (54%), data centre outages (61%), or unauthorised physical access (62%).
The research also identifies a “resilience competency gap”, where critical planning, testing and investment decisions are lagging behind the complexity and frequency of modern IT threats. Despite widespread cloud adoption, 51% still view cloud service outages as one of the top risks to operations – surpassing even traditional IT system failures (49%).
“Too many organisations assume they’re more resilient than they actually are,” commented Stewart Laing, CEO of Asanti. “This research makes clear that real resilience isn’t about where your systems live – it’s about how well you’ve prepared to keep them running. Without clearly defined recovery objectives, rigorous testing and a culture of proactive risk management, even the most advanced infrastructure can fail. Business leaders must move beyond surface-level confidence and embed resilience into every layer of operations.”
The study found that 89% of respondents believe human oversight is a critical vulnerability in their resilience strategy, while 91% agreed that operational failures due to human error could compromise backup power capabilities.
While 59% of those respondents said that they test their business continuity and disaster recovery plans at least every six months, these exercises often lack the depth required to reveal systemic resilience weaknesses. Only 31% of respondents felt extremely confident in their current business continuity and disaster recovery plans – a sobering indicator of widespread fragility.
Downtime’s Impact
Although most firms track downtime (77%) and financial impact (73%) of resilience incidents, softer yet critical indicators like reputational impact (54%) and impact on digital transformation goals (57%) are often overlooked.
“Measurement is the foundation of resilience,” added Laing. “If you’re only tracking outages and costs, you’re missing the true business impact. Resilience must be strategic, tested and integrated across infrastructure, operations and leadership thinking.”
Scotland’s economy has seen the fastest boost in business services activity since 2024, as the economy continues to show signs of improvement, the latest Royal Bank of Scotland report shows.
Mid-market business confidence soars, with strong numbers in technology, media and telecommunications firms.
Scotland’s small and medium market sectors has seen positive growth since May, showing strength as it goes into the second half of 2025.
Employment in Scotland rose in May, and has since then stayed relatively stable, beating out the rest of the UK. The initial rise in jobs was led by the services industry.
Further, after a strong performance in June, confidence in the economy has reached its highest level in 2025, with next year’s outlook on opportunities positive.
A third of firms in the private sector predict an increase in output in the next 12 months, as opposed to only 10% projecting a reduction.
However, the manufacturing sector continues to face challenges – production continued to shrink in June, though at a lesser pace than in May. Consumer goods seemed to be more resilient than other aspects of the sector in the later end of the first half.
“While we continue to see a mixed picture for businesses in Scotland, it is encouraging to see some signs of momentum across the economy,” Paul Thwaite, chief executive of NatWest Group said.
“Firms remain resilient, with activity and confidence improving in many areas, although this varies by sector as well as individual circumstances.”
Sebastian Burnside, RBS chief economist, said: “Following the challenging start to the year, Scotland’s economy hit a high point in June with private sector businesses reporting their strongest growth of the year so far.
“Business services and travel and tourism led the way, with mid-market firms showing renewed confidence in future growth.
“Scotland’s businesses report higher employment trends than other parts of the UK, with mid-market services businesses and technology, media and telecoms firms scoring especially highly.
“Whilst there has been some stabilisation, businesses are still facing a rapidly changing international environment and domestic pressures — as we can see with manufacturers who reported tougher business conditions in June, particularly amongst smaller firms.”
Welcome to the July 2025 edition of DIGIT’s Movers and Shakers!
Last month saw a flurry of activity in the Scottish tech ecosystem, with top-level appointments and major partnerships.
This month features some key government partnerships and appointments, as well as a major partnership between Techscaler and The Venture Labs.
Read on to find out more.
Appointments
Scot Gov Appoints Chief Scientific Advisor
Professor Calum Semple OBE has been appointed the Scottish Government’s next Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA), who will take up the position on the 5th of August on an initial three-year term.
Professor Semple is a Consultant in Paediatric Respiratory Medicine at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and became Professor of Outbreak Medicine and Child Health at the University of Liverpool in 2018.
He has held key advisory roles during public health emergencies, serving as a UK Government adviser during the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic, on the World Health Organisation Scientific Advisory Committee during the Ebola Emergency and as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies during the Covid pandemic.
Ingenza Limited, a technology driven contract research, development and manufacturing organisation (CRDMO), has announced the appointment of Nick Challoner as its new chief executive officer, effective October 1, 2025.
Challoner brings over 30 years of experience in business leadership, innovation, and commercial strategy and execution across the chemical and biotechnology sectors, and has operated internationally in Europe, The Americas, and Asia Pacific.
Challoner most recently served as group chief scientific officer at Croda International Plc, a FTSE 100 company, where he was responsible for the development and execution of global R&D strategy in line with longer-term commercial objectives relating to innovation and sustainability.
A new permanent chief executive officer for Great British Energy has been appointed, bringing private sector experience to the publicly-owned company aiming to make the UK a clean energy superpower.
Dan McGrail will serve as the new CEO of Great British Energy; McGrail previously served as chief executive of RenewableUK and CEO of Siemens Engines.
Under his stewardship as interim CEO for the last four months, McGrail has helped set up the company. This includes announcing £1 billion for Great British Energy to invest in clean energy supply chains such as electric cables and floating offshore wind platforms to ensure the clean energy revolution is built here in Britain.
Scottish space tech firm Bright Ascension has secured more than £2.3 million in what is proving to be a busy period of growth, with the company also welcoming the appointment of a new CEO and the launch of a five-year strategic plan.
In a show of continued backing, existing investor Capital for Colleagues has swapped £1 million in short-term loans for convertible notes, deepening its stake in the space-software provider, with a further £600,000 coming from Scottish Enterprise, £600,000 from Harrock Capital Partners, and £150,000 from T J Morris (Investments) Ltd.
Bright Ascension, which counts offices across Edinburgh and Dundee, intends to use the funds to deliver an expanded portfolio of its HELIX suite of satellite software products, strengthen its international sales capabilities and pursue further innovation.
The Cybersecurity Business Network (CBN), a UK coalition of cybersecurity organisations has announced the appointment of former UK minister for Digital and Broadband, Matt Warman, as chair of the CBN.
Warman’s appointment comes at a critical time for the UK’s cybersecurity sector, as recent high-profile cyber-attacks across sectors have underscored the urgent need for enhanced industry collaboration, resilience and the right regulatory approach.
As chair, Warman will spearhead the continued growth of the network, engaging various stakeholders from the private and public sectors, and championing the UK cyber sector as CBN aims to become a single unifying voice for UK based cyber organisations.
Sue Dawe has been appointed EY Scotland Managing Partner, succeeding Ally Scott after his six-year tenure as he moves into a UK & Ireland leadership role.
After six years as Scotland Managing Partner, Ally Scott takes up a new role within EY as the firm’s UK & Ireland Clients & Industries Leader, whilst maintaining a close connectivity to the market and clients through his M&A and EY Entrepreneur of the Year roles at the Firm.
Sue Dawe, who currently leads the firm’s Scottish financial services business, has been appointed its new Scotland Managing Partner, with responsibility for the leadership and direction of the entire EY business across the country.
Dawe has led Scotland’s financial services business locally since 2016 during which time the team grown from 120 to 420 professionals across audit, tax, strategy and transactions and consulting. Her extensive knowledge of EY, strong leadership experience and established profile in the market make her the ideal candidate to lead EY Scotland into its next chapter of growth.
Scotland’s Critical Technologies Supercluster appoints Chair to Advisory Board
The Executive Committee of Scotland’s Critical Technologies Supercluster Advisory Board has appointed Alan Anderson, senior director of R&D at Optos, as Chair.
The Advisory Board was set up in May 2025 to provide strategic guidance on activities under the supercluster initiative, an approach developed in partnership between Technology Scotland, Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, University of Glasgow and University of Strathclyde. The initiative has a stated ambition to grow revenues beyond £10bn by 2035 with a focus on key areas such as skills development, investment, scale up, internationalisation and collaboration.
Richard Lochhead, Minister for Business and Employment shared his congratulations and added that he looks forward to working with the advisory board as we focus on delivering our shared ambitions for the supercluster.
Vapour Appoints New Managing Directors
Vapour, a cutting-edge digital platform revolutionising spirits production, is advancing its next phase of growth. Operated by Speyside Labs Ltd, Vapour is expanding its global market presence through strengthened strategic leadership by its Managing Directors, Stephen Hamilton and William Binnie.
Stephen Hamilton, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and William Binnie, Chief Operating Officer (COO), will jointly lead Speyside Labs, combining technology innovation with digital business strategy expertise to advance the company’s goals.
Through Vapour, Speyside Labs currently serves a diverse range of customers across Scotland, Norway, Ireland, Australia, and beyond, demonstrating the broad international appeal and impact of its solutions.
Johnston Carmichael appoints new Head of Technology and Life Sciences
Independent accountancy and business advisory firm Johnston Carmichael has appointed ecosystem expert Calum Purdie as its new Head of Technology and Life Sciences.
Calum, who joined Johnston Carmichael two years ago, succeeds partner Shaun Millican, who is now Head of Business Advisory and sits on the Board.
Initially appointed to the firm as technology and life sciences ecosystem manager, Calum brings 10 years’ experience of working with high growth businesses and investors. Previously, he worked in the advisory space supporting private equity and VC investors across the UK, Europe and US with technology due diligence services before working for Tech Nation, a government funded organisation, as scaleup engagement manager for Scotland.
Nexos appoints new Chief Executive
Nexos, an integrated provider of engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) services to the energy sector, has appointed Scott McGinigal as its new Chief Executive with immediate effect.
McGinigal is a chartered process engineer with more than 30 years of industry experience and brings deep technical knowledge and a strong track record of leadership across complex energy projects.
He joins from Spirit Energy, where he served as Technical Services & HSES Director, leading multidisciplinary teams spanning engineering, drilling, operations, decommissioning and projects across both offshore and onshore assets.
ClearSky Logic Makes Duo of Commercial Hires
ClearSky Logic has made a duo of commercial hires as the technology consulting and implementation group continues to see AI power its revenue. Darren Auld-led ClearSky is expected to report doubled annual revenue next month, with CEO Auld noting a shift from supporting VC-backed startups to larger corporates with sales of between £10 and £100 million.
Darren Auld, CEO and Co-founder of ClearSky Logic, said: “What we’ve found, and how we’ve iterated as a business, is that SMEs to larger corporates who successfully implement AI are experiencing exponential growth, and we’re supporting them right through that journey.”
John-Paul Hughes has joined ClearSky as Head of Commercial, joining from digital transformation specialist Equator, with Georgina Hart also joining ClearSky’s commercial team, as Marketing and Events Manager.
Partnerships
Aveni Launches Financial Services Industry Group
Edinburgh-based fintech firm Aveni has launched a new industry group to help shape the future of AI in financial services.
Bringing together C-suite executives from the UK’s wealth management and financial planning sector, Aveni’s Customer Advisory Board will provide cross-sector collaboration with the inaugural meeting focused on emerging trends in AI, operational innovation, the regulatory landscape, and the needs of the financial advice sector.
Leaders from Succession Wealth (Aviva), Schroders Personal Wealth, 7IM, and Rathbones took part in the discussions, sharing insights around strategies of AI adoption at scale, factors limiting growth, and the role of the financial adviser in an increasingly agentic world.
CGI Partners with NHS Scotland for Digital Front Door
CGI is set to work in partnership with NHS Scotland to deliver a user-centred ‘Digital Front Door’ to be rolled out as an online service for selected specialities within NHS Lanarkshire.
The Digital Front Door (DFD) will act as a primary entry point for patients to access the health and care services they need.
BJSS, now a part of CGI, has secured the contract to be the delivery partner for the technology with NHS Education for Scotland, the national health board responsible for digital health development and education across Scotland.
Th DFD is part of a key commitment laid out in the Scottish Government’s Programme for Government, the First Minister’s statement on Renewal in January, and subsequent Operational Improvement Plan.
NatWest Group has announced a new five-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services and Accenture to transform its customer service by accelerating the modernisation of its digital, data and analytics, and AI capabilities.
The collaboration will enable NatWest to provide more intuitive, engaging and personalised services to its 20 million customers – drawing on the combination of Accenture and AWS’s cloud and AI, and banking expertise to help anticipate and respond to customer needs faster and more effectively.
In parallel, it will further enhance colleagues’ skills and foster a data-driven culture through access to new AI technologies that empower them to more swiftly and easily serve customers.
The UK government has struck a partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, aiming to expand AI security research collaborations and infrastructure investment.
The collaboration also plans to find new ways for taxpayer funded services like security and education to make best use of the latest tech.
It comes as OpenAI deepens its commitment to the UK, with plans to increase the size of its London office to follow. The move will build out what started as the company’s first international location just two years ago, where research and engineering teams contribute to the development of frontier AI models, and support is provided to UK business, developers, and start-ups.
The Ventures Lab, delivered by The Challenges Group, is partnering with Techscaler to boost the creation and growth of Scottish tech businesses with a social or environmental mission.
By working together, The Ventures Lab and Techscaler aim to strengthen the pipeline of impact-driven startups in Scotland.
In 2025/26, The Ventures Lab aims to support 40 high-growth, impact-led businesses to grow and scale.
Eureka Solutions Partners with Caledonia Gladiators
Scotland’s only professional basketball team has signed a game-changing new partnership as it looks to ‘make it rain’ in its off-court operations.
Caledonia Gladiators has teamed up with fellow East Kilbride based firm, Eureka Solutions in a partnership that will help support complex behind-the-scenes processes at the club.
Partnering with seasoned pros, Eureka Solutions, will play a crucial part in the Gladiators’ long-term business plan: modernising its back-end financial systems to support its continued success as one of the UK’s fastest growing professional sports franchises.
As a trusted partner of iplicit – cloud accounting’s market disruptor – Eureka Solutions enables businesses to reduce overheads, automate routine tasks, and simplify financial operations, by providing a streamlined and user-friendly platform that improves financial management.
Sword Partners with Arnlea
Sword is delighted to have won a multi-year software development contract with SaaS company Arnlea. This partnership focuses on the development of Arnlea’s field inspection software, Nexar.
The relationship between Arnlea and Sword has grown from project work, through team augmentation, to a strategic partnership for core software development services.
Arnlea now have guaranteed access to technical expertise with dedicated software engineers, plus extended resources available from Sword’s wider development capability.
To ensure the knowledge of the original development team has been fully retained, Arnlea’s software engineers have TUPEd over to Sword.
Together, the software team are working on a product development roadmap to deliver regular iterations based on customers evolving needs. Arnlea are already reporting positive feedback from customers using their software products and apps, from both a quality and service perspective.
FullProxy Partners with AppViewX
FullProxy, a leading Scottish cyber security consultancy, is today announcing a partnership to deliver managed certificate lifecycle management services with AppViewX, becoming the first in the UK to do so. This strategic partnership, which began in 2024, will enable FullProxy to provide cutting-edge, fully managed certificate lifecycle automation and crypto-agility to its clients, addressing the growing challenges of certificate management in an evolving security landscape.
With the emergence of quantum computing and the industry-wide shift towards shorter SSL/TLS certificate lifespans – such as the recent CA/Browser Forum vote to lower certificate lifecycles to 47 days by 2029 – businesses and public sector organisations face increasing complexity in maintaining secure, compliant environments. Through this partnership, FullProxy and AppViewX aim to help teams seamlessly manage certificates, enhance security posture, and reduce operational burdens.
CreateFuture Partners with MONY Group
CreateFuture, a leading digital consultancy and delivery partner, and MONY Group – the tech-led savings platform behind household names including MoneySuperMarket, MoneySavingExpert and Quidco – today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate MONY Group’s technology capabilities and drive future growth.
The agreement, the result of a competitive tender process, solidifies a long-standing relationship between the two companies in delivering smarter, tech-led solutions across consumer financial services. The strategic partnership will see CreateFuture become MONY Group’s preferred consulting partner, delivering strategic technology capability across multiple disciplines.
CreateFuture will work alongside MONY Group’s teams, bringing flexible, high-impact capability to accelerate MONY Group’s technology roadmap and enhance customer-facing platforms. CreateFuture will also support the rollout of AI across the business, ensuring it delivers meaningful impact for teams and millions of users – making financial decisions easier, faster, and more personalised.
Awards
Abertay Uni Announces DARE Academy Video Game Finalists
Abertay University has announced the finalists for its flagship video game design competition, DARE Academy.
The six undergraduate teams will now spend the summer developing and refining their game prototypes, competing for the prestigious DARE trophy, as well as a grand prize of £5,000.
Among the shortlisted finalists selected by a panel of expert judges are Fishbowl Studio, Bonny Bandits, Final Prism Interactive, Cosmic Coda, Hyperfix, and Riverboat Games.
Over the coming months, the teams will perfect their concepts at Abertay’s Centre for Excellence in Computer Games, using the university’s professional studio environment to create playable prototypes.
Orbex Pre-selected for European Launcher Challenge
Orbex, the UK-based orbital launch services company, has been pre-selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) to take part in its prestigious European Launcher Challenge (ELC).
Initiated in November 2023, the ELC programme aims to support the development of new sovereign European launch capabilities. It was created by ESA to promote better European access to space and to increase the competitiveness of European launch services. It provides contractual and financial commitments to launch contracts for ESA programmes and possibly other institutional customers from 2026 to 2030.
Phil Chambers, CEO of Orbex, said: “Being pre-selected as part of the European Launcher Challenge is a milestone moment – not just for Orbex, but for the UK space sector as a whole.
The Cyber and Fraud Hub has recovered £1.15m in its first year of operations supporting individuals affected by cyber-crime, scams, and fraud.
Since launching in July 2024, the Scottish charity has worked in close collaboration with Police Scotland, the banking industry, and tech partners, providing vital assistance to more than 450 individuals with reported cases totalling £18.2 million.
Through this collaboration, the Hub has successfully recovered or prevented from loss £1.15m offering not only financial reprieve but emotional and legal support.
At its core, the charity’s mission is to support victims of scams and fraud by empowering them through education and guidance.
The Hub provides victim assistance via a support helpline, and fraud prevention education with free, accessible online resources to support for those navigating the aftermath of cyber-crime.
“During the last year, we’ve grown to become the vital resource for those in Scotland and beyond who often feel isolated and overwhelmed in the wake of a scam, helping people of all ages regain control, recover funds, and understand their rights,” Alex Dowall, CEO of the Cyber and Fraud Hub said.
“A great example of this work in action was seen in the wake of recent attacks involving West Lothian Council and the City of Edinburgh Council, where our free data breaches guide was circulated to the public.
“We’re also here to restore confidence and importantly, making sure people know they’re not alone. There is a clear path forward, both emotionally and practically, after being affected by cyber enabled fraud.
“With over 12,000 visitors to our website, it’s clear to see that there is a significant demand for our advice and guidance.”
As cyber-crime continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, the Cyber and Fraud Hub remains committed to empowering individuals with the knowledge and tools to protect themselves and to further work with partners across sectors to ensure no one who has been affected by this sort of crime is left behind.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre is updating its Cyber Assessment Framework, providing extra guidance for critical national infrastructure.
The Cyber Assessment Framework was last updated in April 2024 and is now used by nearly all cyber regulators, as well as GovAssure, the cybersecurity assurance scheme for the UK’s critical national infrastructure (CNI).
The CAF mainly serves to provide CNI across sectors with a comprehensive framework for assessing their security and resilience needs and outcomes to protect against threats.
Despite successful update of the CAF, the threat risk to the UK’s CNI has only increased, and keeping pace with complicated attack methodology is essential to closing the gap between escalating cyber threats and security defence posture.
The NCSC has therefore updated the CAF in an attempt to ensure that the framework remains relevant as CNI organisations try to protect themselves from rising threats.
Version 4.0 of the framework will have four major changes.
First, it will feature a new section dedicated to building a deeper understanding of attacker methods and motivations in an effort to inform better cyber risk decisions.
The update will also have a new section focused on ensuring the secure development and maintenance of software used in essential services.
The existing section on security monitory and threat hunting will be updated to improve cyber threat detection.
The CAF will also have improved coverage of AI cyber risks.
The NCSC says that it has consulted with cyber regulators and oversight bodies on the updates to th framework, which mainly serves critical national infrastructure such as energy, healthcare, transport, digital infrastructure and government sectors.
“We are already looking ahead to future iterations of the CAF, ensuring that it keeps pace with the regulatory proposals within the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which will be laid before parliament later this year,” the NCSC said.
The UK now ranks as the third most targeted country for malware, facing more than 100 million cyber-attacks in just the past three months, according to research from NordVPN.
The cybersecurity firm found that everyday internet users are increasingly being targeted by cyber-criminals, falling victim to fraudulent email and text links, as well as malicious attachments and websites.
The US and Canada are the only countries that outstrip the UK when it comes to malware, which saw a 7% increase in the amount of malware from the first to the second quarter of 2025. While the US did see the most overall malware attacks (2.91bn), the UK actually had a higher concentration of malware relative to its population.
The UK’s increasingly digital economy – from a high uptake of smartphones and digital banking to the use of social networks and online shopping – makes it a prime target.
In the second quarter of 2025, the UK saw 1,473 incidents by device per month, versus just 1,281 incidents in the US. The UK was also the most targeted country in Europe when it comes to malware.
It may also be worth noting that the top three countries are also predominantly English-speaking nations (note: Canada also has French as its official language, and the US only made English its official language in March this year), which could also contribute to their targeting. Translation tools that rely on AI systems are often much more proficient at English than other languages.
NordVPN also reported that Google was the most impersonated brand by cyber-criminals, followed by Yahoo!, Telegram, Steam, Outlook, and Amazon. These are typically highly trusted brands, meaning that malware criminals still rely on user trust and people’s day-to-day online practices for exploitation.
Video hosting platforms were the most common vectors for malware, followed by streaming services, content delivery, files sharing, and entertainment platforms.
The most commonly blocked malware NordVPN identified was Advanced Persistent Cyber (APC) virus, which has many variants that all tend to target system configurations in an effort to disrupt automated processes.
“Our data shows that online threats are steadily increasing, not only in number but also in complexity,” Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN, said.
“Malware has become the Swiss Army knife of online crime. It’s fast, silent, and often invisible until it’s too late.” Briedis urged users to be vigilant, as most attacks rely on simple mistakes, stressing that “awareness and a few good habits go a long way” in protecting against these pervasive digital dangers.
Mid-market private equity investment in Scotland fell in the first half of this year, according to KPMG UK’s mid-year private equity pulse.
The mid-year study into private equity deal activity found that interest in the region’s mid-market declined, with 24 deals completing and deal volumes falling by 14% compared to H1 2024.
The findings reflect a backdrop of economic uncertainty, influenced by ongoing geopolitical developments and concerns surrounding the potential impact of trade tariffs.
Bolt-ons remained the largest component of mid-market private equity activity across Scotland, making up over two thirds of all deals. Traditional and leveraged buyouts (LBOs) were the second largest deal type, followed by minority investments and management buy-ins.
Scotland’s mid-market private equity interest accounted for 6% of the total mid-market private equity backing in the UK. Deal activity in the mid-market slowed down across all region in the UK< expect the South West, which experienced increased activity in teams of deal volume, compared with the first half of 2024 (28 vs 22).
Graeme Williams, head of corporate finance in Scotland at KPMG UK said: “There’s no doubt that deal activity on the whole has slowed across the UK, and Scotland hasn’t been immune to that trend.
“What stands out however is the consistency in the types of deals being done – bolt-ons made up over two-thirds of all mid-market activity here, showing that investors remain confident in backing growth through strategic acquisitions.
“While the wider market has been challenged by geopolitical headwinds, the fundamentals in Scotland remain solid. We continue to see strong interest in key locations like Edinburgh and Glasgow, where high-quality businesses and resilient sectors are creating opportunities. As the market begins to stabilise, I’m optimistic that momentum will grow in the second half of the year.”
National Outlook
From a national perspective, last year’s rebound in all private equity investment stalled in the first half of 2025 as activity dipped to the lowest levels since the second half of 2020.
Deal volumes dropped 17% year on year, with a total of 726 deals closed throughout the first half of 2025 compared to 876 over the same period in 2024. The second quarter witnessed fewer deals compared to Q1 as geopolitical uncertainty put the brakes on activity across all private equity and the mid-market. Most deals took place in Q1 with 370, while Q2 saw only 356 deals close.
The slowdown in the mid-market was less pronounced with a total of 377 deals in the first half of the year, representing a fall of 11% year on year.
“As we headed into 2025 off the back of strong deal numbers last year, the expectation was that M&A activity would continue to pick up,” commented Alex Hartley, head of corporate finance at KPMG UK said.
“But economic uncertainty, driven by geopolitical events and nervousness around the impact of tariffs, has meant that the deals market has been slightly more volatile so far this year, and getting deals over the line is taking longer.
“That said, the mood remains cautiously optimistic, and there are still sectors where appetite remains strong, such as business services, healthcare and technology, media and telecoms. We may start to see activity pick up over the rest of the year, as business owners contemplate potential tax changes in the Autumn budget and they have had time to assess any impact from global tariffs.”
As reports trickle in saying that GenAI is diminishing critical thinking, researchers at Multiverse have identified 13 durable skills the UK workforce can adopt to ensure AI adoption has a positive impact.
A human skills deficit can threaten the effective adoption of AI is not properly addressed as studies from MIT and other research institutes show that AI can have a negative effect on critical thinking.
Researchers at upskilling platform Multiverse found that creativity, analytics reasoning and systems thinking are among the 13 human skillsets required for the workforce to successfully adopt AI.
These sit alongside technical skills such as prompt engineering, AI model evaluation and AI process modelling, and hold the keys to effectively bringing together people and technology too drive value.
Through qualitative and observational research with AI-users, Multiverse devised a skills framework that can support workers and organisations looking to improve their AI maturity.
The most essential human skills identified for meaningful AI adoption include cognitive skills, meaning the mental abilities used for learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making.
This includes analytical reasoning, creativity, and systems thinking.
When this comes to AI, these will be essential in breaking down complex information for AI, creativity for the use of AI, and identifying patterns in AI performance.
People will also need responsible AI skills to ensure successful adoption, which includes AI ethics, such as spotting bias and recognising how this affects AI outcomes. People and teams will also require cultural sensitivity to identify how AI biases when it comes to geographic and cultural awareness.
Self management skills will also be important, such as curiosity, self-regulated learning, detail orientation, adaptability, and determination, which are typically skills employers seek out regardless of AI.
Communication skills, such as empathy, tailoring communication, and feedback exchange will also be sought after.
“Leaders are spending millions on AI tools, but their investment focus isn’t going to succeed. They think it’s a technology problem when it’s really a human and technology problem. Without a deliberate focus on capabilities like analytical reasoning and creativity, as well as culture and behaviours, AI projects will never deliver up to their potential,” said Gary Eimerman, Chief Learning Officer at Multiverse. “This framework provides a new model for talent development in the age of AI, which must include human skills as well as technical skills in order to drive tangible business results.”
Imogen Stanley, Senior Learning Scientist at Multiverse, who led the development of the skills taxonomy said: “We need to start looking beyond technical skills and think about the human skills that the workforce must hone to get the best out of AI.
“What we found during our first principles research phase was that skills like ethical oversight, output verification, and creative experimentation are the real differentiators of power AI users. By developing these specific skills, employees can move from being passive users of AI to active drivers of innovation and value.”
WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts that were linked to scam centres across the globe as tech companies attempt to crack down on criminal enterprises.
These accounts were allegedly linked to scam centres committing pig butchering, a type of scam involving social engineering, where scammers build relationships with their soon-to-be victims in an effort to defraud them and convince them to transfer money. Victims are often convinced to do this over cryptocurrency, which can be more difficult to track or get back.
Scams may start as a text message or an exchange on a dating app, but ultimately end up on a payment or crypto platform.
“In the course of just one scam, they often try to cycle people through many different platforms to ensure that any one service has only a limited view into the entire scam, making it more challenging to detect,” Meta wrote.
Many of these crime syndicates operate from Southeast Asian countries such as Myanmar and Cambodia, where people are recruited under false circumstances and often forced into the criminal practice.
Scammers are even employing AI to make these campaigns more convincing – OpenAI found that some scammers used ChatGPT to generate text messages linking victims to WhatsApp, then Telegram, where victims were then told to like TikTok videos in exchange for money.
Then, scammers convince victims to deposit money into a crypto account in order to access the amount of money they think they’ve earned.
While Meta and OpenAI have previously collaborated to investigate and take down accounts that have been linked to scam centres, the recent purge of 6.8 billion accounts was “proactive” and in an effort to delete the accounts before they could be used by the scam centres.
Meta is now urging users to take pause when interacting with strangers online, and to question their intentions, and verify their identity before thinking about exchanging any money.
The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) public cloud market grew 22.5% in 2024, reaching $171.8bn, according to Gartner, driven by the push AI.
Amazon retained the number one position in the IaaS market in 2024, followed by Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and Huawei.
In 2024, the top five IaaS providers accounted for 82.1% of the market. Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with revenue of 64.8 billion and 37.7% market share, followed by Microsoft with 23.9% market share. Google (9%), Alibaba Group (7.2%), and Huawei (4.3%) maintained their respective positions year-over-year.
“As enterprises continue to seek greater flexibility, improved resilience and optimized performance, there is sustained demand for cloud migration and modernization services,” said Hardeep Singh, Principal Analyst at Gartner.
“Enterprises want to transform their IT infrastructure by leveraging multiple platforms for AI and prioritizing modernization by migrating existing workloads to the cloud. They are also deploying cloud-native applications across diverse environments.” This trend is further fueled by the demand for flexibility with data residency and sovereignty, as enterprises seek to gradually transition to the cloud while keeping control over their data and operations.
“Cloud providers are investing heavily in AI infrastructure and capabilities to become leaders in the rapidly evolving AI-optimized IaaS market. They expect that AI will become a much larger revenue contributor in the future, even though it currently remains a relatively small slice of their overall revenue within the IaaS space,” said Singh.
“Emerging AI-optimized IaaS offerings from nonhyperscalers, or GPU as a service (GPUaaS) providers, though still nascent, have also played a key role in addressing immediate capacity requirements by offering flexible, high-performance compute on demand.”
Space Scotland, the not-for-profit organisations supporting the Scottish space industry, has appointed Dr Natasha Nicholson as their new chief executive.
Nicholson returns to Space Scotland after serving as a cluster manager, playing a critical role during its start.
With a doctorate in astrobiology and having held a range of roles in the science sector – from cross-cluster liaison manager for the Science and Technology Facilities Council at Harwell Campus, to the founding director of space research and development company Star Helix, to the chief scientific officer for the Arctic research station.
Nicholson will now take her skills and lead Space Scotland into its next development stage, focusing on the delivery of its national strategy, as well as responding to the commercial needs of Scotland’s space community.
“Scotland’s space community is still growing rapidly and as a vital role in the UK’s broader space economy,” she stated. “I look forward to working with stakeholders to ensure we remain focused, inclusive and impactful, delivering tangible results that clearly benefit the sector with economic growth, environmental responsibility, and opening new markets across disciplines.”
Space Scotland chair and board director Peter Young said: “Scotland’s space industry offers major opportunities across sustainability, launch, data and advanced manufacturing, while also enabling innovation in sectors like life sciences, AI and fintech.
“Natasha is the right person to help us harness that potential – her scientific knowledge, delivery focus and strong network made her an outstanding choice.”
Space Scotland will turn its focus on supporting its working groups in skills, sustainability, inclusion, infrastructure, and international engagement.
Dr Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, added: “With the first launches approaching from SaxaVord, increasing commercial opportunities in satellite manufacturing and data, and leading roles for universities in space science missions, there has never been a more important time for strong leadership to champion the space community.”
About a third (31%) of ransomware victims were affected multiple times in the last 13 months as gangs exploit ineffective defences and security fragmentation.
This is according to the Ransomware Insights Report 2025 from Barracuda Networks, Inc, which also shows that 74% of repeat victims say they are juggling too many security tools, and 61% say their tools don’t integrate – disrupting visibility and creating blind spots where attackers can hide.
The report is based on the findings of an international survey undertaken by Barracuda with Vanson Bourne, gathering insights from 2,000 IT and security decision-makers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The results highlight how ransomware remains a persistent and lucrative threat, ruthlessly exploiting security complexity and coverage gaps to implement multidimensional attacks for maximum disruption and financial gain.
Over half (57%) of the organisations surveyed were affected by ransomware, including 67% of those in healthcare, and 65% for local government.
Ransomware attackers have a one-in-three change of a pay out, the research found, as 32% of victims paid the attackers to recover or restore data, rising to 37% among organisations affected twice or more.
However, 41%of those who paid a ransom failed to recover all their data. There can be several reasons for this. The decryption tools provided by the attackers may not work, or they’ve only shared a partial key. Files can be damaged during the encryption and decryption processes, and sometimes the attackers take the ransom and don’t provide any decryption tools. This highlights how important it it so have have a good and regularly updated backup.
Many ransomware victims have insufficient coverage in key security areas. For example, fewer than half (47%) of the ransomware victims had implemented an email security solution, compared to 59% of non-victims. This matters because email is a primary attack vector for ransomware: 71% of organisations that suffered an email breach were also hit with ransomware.
Just under a quarter (24%) of the ransomware incidents experienced by respondents involved data encryption, while a significant number involved the attackers stealing (27%) and publishing data (also 27%), infecting devices with other malicious payloads (29%), installing backdoors for persistence (21%), and more.
The impact crater of a successful ransomware attack is expanding, from reputational harm (experienced by 41%) to tangible business impact such as loss of new business opportunities (25%) and payment pressure tactics that include threatening partners, shareholders, and customers (22%), and employees (16%).
“The findings make it clear that ransomware is an escalating threat, and fragmented security defences leave organisations immensely vulnerable,” said Neal Bradbury, chief product officer at Barracuda.
“In many cases attackers can move through victims’ networks, gaining access to devices, data and more without being detected and blocked.
“Too many victims are juggling an unmanageable number of disconnected tools, often introduced with the best intentions to strengthen protection. Tools that can’t work together, or which are not configured correctly, create security gaps and lead to breaches. A unified approach to security centred on a strong integrated platform is vital.”
Generative AI continues to gain venture capitalist funding, as the total deal value reached in the first half of 2025 exceeded the total value reached in all of 2024.
This rapid growth, which amounted to $49.2bn in the first half of 2025, shows no signs of slowing down as it is EY Ireland projects it to continue into the second half of 2025.
While the amount of capital rose, the actual deal volume fell in the first half of 2025 by 25% compared to the previous six months, EY Ireland found in its Generative AI Key Deals and Market Insights study.
The growth in deal value is driven by rising AI adoption by businesses as well as consumers, as well as increasing demand for AI solutions that are industry-specific. Further, AI infrastructure requirements, particularly when it comes to semiconductors, are also driving investment.
As training costs fall, generative AI investments have only become more attractive as major ROI seems more likely.
However, the reduction in the amount of deals reflects a maturing market, as GenAI reaches later stage, and therefore larger, investment rounds.
Late-stage investment transaction sizes increased three-fold to $1,533M from $481M in 2024. However, early-stage VC rounds decreased, but angle and seed rounds were unchanged.
VC seem largely interested in organisations that employ third-party AI foundation models for specialised, industry-specific software.
Agentic AI has also released a new avenue for growth as a burgeoning sect of AI. Notable investments in this arena include Capgemini’s acquisition of WNS3 for $3.3bn, and SoftBanks’ investment in OpenAI.
While other regions make moves in the AI arena, the US’s dominance in AI VC funding has only increased.
In the first half of 2025, the US accounted for 97% of the total deal value. It accounted for 70% of total deals in 2024, and 85% of the value of GenAI deals. The US’s share of deal volume, however, fell to 62%, reflecting a a downward trend in the number of total deals.
EMEA commands only 2% of deal value, and has actually fallen proportionally when it comes to the US.
“Europe has established a clear leadership position for itself in AI regulation but there is a fear in some quarters that this has been at the expense of innovation,” Grit Young, EY-Parthenon Partner at EY Ireland, wrote.
“This is not a binary question, however, and balance is required. It is important to regulate powerful technologies. On the other hand, regulation must not be allowed to impede innovation unreasonably, particularly if it applies only in one region.”
More than 500,000 people living with diabetes across Scotland are now using an app developed at the University of Dundee to manage their condition.
My Diabetes My Way (MDMW), developed by Drs Scott Cunningham and Debbie Wake at Dundee’s School of Medicine, has the potential to save the health services millions on pounds every year while improving the quality of life for those who use it.
MDMW was launched in 2008 to provide patients with an accessible means of actively managing their routine care. It contains multimedia resources for diabetes education, online leaning courses and offers people with diabetes access to their electronic personal health record (ePHR), facilitating personalised advice.
Use of this ePHR and the ability to learn about diabetes alongside a person’s own data have been shown to lead to improvements in diabetes control and management. This helps bring about improvements in quality of life and cost-savings to the health service.
“We are very proud that MDMW continues to help individuals and healthcare systems in multiple ways,” said Dr Cunningham, senior lecturer in Diabetes, Endocrinology and Reproductive Biology and Principal Investigator for the MDMW programme. “For the 50,000 users logging in to self-manage their condition, this is potentially life-changing for them.
“Engagement with this tool can result in a delay in complications and a delay in starting more expensive medicine. This is vital at a time when the costs of treating diabetes in an ageing population is growing but, more importantly, it also means a higher quality of life for people living with diabetes.
“The total number of registrants is actually higher than 50,000 and we will continue to work to encourage them, and those who have not yet registered for MDMW, to benefit from this comprehensive app. We know that MDMW is among the most cost-effective interventions available to support diabetes management.”
An analysis of MDMW data found that users of the service were likely to experience an improvement in their quality of life and their diabetes control. It is estimated that every £1 spent on MDMW has resulted in £5 of cost savings through a reduction in heart, kidney, eye and foot disease for patients and a reduction in treatment and medication costs to the NHS.
Rates of diabetes are still growing, with overall prevalence increasing by between 14,000-15,000 people each year in Scotland.
The success of MDMW led to the development of the MyWay Digital Health spinout, which looks to develop the service for use in healthcare systems in NHS England and other countries.
A survey of 200 senior developers at medium-large sized brands by enterprise CMS Storyblok has revealed the factors that developers say make them most productive at work.
Storyblok surveyed developers on their job satisfaction, personal working preferences, and how their job impacts their personal life.
AI is dominating how developers code – 89.5% of respondents said they use AI to code frequently or constantly. Ranking the reasons why, the top was ‘increasing efficiency’ at 30%, followed by automating routine tasks (23%), and improving skillset at 22%.
Interestingly, when asked if AI would enable them to do their marketing counterparts’ jobs in the future, 28.5% of developers said they could do all of a marketing job, 45.5% said most of it, and 20% some.
Only 5% said they couldn’t do any of it. Marketers were slightly less bullish, with 18.5% saying they could do all of a developer’s job, 32% most of it, 37.5% some of it, and 8.5% none.
On needing help with a work problem, AI was preferred to people. 34% of developers said they now turn to AI for the answer, with only 20% saying they would ask a colleague.
Work-life Balance
Sixty-six percent of developers said they have a great work life balance, with only 2% saying it was ‘bad’. 13% said they are ‘always stressed’ by their work, 16% are stressed ‘most of the time’, 58% ‘some of the time’, and 13% are ‘never stressed’.
When asked what made them most unhappy in their day-to-day jobs, the chief culprit was ‘maintaining and fixing bugs on legacy system’ (27.5%), followed by ‘dealing with non-technical stakeholders who don’t understand technical limitations’ (21.5%), and ‘a lack of clear requirements and constantly shifting priorities’ (14%).
Digging into the numbers, the situation becomes more complicated at home. One in four developers said they argued ‘all the time’ with their partner or spouse about their job, with 17% saying it was ‘often’ and 22% ‘sometimes’. 13% said they didn’t argue at all.
When asked how often they checked work emails during time off, 13.5% of developers said every hour, 57% said ‘multiple times a day’, 18% once a day, and only 4% said never.
Despite this, 94% of developers said they have no regrets about their chosen career, and 92% would be very happy if their real or imagined children followed the same path.
“Developers are among the most exposed to the impact of technological developments, so gaining a deeper understanding of their personal workplace preferences, stresses, and productivity more broadly can help businesses determine how best to manage change, improve happiness, and productivity,” Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok, said.
“For example, we see a clear problem with many developers being unable to switch off on holidays. Simple policy and expectation changes could alleviate this problem and may have the knock-on effect of lowering stress levels.”
Drivers in the UK can save £1,5000 on new electric vehicles, with the first eligible models confirmed as the UK government makes owning an EV cheaper and easier for thousands of people.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander has confirmed that buyers can enjoy discounts of £1,500 off four Citroën models – the Citroën ë-C3, ë–C4, ë-C5 and the ë-Berlingo – from today. The discount will be automatically applied in the purchase of the vehicle and customers do not need to complete any paperwork.
The cheapest of these models, the ë-C3, costs around £22,500, according to AutoCar, while the ë-C5 Aircross costs about £32,500.
The four models are the first to be approved for the discounts under the government’s new £650 million Electric Car Grant (ECG) scheme – which will continue to knock money off the price of new electric cars as more models are approved in the coming days and weeks.
The ECG offers carmakers the chance to apply discounts at the point of sale for new eligible EVs which are measured against the highest manufacturing sustainability standards.
The approval of the first 4 models come as over 17,300 public chargepoints have been added to the UK network since July 2024 – a 27% increase on the year.
More than 82,000 public chargepoints are now available, with one chargepoint added every half an hour, and over 100,000 on the way in the coming years.
“With the first four models approved today and more to come over the next few weeks, this summer we’re making owning an electric car cheaper, easier and a reality for thousands more people across the UK,” transport secretary Heidi Alexander
“Once again we’re delivering our Plan for Change by standing firmly on the side of motorists and manufacturers, driving down costs for consumers, supporting jobs and putting money back in people’s pockets.”
With many drivers citing upfront costs as a key barrier to buying an EV, the discounts will bring down the price of electric cars to more closely match their petrol and diesel counterparts. Drivers can also save up to £1,500 a year in fuel and running costs when switching to an EV.
The move follows the department’s £63 million package to boost charging infrastructure across the UK, including by making it easier to charge at home for people without a driveway. This will help drivers charge on their home electricity rates and run their EV for as little as 2p a mile – that’s London to Birmingham for £2.50.
The new Electric Car Grant, which opened to applications from manufacturers last month with discounts of up to £3,750 available, is the latest in a series of moves showing the government is on the side of British drivers. The grant follows a record £1.6 billion invested to tackle potholes and fuel duty frozen at 5p until spring 2026, saving the average motorist on average £59 a year.
“We welcome the support of the Electric Car Grant and are delighted to be the first to have our electric range, including the New ë-C3, New ë-C4, New ë -C5 Aircross and ë-Berlingo, approved and eligible,” Greg Taylor, managing director, Citroën UK.
“At Citroën we want everyone to have the opportunity to make the switch to an electric car and this support will help make our cars more accessible for our customers.”
The government is working closely with the industry to make the discounts available to drivers quickly, with new guidance published by the Department for Transport to help manufacturers apply as easily as possible.
In total, the government is investing £4.5 billion to turbocharge the switch to EVs, securing the UK’s position as a world-leader in electric vehicle adoption – with Britain the largest EV market in Europe in 2024 and sales up a fifth on the previous year – while helping put more money in people’s pockets.
This latest move comes alongside the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate, which requires manufacturers to sell increasing percentages of zero emission vehicles each year.
Recent changes to the mandate give industry the certainty, stability and support they’ve been asking for, alongside crucial trade deals with the US, India and the European Union to support the UK’s automotive sector and protect jobs following the recent global economic headwinds.
AI agents and AI-ready data are two of the fastest advancing technologies in 2025, according to analysts at Gartner.
These technologies are experiencing heightened interest this year, accompanies by ambitious projections and speculative promises, Gartner analysts find.
“With AI investment remaining strong this year, a sharper emphasis is being placed on using AI for operational scalability and real-time intelligence,” said Haritha Khandabattu, senior director analyst at Gartner. “This has led to a gradual pivot from generative AI (GenAI) as a central focus, toward the foundational enablers that support sustainable AI delivery, such as AI-ready data and AI agents.”
Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Gartner Hype Cycle methodology gives a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of specific business goals.
Among the AI innovations Gartner expects will reach mainstream adoption within the next five years, multimodal AI and AI trust, risk and security management (TRiSM) have been identified as dominating the Gartner Peak of Inflated Expectations. Together, these developments will enable more robust, innovative and responsible AI applications, transforming how businesses and organisations operate.
“Despite the enormous potential business value of AI, it isn’t going to materialize spontaneously,” said Khandabattu. “Success will depend on tightly business aligned pilots, proactive infrastructure benchmarking, and coordination between AI and business teams to create tangible business value.”
AI Agents
AI agents are autonomous or semiautonomous software entities that use AI techniques to perceive, make decisions, take actions and achieve goals in their digital or physical environments. Using AI practices and techniques such as LLMs, organisations are creating and deploying AI agents to achieve complex tasks.
“To reap the benefits of AI agents, organisations need to determine the most relevant business contexts and use cases, which is challenging given no AI agent is the same and every situation is different,” said Khandabattu.
“Although AI agents will continue to become more powerful, they can’t be used in every case, so use will largely depend on the requirements of the situation at hand.”
AI-ready data ensures datasets are optimized for AI applications, enhancing accuracy and efficiency. Readiness is determined through the data’s ability to prove its fitness for use for specific AI use cases. It can only be determined contextually to the AI use case and the AI technique used, which forces new approaches to data management.
According to Gartner, organizations that invest in AI at scale need to evolve their data management practices and capabilities to extend them to AI. This will cater to existing and upcoming business demands, ensure trust, avoid risk and compliance issues, preserve intellectual property and reduce bias and hallucinations.
Multimodal AI
Multimodal AI models are trained with multiple types of data simultaneously, such as images, video, audio and text. By integrating and analysing diverse data sources, they can better understand complex situations better than models that use only one type of data. This helps users make sense of the world and opens up new avenues for AI applications.
Multimodal AI will become increasingly integral to capability advancement in every application and software product across all industries over the next five years, according to Gartner research.
AI TRiSM
AI TRiSM plays a crucial role in ensuring ethical and secure AI deployment. It comprises four layers of technical capabilities that support enterprise policies for all AI use cases and help assure AI governance, trustworthiness, fairness, safety, reliability, security, privacy, and data protection.
“AI brings new trust, risk and security management challenges that conventional controls don’t address,” said Khandabattu. “Organisations must evaluate and implement layered AI TRiSM technology to continuously support and enforce policies across all AI entities in use.”
UK manufacturing and engineering SMEs are facing high costs and a skills shortage as labour costs mount.
This is according to Enginuity‘s newest SME Snapshot, which captured insight from 135 manufacturing and engineering SMEs from across the UK, representing 6,500 employees and £1.1bn worth of sales.
High employment costs are outstripping energy costs as the most cited source of pressure to raise prices, the report found.
Most SMEs (76%) are planning to pass these costs onto customers by raising prices. The rise in National Insurance contributions from employers in the last year’s autumn budget by 1.2% has been a strain on my businesses, particularly SMEs.
But this is not the only pressure SMEs are facing, as the report showing that 80% of SMEs are finding it difficult to find skilled staff in the past six months.
Only 24% of SMEs have not been affected by labour and skills shortages, while only 15% find the UK labour market attractive.
“This report is a striking confirmation of how severely the skills system is failing the majority of engineering and manufacturing SMEs, stifling their ability to grow,” Poppy Bramford, policy officer for Enginuity, said.
Despite these top challenges, most SMEs are optimistic about the coming year, with many making commitments to invest in training to prepare their labour force.
SMEs seemed to be aware of the UK government’s industrial strategy that will aim to support businesses with skills training, investment, and lower fuel prices. While awareness of this was high, only about a third were more optimistic because of it.
“For SMEs to realise the ambitions of the UK government on economic growth, the skills landscape must move beyond policy chop and change by injecting longevity and SME engagement into policy creation,” Bramford said.
Firms will soon be able to give retail consumers access to crypto exchange traded notes (cETNs), under changes announced by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Crypto ETNs that retail consumers can access must be traded on an FCA-approved, UK-based investment exchange under new rules from the FCA.
Financial promotion rules will apply so consumers get the right information and aren’t offered inappropriate incentives to invest.
“Since we restricted retail access to cETNs, the market has evolved, and products have become more mainstream and better understood,” David Geale, executive director of payments and digital finance at the FCA, said.
“In light of this, we’re providing consumers with more choice, while ensuring there are protections in place. This should mean people get the information they need to assess whether the level of risk is right for them.”
The Consumer Duty will apply to firms offering these products to retail investors. However, there won’t be coverage from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS)Link is external. Consumers should ensure they understand the risks before deciding to invest.
This is the latest development as the FCA continues to establish a regulatory framework for crypto. They have outlined their crypto roadmap and recently published proposals on stablecoins as well as other aspects of the regime.
The FCA’s ban on retail access to cryptoasset derivatives will remain in place. The FCA will continue to monitor market developments and consider its approach to high-risk investments.
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes has announced her intention to step down and not seek re-election at next year’s Scottish Parliamentary elections.
Forbes, who serves as the MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, cited childcare responsibilities as the main reason for her departure from office.
Her daughter turned three this month, and Forbes said she did not wish to “miss any more of the precious early years of family life.”
She will continue to serve her constituency and as deputy first minister for nine months until the May 2026 elections.
Forbes was first elected as an MSP in 2016, later serving as Scotland’s first female finance minister in 2020 under Nicola Sturgeon.
“I am in no doubt about the scale of my duties as a local representative, an activist and campaigner, and a government minister,” Forbes said in a letter to the first minister.
“Quite rightly this job entails long days far from home, constant attention and total dedication.”
“As I consider the upcoming election and the prospects of another term, I have concluded that I do not wish to seek re-election and miss any more of the precious early years of family life.”
She said that she will continue to support Swinney, and that she will campaign for the SNP in the next election to support Swinney for re-election as First Minister.
Swinney wrote that on social media honour Forbes’ decision: “The challenges of frontline politics are considerable, and I understand the decision she has made although I wish it was not the case.
“I am pleased that Kate will continue to serve in my government and to make a significant contribution to the work of the Scottish National Party.
“I wish her and her family well and for every happiness for the future.”
Forbes was known for her depth of knowledge and strong recall of the facts shaping some of Scotland’s industries, as well as her strong support for the Scottish tech ecosystem. Forbes was responsible for tasking Mark Logan with the Scottish technology ecosystem review which delved into the struggles of the Scottish entrepreneurial ecosystem.
She has also commissioned the Pathways report form Ana Stewart and Mark Logan, and appointed Logan and later Stewart as Chief Entrepreneurial Advisors to the Scottish Government.
While Forbes may be remembered fondly for her pro-business campaigning, her conservative views on abortion, gay marriage, and trans rights have made her place in the Scottish government controversial.
She lost her bid for First Minister narrowly to Humza Yousef, and was appointed Deputy First Minister to John Swinney after supporting him in his bid for First Minister.
Debenhams Group, the online firm behind brands including Debenhams, PrettyLittleThing, boohoo, boohooMAN and Karen Millen, has launched its AI Skills Academy – a new programme to equip employees with practical AI skills.
The Academy is being rolled out in partnership with Multiverse, the workforce development platform, to boost growth across Debenhams Group by closing the AI skills gap.
Fully funded through the Group’s £1.35 million Apprenticeship Levy, a government fund for work-based training, the AI Skills Academy provides employees with structured, on-the-job learning that will deliver tangible value to the Debenhams Group business.
Staff will be taught all the technical skills and behaviours required to embrace AI in their day-to-day work.
Training will include using AI tools to boost productivity and free up time for higher-value strategic work, and applying AI solutions to streamline operations and reduce manual tasks.
Further, staff will build AI systems in-house to accelerate digital transformation and reduce reliance on external providers.
The AI Skills Academy supports a key pillar of Debenhams Group’s digital transformation roadmap, aimed at embedding a culture of innovation and continuous learning.
The new programme will be launched internally via a company-wide communication campaign, including in-person sessions delivered by Multiverse to help teams understand the opportunities on offer.
“Adopting AI is not just about investing in our systems – it’s about investing in our people,” Dan Finley, CEO of Debenhams Group, said.
“With the launch of the AI Skills Academy, we’re giving our teams the tools to think differently, work smarter and build for the future. This is about unlocking the potential of every colleague to drive real innovation across the Group.”
The Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) has significantly increased its IT spending, investing nearly £5m in laptops, phones, and tablets over the past two years.
This investment is a key part of DSIT’s strategy to scale up internal digital capabilities and empower its workforce, supporting the UK’s ambition to become a global leader in technology and AI.
Data obtained through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request and analysed by Parliament Think Tank reveals a sharp year-on-year rise in device procurement. Between June 2023 and May 2025, DSIT purchased 3,435 laptops, 4,466 mobile phones, and 19 tablets – with laptop acquisitions up 48% and mobile phone purchases surging by 97% in the latest financial year alone.
The expenditure on mobile phones alone has tripled, jumping from £531,000 in 2023–24 to £1.58 million in 2024–25, underscoring a strategic push towards mobile-first, hybrid, and flexible working environments.
This surge in IT investment is more than a routine technology upgrade. It reflects DSIT’s commitment to building a digitally agile workforce equipped with the tools necessary to drive complex innovation, policy development, and AI safety initiatives.
As artificial intelligence and digital transformation reshape industries and public services, DSIT’s operational spend is directly aligned with the government’s broader mission to futureproof Britain’s digital economy and maintain its competitive edge on the global stage.
By empowering its employees with state-of-the-art technology, DSIT aims to foster collaboration, agility, and efficiency — all critical components to delivering on the UK’s tech and AI leadership ambitions.
“As the UK strengthens its position as a global leader in science, technology and AI it is encouraging to see DSIT making a strategic and long-term investment in the digital capabilities of its workforce,” Sachin Agrawal, managing director for Zoho UK said.
“In today’s fast moving digital landscape it is becoming increasingly important to empower employees with secure, modern tools that are essential to foster collaboration and agility.”
“This forward-thinking approach sets a strong example for businesses and other public sector organisations to consider following in the footsteps of to align workforce enablement with innovation goals to deliver against complex challenges.
“This will not only enhance productivity and operational effectiveness but also reinforce the UKs broader ambition to lead in digital transformation and AI policy.”
Stuart Harvey, CEO of Datactics, commented: “It’s encouraging to see DSIT significantly ramp up IT spending, as investing in modern, secure technology is essential to supporting the UK’s leadership in AI governance and digital transformation.
“But infrastructure alone isn’t enough. As we’ve seen from recent high-profile failures, better, faster, and more secure devices can’t compensate for weak passwords or a lack of data skills. To be truly future-proof, investment in infrastructure must go hand in hand with investment in data maturity and skills, ensuring teams can identify risks and develop AI systems responsibly, ethically, and safely.”
The UK government is investing in defence and clean energy to protect existing jobs and create thousands more in Scotland.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves visited Scotland on Friday, discussing how the Spending Review will increase jobs in Scotland through funding for defence and energy.
Increasing defence spending to 2.6% could lead to around 0.3% higher GDP in the long run, equivalent to around £11 billion of GDP in today’s money, the government estimates.
“We’re seizing the huge potential and opportunities that Scotland has on offer,” chancellor Reeves said.
“Whether it’s in defence to keep the UK safe, or clean energy to power all corners of the country, this government is backing Scotland with billions of pounds of investment to grow the economy and create jobs.”
The spending review also saw investments that will make Scotland the home of the UK’s clean energy revolution. While Acorn – an Aberdeenshire-based carbon capture project – is still subject to a final investment decision, this £200 million is just part of the UK government’s commitment to investing in Scotland and has the potential to safeguard 18,000 North Sea jobs whilst creating 15,000 new ones in Scotland’s clean energy transformation.
Great British Energy will also be headquartered in Aberdeen, to drive clean power generation across the UK, boosting homegrown energy.
The Chancellor’s visit comes as defence spending rises to 2.6% of GDP and figures from 23/24 reveal that MOD spend maintains 26,100 skilled jobs across Scotland. The Spending Review also committed £250 million to secure the future of HMNB Clyde – the first stage of a multi-decade, multi-billion renewal project and all three Clyde shipyards are currently fulfilling contracts for the Royal Navy.
The funding will also see the addition of three new E-7 Wedgetail aircraft be added to the RAF’s fleet, which will see more jobs created at the Boeing base in Moray.
“The UK Government is investing in defence to ensure Britain’s security and deter our adversaries and drive economic growth,” Scottish Secretary Ian Murray said.
“This investment is a massive jobs opportunity for Scotland – this ‘defence dividend’ is good news for Scotland, where it will help create skilled jobs, drive economic growth and help tackle the critical skills gaps facing the country in sectors such as nuclear, construction, maritime and project management.”
The CyberScotland Partnership (CSP) has appointed Karen Meechan, CEO of ScotlandIS, as the new Chair of the Partnership, which came into effect on 1 August, 2025.
Karen succeeds Clare El Azebbi, Head of the Scottish Government’s National Cyber Resilience Unit, who has held the position of Chair since 2023. Clare has played a pivotal role in shaping CSP’s direction and leading a cross-sector collaborative approach to cyber resilience in Scotland.
Karen Meechan brings extensive experience in digital innovation and cyber collaboration. She is dedicated to helping solve the challenges the cyber security industry faces in order to help Scotland’s technology landscape to thrive.
Karen has been a passionate supporter of the Scottish digital tech industry since joining ScotlandIS in 2004 to oversee operations and memberships, and worked her way up to CEO, a role she took on in 2021.
ScotlandIS is home to Scotland’s cyber cluster, a connected community aiming to drive growth and innovation in the sector and to support the growing skills pipeline.
“It’s a privilege to take on the role of Chair of the CyberScotland Partnership,” Karen Meechan said.
“As we continue to face an escalating and unpredictable cyber landscape, collaboration across sectors has never been more critical. I look forward to working with our partners to strengthen Scotland’s cyber resilience, support innovation and ensure that our digital future is secure and inclusive for everyone.”
Outgoing Chair Clare El Azebbi commented: “It has been a pleasure to serve as Chair of the CyberScotland Partnership. Over the past few years, we’ve built a strong and collaborative network of partners who are committed to improving Scotland’s cyber resilience. I’m confident that under Karen’s leadership, the Partnership will continue to grow in impact and ambition.”
The CyberScotland Partnership consists of 23 partners, who work together to improve cyber resilience across Scotland in a coordinated and coherent way.
It is committed to widening its reach to all in Scotland, providing practical, tailored advice and guidance for every individual and organisation, with the aim of raising awareness of cyber threats and enhancing resilience to build a safer, secure and prosperous Scotland.
A new finance festival will be held in Edinburgh in September in a hopes of bringing people together in the thousands to promote the city as an ethical finance hub.
Edinburgh Finance Festival will feature a range of events from September 15 to 26 hosted by a variety of partners including Scottish Renewables Onshore Wind Conference, the FinTech Scotland Festival, and the Ethical Finance Global summit.
The festival is being lead by Global Ethical Finance Initiative (GEFI), which also host its summit. GEFI expects more than 2,500 delegates to attend the festival, which will contribute about £1m to the city economy.
“Over the past 10 years Ethical Finance Global has grown from a single summit into a wider programme that tackles some of the biggest challenges facing finance today,” Omar Shaikh, managing director of GEFI said.
“This new expanded festival brings together leaders from across finance, technology and energy to focus on climate change, social justice and economic uncertainty.
“Scotland’s role as a centre for responsible finance continues to strengthen, with this event providing a platform to share practical ideas and solutions.
“The festival highlights how finance can be a force for good by supporting a fairer economy and a greener future.
“It also offers a chance for experts and policymakers to come together and push for change, at a time when global tensions and climate pressures are making the need for ethical finance more urgent than ever.”
One of the flagship events will include the DIGIT FinTech Summit on September 24 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre as part of the FinTech Scotland Festival, which is partnering with GEFI. S
peakers will include executives from top UK banks, regulators, and leading FinTechs, delving into the top trends of the sector from AI to security and compliance. The event will be followed by an awards night that will honour some of the best and brightest in the Scottish FinTech ecosystem.
“Scotland has a rich heritage in financial services stretching back more than 300 years,” Sandy Begbie, chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise said.
“It’s fitting that our finance festival is being held in Edinburgh, where much of our financial services history was made.
“The festival offers a great chance for our members to network, take part in events, and connect with colleagues from around the world on a wide range of topics.”
The Ethical Finance summit will feature discussions ranging from tariffs to climate change, with he onshore wind conference highlighting Scotland’s renewables sector and net zero goals.
Only a quarter (26%) of job candidates trust AI will fairly evaluate them, even though just over half of candidates (52%) believe AI screens their application information, Gartner found.
A first quarter of 2025 survey of 2,918 job candidates found that 32% were concerned about AI potentially failing their applications, and 25% said they trust employers less if they are using AI to evaluate their information.
Furthermore, only half of candidates trusted that the jobs they were applying for were legitimate.
While candidates are concerned about employer use of AI, they are leveraging the technology in their own applications. A fourth quarter 2024 survey from Gartner of 3,290 job candidates found that four in 10 candidates (39%) said they used AI during the application process.
Those who leverages the technology did so to generate text for their CV (54%), generate text for a cover letter (50%), generate text for writing samples (36%), or generate text for answers to questions on the assessment (29%).
“It’s getting harder for employers to evaluate candidates’ true abilities, and in some cases, their identities. Employers are increasingly concerned about candidate fraud,” said Jamie Kohn, senior research director, in the Gartner HR practice. “Candidate fraud creates cybersecurity risks that can be far more serious than making a bad hire.”
A second quarter 2025 Gartner survey of 3,000 job candidates found that 6% admitted to participating in interview fraud – either posting as someone else or having someone else pose as them in an interview. Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake.
Uncertainty surrounding AI could make candidates even more selective when it comes to the job application process. According to Gartner research, 51% of candidates accepted a job offer in their most recent application process (Q2 2025) a substantial decline from Q2 2023, when 74% of candidates accepted their most recent offer.
To combat candidate fraud, while retaining candidate trust, employers should have a multi-layer fraud mitigation strategy that focuses on three steps:
Setting clear expectations and communicating hiring standards. Employers should explain to candidates how they define acceptable use of AI and emphasise their fraud detection efforts including the legal consequences if fraudulent behaviour is detected.
Using the assessment process to uncover fraud. Recruiters should know how to detect evasive behaviours and assessment tools should include anti-cheating safeguards such as conducting in-person interviews. Gartner research found 62% of candidates said they are more likely to apply to a position if the organisation requires in-person interviews (2Q25).
Refining assessment methods throughout candidate evaluation. Fraud prevention must extend beyond the initial hiring phase. Employers should focus on system-level validation rather than individual surveillance – tightening background checks, using risk-based data monitoring and embedding detection tools like identity verification and anomaly alerts in recruiting systems.
The UK’s competition regulator has found that the cloud market is “not working well” and is anti-competitive, prescribing specific requirements for Microsoft and Amazon.
The Competition and Market Authority’s final report on the UK cloud market found that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft hold dominant positions in the cloud market, driving down competition and therefore, hurting consumers.
The CMA’s report hit out at Microsoft in particular over its costs to Amazon and Google customers looking to use its software.
Under its new powers, the CMA can take action on organisations deemed to have strategic market status in order to fix any competition concerns.
The report recommends that “this would enable the CMA to impose targeted and bespoke interventions to address the concerns we have identified, including with respect to features where there are specification risks around the design of effective market interventions.”
Microsoft and Amazon have yet to be designated as having strategic market status in the cloud market, but the CMA is now launching a probe into this, which could come into effect in 2026.
A lack of competition in the cloud market could be driving up costs, offering consumers less choice, and staling innovation, the CMA found.
AWS and Microsoft, for which Azure is its cloud offering, each hold about 30 to 40% of the cloud market, while Google has just over 10% of the market.
Microsoft has come out against the CMA’s findings, saying that the report “misses the mark again, ignoring that the cloud market has never been so dynamic and competitive, with record investment and rapid, AI-driven changes.”
A Microsoft spokesperson also said that the CMA recommendations “fail to cover Google, one of the fastest-growing cloud market participants.”
An AWS spokesperson said that the report “disregards clear evidence of robust competition in the UK’s IT services industry.
“The action proposed by the inquiry group is unwarranted and undermines the substantial investment and innovation that have already benefitted hundreds of thousands of UK businesses.”
Google, however, welcomed the report, saying that the CMA should take “swift action.”
“The conclusive finding that restrictive licensing harms cloud customers and competition is a watershed moment for the UK,” Chris Lindsay, Google Cloud’s vice president of customer engineering in EMEA said.
“Swift action from the (CMA’s) Digital Markets Unit is essential to ensure British businesses pay a fair price and to unleash choice, innovation and economic growth in the UK.”
Despite the growing global attention on AI and its impact on businesses, cloud transformation also ranks as a critical priority for UK tech leaders, according to new research from Coursera, in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Nearly all (94%) UK tech leaders say cloud transformation is a key business goal in the next three years, compared to 88% who are prioritising AI. This is reflected in the skilling priorities for tech leadership, with foundational IT capabilities including cloud (70%), data (59%) and cybersecurity (52%) skills, ranked as critically important, above AI skills (50%).
Coursera and AWS surveyed 750+ senior technology executives in six countries, leading digital transformation initiatives across the United Kingdom, France, the United States, India, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.
Critical Skills
More than half (52%) of UK tech leaders do not think their current team members have the skills needed to achieve their business transformation goals in the next 12-18 months.
To overcome this, three-quarters (75%) of these leaders see training existing employees as critical in the next 12 to 18 months, while two-thirds (67%) see keeping pace with technology as the most urgent driver for skills development within their team.
Despite this focus on transformation-related skilling drives, AI is only the fourth-highest skill in terms of priority for tech leaders.
In fact, reflecting the increasing risk of threats to businesses, cybersecurity ranks higher in importance than AI, taking third place.
This comes as attack frequencies rise in the UK – over a quarter (27%) of companies were hit by a cyber-attack in the past year, up from just 16%. Recognising the implications for their businesses, 62% of UK tech leaders say staying ahead of security threats is a key driver of skills development.
Other key drivers of skills development across tech organisations include managing complex infrastructure (46%), optimising cloud spend and IT budgets (46%), and aligning product to business strategy (46%).
British tech leaders are already seeing benefits for current employees from skilling investments. These include enhanced performance and productivity leading to better work outputs (79%), and improved talent mobility (59%), with team members better able to take on new roles and responsibilities within the organisation.
Automation
While cloud transformation is topping the priorities list for skilling strategy, AI and automation are fundamentally changing the way we work.
With significant shifts in the future of work led by automation, more than half (54%) of UK tech leaders anticipate that 30-50% of their own tasks will be automated within the next three years.
Nearly all (99%) respondents anticipate that their codebases will be partially AI generated or developed with AI assistance in the next 3 years – and 86% percent of tech leaders anticipate that up to 20 to 50% of their codebase will be either AI-generated or developed with AI assistance.
While automation will provide more time for strategic work, skills are a vital part of this AI transition across sectors.
Globally, more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) believe that all technical roles addressed will be impacted in some way by task automation due to developments in AI in the next three years. Software developer (42%) and systems developer roles (41%) are anticipated to be most significantly impacted.
With an impetus to secure the right skills for technology transformation, UK tech leaders now want new hires to already possess AI skills on day one.
Over two-thirds (68%) of UK tech leaders expect new hires, regardless of their specific role, to understand how generative AI could be applied to their work tasks.
Data suggests that there is demand for educational institutions to respond to these employer demands. Insights from Coursera’s Micro-Credentials Impact Report 2025 highlight that nine in 10 (93%) students believe GenAI training belongs in degree programmes, while nine in ten (94%) employers believe universities should equip graduates with GenAI skills for entry-level roles.
Despite this demand for employees to possess key job skills before day one in the office, a similar number of leaders (74%) acknowledge they cannot depend on hiring alone to fulfill AI skills gaps, indicating that training must intervene to fill them.
“Tech leaders may be under increasing pressure to deliver AI transformation, but our research shows that they view the cloud as an equally essential foundation.
“You can’t scale AI capabilities without this foundation – and UK tech leaders are rightly prioritising cloud transformation to build the infrastructure, security and data capabilities upon which AI depends” said Mustafa Furniturewala, CTO, Coursera.
“While AI skills will be vital in the coming years – with the UK government identifying investment in the technology as the new economic frontier – adjacent IT skills cannot be overlooked. In fact, AI currently ranks fourth on the list of top skills priorities, behind foundational IT expertise in cloud, data and cybersecurity.
“AI deployment is inherently connected to, and dependent upon these areas – from data science to cybersecurity and cloud operations – and successfully prioritising them together as part of a unified strategy will confer significant advantage upon leaders across industries.”
Edinburgh-based Frontier Robotics is commercialising its remotely operated underwater vehicles for deployment at an offshore wind simulation facility.
The robotics startup based in the National Robotarium has reached the milestone by making its first commercial sale with the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, a UK offshore renewables technology innovation centres.
Frontier Robotics has developed state-of-the-art cameras that can be deployed on remotely operated underwater vehicles that will allow these robots to take realistic images of offshore assets like wind platforms and wind turbines, which can then be used in a simulator to emulate real-life situations.
“Seeing Frontier Robotics develop from incorporation to now securing its first sale demonstrates what’s possible when we properly support innovation in Scotland’s high-growth sectors. Its success creates benefits that extend far beyond one company – strengthening our robotics ecosystem while helping critical industries like offshore energy operate more sustainably,” Lisa Farrell, Business Development Manager at the National Robotarium, where the company is based, said.
“This is exactly why the National Robotarium exists – to help promising technologies move from concept to commercial reality. We create an environment where talented innovators can access specialised resources rarely found in one location.”
Inspection and maintenance of offshore assets – backbones of Scotand’s energy transition – can be made complicated by the unpredictable nature of the world’s oceans. Murky, wavy water can be a barrier to accurate monitoring and image taking.
Frontier Robotics’ system leverages sensor fusion techniques to bypass these obstacles, offering enhanced visual clarity and 3D mapping through Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) technology.
SLAM enables the underwater robots to create comprehensive 3D maps of their surroundings, all the while generating locational data, providing the foundations for automated and autonomous operations.
With the UK’s offshore wind sector featuring more than 2,600 turbines across 43 wind farms requiring up t three maintenance checks a year, the new technology can help address critical challenges in the industry.
These operations can account for up to a fifth of total offshore wind emissions through vessel operations and helicopter transfers. The new system offers a way to reduce costs and carbon footprints, while offering faster and better decision making.
“Offshore renewable asset inspection is a very challenging and hazardous task in the energy sector. With the UK’s ambitious offshore expansion plans, innovative systems that enhance safety and efficiency aren’t just beneficial – they’re essential,” Jonatan Scharff Willners, CEO of Frontier Robotics said.
“This sale to ORE Catapult is really important and helps demonstrate the value of our technology to the market. We’re grateful to the National Robotarium for their support. Being based there, we have access to world-class facilities and exceptional engineering talent and that has accelerated our development timeline.
“Our vision is to become the default autonomy provider for underwater inspections globally, transforming how the industry approaches maintenance and monitoring, and this sale is a major milestone in our journey to delivering that vision.”
Ken Chan, Robotics Operation Lead at ORE Catapult, said: “Our VDARE simulation platform has been created to accurately represent real world offshore assets and environments, with data integrated into our simulations that respond in real time.
“We have conducted underwater trials using robotics systems to map subsea environments, and have imported data mapping seabed structures, water clarity, temperature and salt levels to create interactive 3D scenes built on accurate, real-world measurements.
“Our mission is to de-risk offshore robotics and accelerate development timelines through affordable, modular, and scalable test environments, and the technology we are now using from Frontier Robotics is supporting us to do that.”
AI adoption is greatly outpacing AI security and governance, according to IBM’s new Cost of a Data Breach Report.
While the overall number of organisations experiencing an AI-related breach is a small representation of the researched population, this is the first time security, governance, and access controls for AI have been studied in this report, which suggests AI is already an easy, high value target.
Over one in ten (13%) of organisations reported breaches of AI models or applications, while 8% of organisations reported not knowing if they had been compromised in this way.
Of those compromised, 97% report not having AI access controls in place.
As a result, 60% of the AI-related security incidents led to compromised data and 31% led to operational disruption.
This year’s results show that organisations are bypassing security and governance for AI in favour of do-it-now AI adoption. Ungoverned systems are more likely to be breached – and more costly when they are.
“The data shows that a gap between AI adoption and oversight already exists, and threat actors are starting to exploit it,” said Suja Viswesan, vice president, Security and Runtime Products, IBM.
“The report revealed a lack of basic access controls for AI systems, leaving highly sensitive data exposed, and models vulnerable to manipulation. As AI becomes more deeply embedded across business operations, AI security must be treated as foundational. The cost of inaction isn’t just financial, it’s the loss of trust, transparency and control.”
However, the report did reveal that organisations using AI and automation extensively throughout their security operations saved an average $1.9 million in breach costs and reduced the breach lifecycle by an average of 80 days.
The 2025 report, conducted by Ponemon Institute, sponsored and analysed by IBM, is based on data breaches experienced by 600 organisations globally from March 2024 through February 2025.
Breaches and the AI Era
AI governance policies are lacking, with 63% of breached organisations either not having and AI governance policy, or still in the development stage. Of the organisations that have AI governance policies in place, only 34% perform regular audits for unsanctioned AI.
One in five organisations reported a breach due to shadow AI, the report found, with only 37% having policies to manage AI or detect shadow AI.
Organisations that used high levels of shadow AI observed an average of $670,000 in higher breach costs than those with a low level or no shadow AI. Security incidents involving shadow AI led to more personally identifiable information (65%) and intellectual property (40%) being compromised compared to the global average (53% and 33% respectively).
AI is also making attacks smarter, with 16% of studied breaches involving attackers using AI tools, most often for phishing or deepfake impersonation attacks.
The global average cost of a data breach fell to $4.44 million, the first decline in five years, IBM found.
The global average breach lifecycle, which is the mean time to identify and contain a breach, including restoring services, dropped to 241 days, a 17-day reduction from last year. Organisations which detected the breaches internally observed a $900,000 savings on breach costs compared to those disclosed by an attacker.
IBM found that healthcare breaches remain the costliest, averaging $7.42 million, even as the sector saw a $2.35m reduction in costs compared to last year. Breaches in this sector took the longest to identify and contain at 279 days , 5 weeks longer than the global average.
Last year, organisations pushed back against ransom demands, with more opting not to pay (63%) compared to the year prior (59%). As more organisations refuse to pay ransoms, the average cost of an extortion or ransomware incident remains high, particularly when disclosed by an attacker ($5.08m).
There was a significant reduction the number of organisations that said they plan to invest in security following a breach, 49% in 2025 compared to 63% in 2024. Less than half of those that plan to invest in security post-breach will focus on AI-driven security solutions or services.
Operational Disruption
Nearly all organisations studies suffered operational disruption following a data breach, the 2025 IBM report found. This level of disruption is taking a toll on recovery timelines. Among organisations that reported recovery, most took more than 100 days on average to do so.
However, compared to consequences of a breach continued to extend beyond containment. While down compared to the year prior, nearly half of all organisations reported that they planned to raise the price of goods or services because of the breach and nearly one-third reported price increases of 15% or more.
The Ventures Lab, delivered by The Challenges Group, is partnering with Techscaler to boost the creation and growth of Scottish tech businesses with a social or environmental mission.
By working together, The Ventures Lab and Techscaler aim to strengthen the pipeline of impact-driven startups in Scotland.
In 2025/26, The Ventures Lab aims to support 40 high-growth, impact-led businesses to grow and scale.
This includes unlocking access to £2 million in Scottish Government loan investment through the Firstport Venture Catalyst Fund, helping mission-led businesses tackle some of the most pressing societal and environmental challenges.
Angie Lee, director of Venture Services, The Ventures Lab said: “By combining The Ventures Lab’s strengths in impact business support with Techscaler’s leading role in the tech startup space, we’re creating something far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s about building ventures that are investment-ready and impact-aligned and showing that values and viability go hand in hand.”
The partnership with Techscaler builds on a strong foundation of collaboration that The Ventures Lab has already developed with organisations such as Converge, Scottish EDGE, Firstport, and 19 Scottish universities. Together, these partnerships are building a pipeline of over 150 early-stage impact ventures.
Techscaler, the Scottish Government’s tech startup programme run by CodeBase, is already supporting over 1,000 tech startups across Scotland. Techscaler has other purpose-led collaborations in place, including its partnership with Sustainable Ventures, one of the world’s leading climate tech hubs. The new partnership will give purpose-led founders direct access to The Ventures Lab dedicated programme.
The Ventures Lab offers bespoke, hands-on guidance to help businesses build solid foundations, develop robust revenue-generating models, and create solutions to global problems. This holistic approach helps ventures become investment-ready while staying rooted in their purpose.
“We’re excited to work closely with The Ventures Lab to give tech founders greater access to tools and support that help them understand, measure and communicate the impact of their work,” Jennifer McInroy, head of partnerships at CodeBase, said.
“Embedding this thinking early, alongside core startup development, can help create a mindset shift across the tech sector, where impact becomes a meaningful part of how innovation is defined and valued.”
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes said: “Scotland has always been a nation of innovators, entrepreneurs and impact-makers.
“This strategic partnership between two of Scottish Government’s key economic growth programmes reflects the type of collaboration we need to see more of: focused, practical, and committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ventures delivering positive change both in Scotland and on the global stage.”
Tech founders who are building with purpose or are curious about how to embed impact into their businesses, are encouraged to connect with The Ventures Lab or Techscaler to explore the support available.
Organisations are facing a stage of disillusionment when it comes to using generative AI for procurement, according to Gartner, Inc.
While some early adopters are seeing benefits, many organisations are experiencing uneven ROI or falling short of expectations, highlighting the need for a more measured and strategic approach.
“GenAI is proving to deliver process efficiency, better data insights, and cost savings for procurement organisations,” said Kaitlynn Sommers, senior director analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice.
“However, fragmented and low-quality data across procurement systems can hinder accurate outputs, and integrating stand-alone GenAI solutions with existing platforms is often complex, due to differing technical specifications. Despite these challenges, its applicability across the source-to-pay spectrum continues to drive strong interest and adoption.”
Applications
GenAI-enabled procurement applications will focus on automating time-consuming repetitive tasks such as knowledge discovery, summarisation, contextualisation, workflow, and execution.
As these tools are adopted, procurement, organisations can expect to boost productivity and efficiency, reduce operational costs, and free up staff to focus on higher-value activities like strategic decision making and supplier management.
Text-to-process and workflow automation are emerging as common use cases for GenAI in procurement, enabling users to generate workflows or instruct agents using natural language.
These capabilities support tasks such as automating contract management, project scoping, supplier recommendations, and autogenerating ‘Request For’ documents (RFx). GenAI offers the potential for significant cost savings while maintaining or even improving output quality, and early adopters are positioned to gain a strategic edge over competitors.
Organisations face several obstacles in adopting GenAI for procurement, including fragmented and low-quality data, job security concerns, skepticism about AI-driven insights, and resistance to change.
High and unpredictable costs, complex integration with existing systems, and emerging regulatory requirements further complicate adoption. Unclear regulations also raise concerns around privacy, intellectual property protection, and trust.
“Organisations that delay action on integrating GenAI into procurement processes risk falling behind as early adopters overcome these challenges and realize tangible benefits,” said Sommers. “Gartner projects that GenAI for procurement will become a fully productive technology within five years.”
CPOs seeking to integrate GenAI into their operations should:
Invest in data infrastructure to standardize and integrate information across procurement systems for more reliable insights.
Explore vendors offering embedded GenAI capabilities and assess how these solutions align with enterprise strategies and desired business outcomes.
Evaluate process-specific AI tools for areas such as sourcing, contract management, and supplier risk where early adopters are seeing benefits.
Prioritize change management by encouraging learning and adaptation of procurement processes using data insights and automation.
Monitor evolving regulations to ensure compliant implementation and seek expert guidance as needed.
Upskill teams in digital dexterity, human-machine interaction, and prompt engineering to prepare for more AI-enabled processes.
Business confidence in Scotland rose by nine points during July to 56%, according to the latest Business Barometer from Bank of Scotland.
While Scottish firms’ optimism in the economy fell five points to 43%, their confidence in their own business prospects rose 23 points month-on-month to 70%. Taken together, this gives a headline confidence reading of 56% (vs. 47% in June).
Looking ahead to the next six months, Scottish businesses identified their top target areas for growth as introducing new technology, such as AI and automation (48%), entering new markets (41%) and investing in their team, for example through training (41%).
The Business Barometer, which surveys 1,200 businesses monthly and which has been running since 2002, provides early signals about UK economic trends both regionally and nationwide.
National picture
Overall, UK business confidence increased one point in July to 52% – its highest level since 2015 and the third consecutive monthly increase.
Firms’ optimism in their own trading prospects rose one point to 58%, while their confidence in the wider economy increased two points to 47%.
Wales was the most confident UK nation or region for the second month in a row (76%), followed by the North East (73%).
Sector Insights
July saw the service sector’s confidence increase by 11 points to 61%, one of the main drivers behind this month’s overall increase in business confidence, indicating strong momentum in the sector. This gain was partially offset by declines in other areas, with retail firms down eight points, manufacturers down four points and the construction sector down six points.
“It’s very encouraging to see Scottish business confidence not only rising in July, but once again outpacing the UK average,” Martyn Kendrick, Scotland director at Bank of Scotland Commercial Banking, said.
“Technology is set to play a particularly important part in Scottish firms’ plans, with more businesses identifying it as a key avenue for growth than anywhere else in the UK. We’ll continue to support businesses’ investments in this space, and beyond, as they press ahead with their ambitions.”
Hann-Ju Ho, senior economist, Lloyds Commercial Banking, said: “This continued upward trend reflects a growing sense of cautious optimism across the UK economy, underpinned by both improved trading prospects and broader economic sentiment. Despite ongoing cost pressures, firms are positioning for growth, particularly in services where hiring and investment plans are accelerating.
“Overall business confidence remains buoyant, with firms well placed to take advantage of opportunities such as new markets, adopting new technology and workforce expansion amid evolving market conditions.”
Paul Kempster, managing director for Commercial Banking Coverage, Lloyds Business & Commercial said: “July’s figures show that businesses are looking to the future. While confidence isn’t rising evenly across all sectors and regions, it’s encouraging to see positive sentiment holding well above the long-term average.
“As confidence builds, we remain committed to supporting firms with a range of financial services to help them achieve their growth ambitions.”
Enterprise leaders are eager to move beyond AI experimentation and unlock scalable value.
However, new research from Kore.ai, a global leader in enterprise AI, reveals a critical gap: while 71% of companies are actively using or piloting AI, only 30% are prepared to scale — potentially slowing the momentum of the next wave of enterprise AI adoption.
The new report, Practical Insights from AI Leaders, surveyed 1,000 senior business and technology leaders across 10 countries. It finds that 89% of respondents say their companies plan to increase AI investments in 2025, with three-quarters of all respondents planning to allocate up to half of their IT budgets to AI initiatives.
Scaling AI, however, remains a major hurdle, hampered by three key challenges.
These include a lack of AI talent (44%), unpredictable costs associated with large language models (42%), and persistent concerns around data privacy and regulatory compliance (41%).
The report highlights the top strategies AI leaders are adopting to overcome these hurdles as well. First, leaders identified four critical investment areas that underpin scalability: hiring internal and external AI talent (66%), improving data quality (51%), strengthening solution security (40%) and upgrading IT infrastructure (37%). AI initiatives grounded in these focus areas are more likely to deliver sustainable, enterprise-wide value.
Secondly, organisations are becoming more intentional about where and how they apply AI. Strikingly, 72% of respondents prefer to buy and customise AI solutions rather than build them from scratch internally, prioritising ease of deployment, regulatory compliance, solution quality, and integration.
The survey indicates that successful implementations have GenAI, LLMs, and conversational AI technologies already in production or scaling, while emerging areas like multi-modal AI, RAG, and agentic AI are gaining traction through active experimentation and pilots.
“AI is no longer experimental, it’s foundational,” said Raj Koneru, Founder and CEO of Kore.ai.
“We’re seeing businesses reimagine how they operate, innovate, and grow—and AI is at the heart of this transformation.
“The future enterprise will have AI embedded across every function, with humans and intelligent agents working side by side. To prepare for this future, organisations must prioritise data readiness, build scalable infrastructure, implement responsible governance, and invest in empowering their workforce to thrive alongside AI.”
To scale AI successfully, organisations must focus on measurable ROI. Senior leaders identified the top success indicators as operational efficiency, output quality, employee productivity, customer satisfaction, and time-to-completion.
They identified three key application areas for AI: AI for business process orchestration (44%), including automation, operations, compliance and risk management; AI for workforce productivity (31%), like for task automation, information discovery, and employee support; and AI for customer experience (24%) such as support and self-service.
While 71% of AI leaders report that their organisations are actively experimenting with or using AI across multiple departments and use cases, focusing on the right applications—and having an organisation-wide AI strategy from the start—is proving essential for successful scaling.
Backed by £15 million in funding, the UK’s AI Security Institute is leading a new project with Anthropic, Amazon, and the Canadian AI Safety Institute to ensure AI alignment.
AI alignment is a crucial field in AI research – focused on making sure the technology always acts in the public’s interests and rooting out harmful behaviours which could post a risk to society.
The fund is backed by an international coalition including the Canadian AI Safety Institute, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Schmidt Sciences, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic, Halcyon Futures, the Safe AI Fund, UK Research and Innovation, and the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).
The international span reflects a growing consensus – across government, industry, academia, and philanthropy – that alignment is an urgent technical challenge, and that expanding the field is a shared responsibility.
The project will fund research into AI alignment, including ways to make sure AI systems continue to follow ethical goals as the technology becomes more capable and finding techniques to ensure AI systems remain transparent and responsible to human oversight.
AI continues to develop at breakneck speed, with the 2025 International AI Safety Report highlighting how advanced models are rapidly improving their capabilities and demonstrating PhD-levels of knowledge in some areas.
Today’s methods for controlling AI are likely to be insufficient for tomorrow’s more capable systems as the technology continues to develop, with the need for co-ordinated global action to ensure the long-term safety of citizens more pressing than ever.
“Advanced AI systems are already exceeding human performance in some areas, so it’s crucial we’re driving forward research to ensure this transformative technology is behaving in our interests,” science and technology secretary Peter Kyle said.
“AI alignment is all geared towards making systems behave as we want them to, so they are always acting in our best interests. This is at the heart of the work the Institute has been leading since day one – safeguarding our national security and ensuring the British public are protected from the most serious risks AI could pose as the technology becomes more and more advanced.
“The responsible development of AI needs a co-ordinated global approach, and this fund will help us make AI more reliable, more trustworthy, and more capable of delivering the growth, better public services, and high-skilled jobs that drive our Plan for Change.”
The Alignment Project will be guided by an expert advisory board including Yoshua Bengio, Nico Kolter, Shafi Goldwasser, and Andrea Lincoln, who will collaborate in aiming to remove barriers that have previously limited alignment research.
The board will offer three distinct levels of support, including grant funding of up to £1 million tor researchers, compute access including up to £5m in dedicated cloud computing credits, and venture capital from private funders.
Governments, philanthropists, and industry partners are now able to come forward to join The Alignment Project, with the ability to contribute through research grants, cloud compute resources, or venture funding.
“AI alignment is one of the most urgent and under-resourced challenges of our time. Progress is essential, but it’s not happening fast enough relative to the rapid pace of AI development. Misaligned, highly capable systems could act in ways beyond our ability to control, with profound global implications,” Geoffrey Irving, chief scientist, AI Security Institute said.
“The Alignment Project tackles this head-on by bringing together governments, industry, philanthropists, VC and researchers to close the critical gaps in alignment research. International coordination isn’t just valuable – it’s necessary.
“By providing funding, compute resources, and interdisciplinary collaboration to bring more ideas to bear on the problem, we hope to increase the chance that transformative AI systems serve humanity reliably, safely, and in ways we can trust.”
Businesses looking to establish longer-term partnerships with academics can apply for a share of £200,000 funding, as a new round of Advanced Innovation Voucher funding has been launched.
The funding is provided by Scottish Enterprise and managed by Interface to support and encourage collaborative projects to create new products, processes and services.
The Advanced Innovation Vouchers are aimed at building relationships between business and academia, and are open to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Scotland. The funds are awarded on a sliding scale with the business match-funding the award up to £20k.
Since 2011, the Advanced Innovation Voucher programme has awarded £1.94m for 159 business-academic projects.
“The Advanced Innovation Voucher funding helps unlock deeper collaboration between ambitious businesses and academia, converting cutting-edge research into globally competitive products and services,” Paul Cross, innovation team leader at Scottish Enterprise, said.
“These businesses have the potential to scale, attract investment, create high quality jobs across Scotland, and lead their industries in the future. Our funding and support is part of our long-term strategy and missions approach to scale innovation in growth sectors where Scotland excels.”
Laura Goodfellow, associate director, Innovation Engagement, at Interface, said: “This funding provides a fantastic opportunity for businesses aiming to scale innovative projects – whether building on a successful partnership or launching a new venture.
“Interface is here to help businesses connect with the academic expertise that can drive their ideas forward and support them with funding to achieve their research and development ambitions.”
East Kilbride-based business Airglove Medical Ltd, accessed the Advanced Innovation Voucher funding after Interface brokered a partnership with Edinburgh Napier University to further develop their medical products.
The potential for Airglove Medical’s innovative patient wellbeing products is also recognised by Scottish Enterprise through its equity investment into the company.
Sheena Jack, Marketing and Design Director at Airglove Medical Ltd, said: “We were delighted to work with Edinburgh Napier University and access funding for the project through the Advanced Innovation Voucher.
“Their knowledge and expertise, along with their enthusiasm for Airglove, has enabled us to develop prototypes and given us a strong industry/academic relationship. We are looking forward to working with Professor Chan See and his team on the next phase of Airglove.”
Professor Chan Hwang See, from the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University, added: “The Standard and Advanced Innovation Voucher scheme enabled us to bring together a multidisciplinary research team with expertise in product design, electronics, electrical engineering, and biomedical devices.
“The project has engaged several students, enhancing their experience and skills of working with industry. In addition, the knowledge gained through this project will support future funding applications, inform several final-year and MSc student projects, and contribute to teaching materials—helping to equip the next generation of engineers with industry-relevant expertise.”
The deadlines for applications are the 30th of September, the 31st of October, and the 28th of November 2025.
With salaries for AI-related roles expected to increase by 15–25% this year alone, UK organisations are facing escalating AI skills shortages as rising salary expectations make hiring increasingly unsustainable.
This is according to the State of AI Costs in 2025 from CloudZero, which surveyed 500 engineering professionals about AI costs and ROI.
AI budgets are set to rise by 36% this year as businesses ramp up their AI investments, with average spending topping $1 million annually. However, many companies are struggling to attract or retain the talent needed to scale their AI initiatives.
AI-skilled professionals are commanding salaries between $150,000 and $200,000, and 35% of companies say rising compensation is the biggest barrier to filling AI roles.
Meanwhile, a lack of qualified candidates, particularly in cloud and data engineering, continues to slow project timelines and fuelling internal capability gaps. In total, 32% of companies cite skills shortages, and 13% say they don’t have the in-house expertise to even assess applicants effectively.
Amid the rush to invest, boardrooms are also facing growing uncertainty about ROI. Only half of respondents said they were confident in their ability to evaluate returns from AI initiatives, even as they continued to scale their spending. The disconnect between ambition and capability is fuelling concerns about whether organisations are building sustainable, measurable AI success.
“AI success doesn’t come from throwing money at tools alone, but by the people who build, manage, and govern those systems effectively,” Stuart Harvey, CEO of Datactics commented. “Companies are chasing specialist hires while overlooking the fundamentals of governance, explainability, and the quality of the data feeding their models, which, without these, the cost of AI rises while clarity around ROI vanishes.
“Instead of entering bidding wars for scarce talent, organisations should be looking into investing in long-term capability by upskilling their existing teams in data quality, model oversight, and governance. AI performance depends on the integrity of the data it processes, and the people who understand how to prepare and structure data responsibly that will make AI trustworthy, scalable, and compliant.
“The companies that will win in the next phase of AI adoption aren’t just the ones with the biggest budgets, they’re the ones with the most disciplined, data-driven foundations. Without strong data foundations, even the most advanced models will fail to deliver meaningful results.”
Analysts expect a stronger focus on building transparent, auditable AI systems that can demonstrate value under scrutiny. However, without investing in internal expertise and data infrastructure, many businesses risk inflating their AI costs without improving their outcomes.
EE is launching new phone plans that will restrict the internet for teens from next month.
The new mobile plans will use web filters depending on the age of the user, with three different levels of restriction.
The phone plans, which will be Sim-only, will also feature reduced internet speeds for younger users in an effort to limit streaming, as well as tools to prevent scam calls.
However, the restrictions will have no longer apply if a teen connects their device to WI-FI, as EE can only control the signal through mobile data.
EE appears to be the first major UK mobile network to create a smartphone plan specifically for those under the age of 18.
Under Ofcom, mobile networks must ensure that adult content is restricted from under-18s. Mobile networks often accomplish this by blocking these websites on mobile data for underage users. Users are then required to verify their age, and that they are the account holder, to change their settings.
Launching in August, the mobile plans will start from £7 per month, and will be available for all smartphones.
Pre-teens will be offered “protected” plans for pre-teens with more stringent controls, with “guided” and “trusted” tiers for older teens.
“As the UK’s best network for families, we understand that while smartphones offer many benefits to people, there are also very real risks and challenges, especially for young people,” said Claire Gillies, BT head of the consumer division, which owns EE.
“As a parent of a teenager, I too have had to balance the benefits and challenges that come with giving our children their first smartphone.”
To help parents that may be overwhelmed by the range of parental controls on offer, EE is offering in-store appointments for families providing guidance on smartphone safety.
EE will also launch a resource in and effort to help parents navigate communicating with their children about the responsibilities of smartphone ownership and use.
While the new offering will not restrict teens’ phone usage on Wi-Fi, it follows the Online Safety Act’s age restrictions coming into force. These restrictions will require age checks on websites ranging from adult content platforms to social media, ensuring users are over 18.
UK cybersecurity leaders are facing mounting pressures as they work to balance growing risk complexity, increasing board expectations and intensifying compliance requirements, according to the latest State of Cyber Risk and Exposure report from Bitsight, the global leader in cyber risk intelligence.
The study, based on a survey of 1,000 cybersecurity and risk professionals globally, reveals that while British organisations are leading in some areas of risk monitoring, many still struggle when it comes to converting that data into actionable insight.
UK firms are more likely than their global peers to continuously monitor their third-party relationships for cyber risk, with 43% doing so compared to 33% worldwide.
Yet fewer than one in five UK organisations can translate this data into intelligence that drives real-time decision-making or informs board-level reporting.
Despite increasing investment in tools, many organisations are struggling to develop mature, contextualised cyber risk programmes that align with business goals.
The report finds that just 20% of UK organisations consider their cyber risk management practices to be “very mature”, and only 29% report having a formal cyber risk programme that is well aligned with business priorities.
This lack of strategic alignment limits leadership teams’ visibility into the threats facing their digital ecosystems – undermining both resilience and regulatory readiness.
Notably, only 21% of UK respondents cite compliance reporting and auditing as a top priority for 2025 – despite intensifying obligations under regimes like NIS2 and DORA.
This suggests a potential oversight, as deprioritising compliance amid broader risk concerns could increase exposure to regulatory scrutiny, potentially exposing organisations to enforcement action and further undermining board confidence.
Stephen Boyer, chief innovation officer, at Bitsight comments: “In today’s post-NIS landscape, continuous monitoring is no longer a competitive edge – it’s a compliance expectation. But without the intelligence to interpret what that data means for the business, it’s just noise. UK security teams need clarity, not complexity, to make confident decisions – and that starts with risk teams turning data into actionable insight.”
The scale of the challenge is not just technical – it’s human. UK cybersecurity professionals are experiencing burnout at significantly higher rates than their global counterparts, with 59% reporting symptoms of stress or exhaustion compared to a 47% global average. The report shows that firms lacking continuous visibility into their environments are up to 30% more likely to suffer staff burnout, exposing a growing operational risk alongside cyber threat.
A lack of effective communication between cyber teams and executive leadership is also creating friction at the top. Over half of UK organisations (52%) say they struggle to translate cybersecurity data into business risk terms, making it harder to secure board engagement and funding for critical investments. This compares to fewer than a third of organisations globally reporting the same issue.
Compounding this is growing anxiety about the scale and diversity of cyber threats. While accelerating AI risks dominate the global conversation, UK respondents cited the breadth and pace of emerging threats as their primary concern, highlighting a critical need for smarter risk prioritisation and contextual threat intelligence.
Boyer adds: “Visibility alone is no longer enough. Cyber risk intelligence – blending asset discovery, threat telemetry, and business context – is now essential for UK organisations seeking to move from reactive postures to proactive, intelligence-led strategies.”
App-connected sex toys are vulnerable to major security risks, leaving user emails vulnerable to hackers, after the firm failed to fix two security flaws.
Lovense is a marker of internet-connected sex toys with over 20 million users. The sex toys connect to the internet and bluetooth, where users can connect their devices together using an app. The company has tried to stay ahead of the curve technology-wise, as it integrated ChatGPT into its products in 2023.
However, when it comes to basic security hygiene, the company seems lacking.
Cybersecurity blogger BobDaHacker said that Lovense is exposing other people’s email addresses to other users of the apps. Though not directly exposed in the app, the use of a network analysis tool to look at the data transferring in and out of the app would reveal users email addresses when a user interacts with them.
BobDaHacker discovered that they could associate any Lovense username with their registered email address – this could expose any customer with an email address.
Using an XMPP roster and using a known username – which can often be made public for people’s work – can be exploited to return a real email address.
BobDaHacker has tested this out multiple times, saying that now, he can retrieve an email based off a username is less than a second.
Another vulnerability allowed BobDaHacker to take over any Lovense user’s account using just their email address. This secondary bug allows anyone to create authentication tokens without a password, which means a hacker can remotely control an account pretending to be the actual account holder with just the email address.
“Literally anyone could take over any account just by knowing the email address,” BobDaHacker said.
This is a major issue for people’s privacy, especially webcam models who use these tools for work and share their usernames for tips and subscribers.
Upon discovering the security flaws, BobDaHacker has been through numerous back and forths with Lovense, after first notifying them of the bugs back in March.
While BobDaHacker recieved $3,000 via HackerOne, a bug bounty site, Lovense requested 14 months to fix the flaws. Typically, security research only grant organisations about three months to fix any identified flaws before they take their findings public.
In the same email saying the fix would take 14 months, Lovense explained that they opted not to adopt a fix that would take one month because they wanted to avoid requiring users to update their apps.
Lovense has since commented that there is currently “no evidence suggesting that any user data, including email addresses or account information, has been compromised or misused.”
The company also assured that “the email address exposure vulnerability has been fully resolved, and updates have been deployed to all users.”
The account takeover vulnerability identified in the bug bounty exercise by BobDaHacker has also been “fixed” according to Lovense.
Lovense also iterated that their proposed 14-month system reconstruction plan was a “comprehensive project,” and that reducing it to “a simple, ‘fixable in two days'” problem was “misleading.”
Lovense said that the company is “proud to be one of the earliest sex toy companies” to join the HackerOne programme in 2018, and that they “value the insights provided in the vulnerability disclosure report.”
“However, we must clarify that any accusations of neglect regarding user safety are unfounded.”
Lovense has urged all users to upgrade to the latest version to access all functions. “While those who do not upgrade will not face security risks, certain features will become unavailable.”
More than half of UK IT decision makers currently using public or hybrid models say they are planning to move away from U.S. based cloud providers, research from Asanti shows.
UK IT leaders are increasingly citing growing concerns around data sovereignty (95%) and data residency (93%), driving them toward sovereign cloud options.
Asanti’s findings reveal the increasing influence of global politics on IT infrastructure decisions, with 52% of those surveyed saying they’re taking strategic steps to reduce their organisation’s exposure to US cloud providers.
In addition, 45% of those surveyed, currently using US public cloud platforms, confirmed that they plan to actively limit their data’s exposure to U.S. jurisdiction in light of recent political developments.
“Organisations are becoming more aware and more wary of where their data is stored and who has jurisdiction over it,” said Stewart Laing, CEO of Asanti. “It’s no longer just about performance or cost. It’s about trust, control and strategic sovereignty.”
This shift builds on findings from October which showed that 91% of organisations were already in the process of bringing at least some applications back on-premise or into colocation facilities.
Organisations are pulling back from public cloud for a range of reasons, including high recuring costs (41%), limited control and customisation (39%), slow data transfer (36%), and security compliance and risk management concerns (39%).
Repatriation, however, is not without its challenges. Barriers include the complexity of moving applications to internal systems (38%), inflexible contracts or cloud vendor lock0in (36%), and a lack of internal skills for repatriation (41%).
“Cloud is powerful – but not perfect. The lesson here is that infrastructure strategy needs to be driven by business needs, not vendor hype,” added Laing. “We strongly advise UK organisations to revisit their current and future hosting strategies with a more critical eye, especially as AI workloads, regulatory scrutiny, and cyber threats escalate.”
Asanti recommends organisations take car to assess the geopolitical risks when selecting providers, whilst also ensuring they match workload sensitivity to the hosting model and ensuring the flexibility to move.
BT has been required to refund or credit £18m to customers, following enforcement action by Ofcom.
Last year, Ofcom fined BT £2.8 million after it failed to provide customers with clear and simple contract information before signing up to a new deal.
Ofcom says that BT broke the regulator’s consumer protection rules designed to ensure telecoms customers get clear, comparable information about the services they are considering buying.
Following engagement with Ofcom, BT contacted the majority of affected customers, explaining that it had not provided them with the information to which they were entitled, and giving them the opportunity to request the information and/or cancel their contract without charge.
However, before these communications were sent, some customers affected by the breach left BT before the end of their contract and may have been charged an early exit fee.
Ofcom’s rules are clear that if the required contract summary and contract information is not given, the contract is not binding on customers. As a result, an early exit fee should not have been payable by these customers.
As well as fining BT, Ofcom also required it to amend its sales process and refund any affected customers who may have been charged for leaving before the end of their contract period. We told the company that if it was unable to refund any money, it must donate it to charity.
As a result of this enforcement action, BT has now refunded or credited £18 million back to customers and donated £440,000 across 17 charities where refunds or credits were not possible.
The UK’s insurance technology sector is undergoing a significant realignment, with job patterns pointing to a sector in transition rather than retreat.
Overall insurance vacancies are projected to fall by 17.4% in 2025, yet the decline masks a broader reorientation toward technology-led growth, according to new research from Avencia and Vacancysoft.
Insurers are cutting back on legacy operations while stepping up digital investment, driving a 14% rise in IT vacancies, which will account for 35.5% of all roles next year, up from 28.5% in 2024.
Much of the hiring is focused on areas such as data science, cybersecurity and automation, as companies look to modernise infrastructure and deepen their technology partnerships. Customer service roles, by contrast, are being steadily pared back.
Policy initiatives such as regulatory sandboxes and R&D tax incentives are helping to accelerate the shift, according to a new report by recruitment consultancy Avencia and labour market analytics firm Vacancysoft.
Early signs of the transition are already visible. In the first quarter of 2025, insurance sector hiring rose by 6.1% overall, while IT roles surged 27.7% quarter on quarter.
Northern Ireland Emerges, London Holds Ground
London continues to lead as the UK’s insurtech hub, with 2,172 IT roles forecast in 2025, an increase of 11.9% on the previous year. But growth is spreading. Northern Ireland is seeing the fastest expansion in relative terms, with IT vacancies expected to rise by 216.2% to 117 roles, lifting its share of national tech hiring from 0.8% to 2.3%.
The North of England and the Midlands are also expanding, with projected IT hiring increases of 26.9% and 15.6% respectively. Scotland and Wales are holding steady, while the South of England is expected to see a modest decline.
The trends suggest insurers are increasingly tapping into regional tech ecosystems as they look to build cost-effective and scalable talent pipelines beyond the capital.
Data Skills and Delivery Roles in Focus
Within the evolving insurtech workforce, demand is strongest for data-driven and delivery-focused roles. Vacancies for data engineers are forecast to grow by 27% to 240, while roles in data analysis will rise 23.4% to 306.
Project management positions are expected to see the sharpest growth at 48.2%, an indication that digital transformation programmes are moving from planning to execution.
Business analysis continues to trend upward, with an 8.7% rise to 312 roles, though its overall share is beginning to taper.
Product owner roles are stabilising, accounting for 3.7% of the total. Collectively, these changes suggest a pivot from ideation and experimentation to scaled delivery, infrastructure modernisation and operational impact.
Insurers Lead Charge in Building Digital Capability
Several major insurers are at the forefront of the recruitment drive. Aviva is expected to top the IT hiring league table with 420 projected roles, up 13.5% year on year. Royal London is growing at an even faster pace, with IT roles set to rise 67.1% to 234, fuelled in part by increased investment in artificial intelligence.
Howden continues its aggressive digital expansion, with IT hiring forecast to rise by 75.5% to 165 roles.
BGL Group, now part of Markerstudy, is the fastest-growing among major firms, with IT roles expected to more than double, a 114.3% increase. AXA, meanwhile, plans to scale back by 47%, consolidating after a period of sustained tech investment.
The picture that emerges is one of a maturing digital insurance sector that is leaner, smarter and more reliant on data and automation. As transformation strategies move from concept to execution, hiring patterns reflect a new phase of operational discipline and long-term digital intent.
Consumer trust in personal AI assistants is gaining significant momentum, with more than half (52%) of respondents feeling comfortable relying on them for everyday tasks, according to a new global survey by YouGov and commissioned by Zendesk.
The results reflect a pivotal moment for AI: it’s no longer just transforming businesses – it’s entering the daily lives of consumers.
From productivity to professional communication, people are beginning to embrace AI-powered support. However, the findings also underscore that trust has its limits.
According to the study, the task that consumers are most comfortable entrusting to AI assistants is managing to-do lists and calendars: 64% indicate a willingness to let AI handle these interactions. However, this comfort often comes with conditions: many of these consumers would still want the ability to review or approve messages before they’re sent.
At the same time, 84% believe human interaction should always remain an option – highlighting the need for CX leaders to prioritise technology that fosters human connections.
That’s followed by professional communication tasks, such as scheduling meetings or managing emails, where 52% feel at ease.
But comfort drops when AI ventures into high-stakes territory. Only 39% of global respondents are willing to trust AI assistants with financial planning decisions.
If an AI assistant were to make a financial mistake – such as paying the same bill twice -, 58% of respondents would revert to human assistance. However, if the mistake was an irrelevant recommendation, like suggesting a product the consumer just bought, 58% would continue to trust AI assistants.
In the UK, consumers mirror global preferences but with greater caution. 55% say they are comfortable with AI managing their to-do lists and calendar and 35% trust AI assistants to handle professional communications.
However, only 19% are willing to trust AI assistants with financial planning decisions – placing the UK, alongside Germany, among the least comfortable markets when it comes to AI making personal decisions.
In stressful situations, consumers still prefer human interaction. Whether dealing with urgent issues or disrupted travel plans, 55% of global respondents say they would prefer to speak with a human rather than a bot.
In the UK, that figure rises to 78%, highlighting a stronger preference for human support in moments of pressure.
Still, there are signs of growing openness in the UK – 37% of respondents believe that a personal AI assistant could free up time for more meaningful activities by handling routine tasks.
When it comes to interacting with brands and their customer service, 54% of respondents believe AI assistants will make support faster and more efficient. However, 63% agree that companies will need to redesign customer service to accommodate the use of personal AI assistants.
This could mean allowing a personal AI assistant to communicate directly with a company’s AI on the customer’s behalf – one in three (33%) would be comfortable letting AI handle these interactions.
At the same time, 84% believe human interaction should always remain an option – highlighting the need for CX leaders to prioritise technology that fosters human connections.
“Consumers are increasingly embracing personal AI assistants – not just as support tools, but as part of daily life,” said John Kelleher, VP UKI and MEA at Zendesk.
“Our latest CX Trends report shows AI acceptance has jumped to 67%, and this new research reinforces what we’re seeing globally: people expect AI to make support faster and more efficient.
“But trust remains key to unlocking AI’s full potential, and consumers expect companies to evolve. The message is clear: brands must rethink the entire service experience with AI as a collaborator, not just a feature.”
Trust in AI is conditional, and companies must meet high expectations for transparency and governance in how they deploy AI-powered tools. Respondents are particularly sceptical about sharing personal data – two-thirds (67%) would only do so if strong privacy protections are in place, or would prefer not to share it at all.
When asked what would increase their willingness to use personal AI assistants, consumers across all regions consistently highlighted three top priorities: data security and privacy (57%), transparency around how decisions are made (48%), and the availability of human oversight or support (46%).
Worldwide end-user spending on information security is projected to reach $213 billion in 2025, up from $193bn in 2024, according to Gartner.
Spending is estimated to increase 12.5% in 2026 to total $240bn, the analysis firm predicts.
“Established security spending will continue as normal, but some organisations are being more cautious with any new security spending in this highly uncertain and challenging climate,” said Ruggero Contu, senior director analyst at Gartner.
“However, higher defence budgets, rising threats, increasing regulatory pressure and better cybersecurity awareness – especially among small and medium-sized businesses – will keep cybersecurity spending strong in the medium to long term.”
Security software is the fastest growing segment because more companies continue to move from on-premises to cloud-based systems, which brings new security risks.
Cloud security posture management and cloud access security brokers are the main drivers in this segment.
In the forecast period, rising threats and the expanding use of AI and generative AI (GenAI) — by both internal users of AI and attackers — will remain key growth drivers.
Network security is expected to reach $23.27m, with security services to reach $83.8m, and security software to reach $105.94m in 2025.
By 2026, network security is projected to reach $25.83m, with security services to reach $92.78m, and security software to reach $121.15m.
Local leaders in every UK nation are now being backed by at least £30 million each to unlock potentially transformative research and local innovations, the UK Sciences and Technology Secretary announced.
The Glasgow City Region, Cardiff Capital Region, and Belfast/Derry-Londonderry are the latest parts of the UK to be supported by the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund of up to £500 million, committed ahead of last month’s Spending Review, to empower local leaders with skin in the game.
It will help target innovation investment and make the most of communities’ expertise to unleash discoveries that can benefit the UK or create businesses central to economic growth.
The decision to earmark at least £30m to each of these three high-potential areas in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales was reached following collaboration between the UK government and the governments of each nation and builds on seven regions of England being backed as part of the scheme from the North-East to Greater Manchester, Liverpool to London.
High potential areas in places that have not been allocated funding will also be able to bid into a competition, with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) publishing guidance on this competition soon.
The funding follows a successful trial scheme into how national innovation experts can best collaborate with regional partnerships of local leaders, research organisations and industry to make the most of R&D as a solution to some our country’s biggest challenges, while turbocharging our economy.
The Innovation Accelerators programme has brought in more than £140m of private investment and created hundreds of jobs in cities across the UK, and is already driving innovation in healthcare, from a Greater Manchester team helping to detect heart and lung diseases more quickly and cheaply to Glasgow researchers working to spot the signs of colon cancer earlier to save lives.
“All across the UK there are incredible projects and fantastic innovation taking place. We know that these are critical for the UK’s success,” UK science and technology secretary Peter Kyle said.
“This fund now gives local leaders in every nation of the UK the chance to proudly capitalise on their city or region’s expertise, from AI to life sciences, medicines to engineering, and beyond, to make a difference to lives across the country.
“With backing for more regions to come we can unlock the new jobs and business opportunities that are central to boosting the economic growth at the heart of our Plan for Change.”
Partnerships of local and city region authorities, businesses and research organisations will now work with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to invest the funding into regional and national priorities from early next year and could back a range of sectors, from life sciences to green energy solutions, AI to medical tech, and beyond.
It gives places the opportunity to choose which existing regional strengths they will prioritise. It could mean Cardiff Capital Region building on its electric vehicle expertise for a greener planet, Belfast and Derry-Londonderry spurring on Northern Ireland’s strong cybersecurity sector to keep us safe or Glasgow building on its history of medical discoveries through new technology to keep us healthy.
The funding was announced as part of a record £86 billion R&D settlement until 2030 and will help the government to deliver our modern Industrial Strategy by backing high growth sectors and bolstering partnerships with industry for long-term economic growth.
Glasgow City Council has said that the cybersecurity incident that was discovered back in June did not result in any loss of data.
Experts investigating the incident have said they are confident there is no evidence of data having been stolen or encrypted.
A report from specialist cybersecurity experts, received by the council, says they have ‘high confidence’ that the incident has been contained.
The attack last month had hit servers operated by a third-party supplier to one of the council’s ICT providers, CGI.
Work to safely recover online services is well advanced and will continue into August in some cases.
The cyber incident was discovered on 19 June when CGI discovered malicious activity on servers hosted by a third-party supplier.
Glasgow City Council said they acted quickly to isolate those servers in an effort to protect the council’s wider network. However, taking them offline unavoidably disrupted a number of their day-to-day digital and online services.
Following expert advice, the council took an early decision to proceed on the basis that data was likely to have been lost – and that this may have included customer data.
Subsequent independent forensic analysis has found no evidence of encryption or exfiltration of council or customer data – however, the Council will still closely monitor the situation.
Although there is evidence that attempts were made to download data, these were all denied.
The investigation characterises this as an opportunistic attack on a third-party supplier, rather than on the council itself. Access was gained through the supplier’s network, rather than via any council system or user.
Although the incident has disrupted council services, the loss of some web-based services was caused by the isolation of the affected servers, rather than the cyber incident itself.
Many of the highest priority services are now back online, with temporary workarounds in place for others.
A recovery plan is in place to restore each of the affected services, with all but a handful of applications, which are dependent on external support, expected back online by mid-August.
The council is sorry for the continued inconvenience this will cause customers.
As the Online Safety Act ushers in an era of age checks, Brits are seeking out VPNs in record numbers to evade some of the legislation’s newly enforced rules.
ProtonVPN shared on X that it had an over 1,400% surge in sign-ups for its VPN services in the UK after age check requirements went into effect in the UK.
“Just a few minutes after the Online Safety Act went into effect last night, Proton VPN signups originating in the UK surged by more than 1,400%,” the VPN purveyor wrote.
“Unlike previous surges, this one is sustained, and is significantly higher than when France lost access to adult content.”
From the 25th of July, Ofcom has required any organisations showing harmful content to children – including pornography, self-harm, or eating disorder content – must issue age checks to users.
Those under the age of 18 will therefore be effectively blocked from access to hundreds of sites, ranging from Reddit and X, to Grindr and Pornhub.
If firms are found to not comply with the new rules, they risk a fine of up to £18 million, or 10% of their worldwide revenue, whichever is higher.
Senior managers could also face disciplinary action from Ofcom if the company is found in breach.
Sites can decide for themselves how to verify user age, with many opting for uploads of selfies with government IDs, or even using credit card information.
However, many are concerned that these methods are not only a breach of privacy, but a security risk. The recent hack into the dating service Tea, which leaked thousands of identity verification photos, only adds fuel to these concerns.
VPNs have seen similar surges in popularity when users are faced with app or website restrictions. Before Pornhub decided to exit Florida due to restrictions, interest in VPNs from Floridians surged by 1000%.
The VPNs offer a work around from the age verification systems required on many sites, allowing users to connect to servers that appear outside of the UK, ensuring their identities stay anonymous.
While the VPNs may ensure privacy, they bring up yet another roadblock to the UK’s efforts to regulate the sprawling internet for safety and the protection of children.
In today’s digital age, the proliferation of misinformation (the dissemination of false information without the intent to deceive) and disinformation (the dissemination of false information with the intent to deceive) presents one of the most significant challenges to societal cohesion at a global level.
The advent of AI has transformed and supercharged the information dissemination landscape, introducing both threats and opportunities.
Romania and Poland each reported increased Russian disinformation activity ahead of their presidential elections, with authorities warning the Russian-backed network Doppelgänger is actively attempting to influence voters.
In the run-up to the 2025 German federal elections, Doppelgänger was also implicated with setting up over 100 pseudo-news websites, many of them mimicking mainstream media outlets.
Their disinformation campaign focused on posting AI-generated articles, many of which undermined Germany’s support for Ukraine and promoted the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party.
Leveraging an army of bots on platforms such as X, Doppelgänger flooded social media with thousands of posts, creating an illusion of viral traction.
According to Will Ashford-Brown, director of strategic insights at Heligan Group, the integration of Superhuman AI into disinformation campaigns has far-reaching consequences.
“We are starting to see the erosion of public trust in traditional media and other formerly trusted institutions,” Ashford-Brown said.
“This depletion in trust risks increased cynicism, societal polarisation and the echo-chambers that fuel the angry and disenchanted, which has serious implications. When individuals are unable to discern truth from falsehood, it undermines the foundation of informed citizenship.
“We have seen the effects of AI-generated disinformation interfering with democratic processes by spreading false narratives about candidates or policies that have led to the influencing of election outcomes and ultimately an undermining of public confidence in governance.
“There are financial implications too, false information can also manipulate financial markets, damage corporate reputations, and facilitate sophisticated scams, leading to significant global economic losses.
“Addressing the challenges posed by AI-enhanced misinformation and disinformation requires a multifaceted approach. Developing and deploying AI tools capable of detecting and flagging deceptive content is crucial and should be a key investment area for those in this sector.
“But it’s not all about investment, there is a wider role for Governments and international bodies, to establish frameworks to regulate the use of AI in information dissemination, ensuring accountability and ethical standards are upheld.”
Enhancing media literacy among the general public, as trust in these media institutions shifts, is important to empower individuals to critically assess information sources and recognise potential disinformation, hopefully reducing its impact.
“The rise of Superhuman AI has undeniably transformed the information landscape, presenting both opportunities and significant risks.
“As AI continues to evolve, it is imperative for all of us, including technologists, policymakers, and the public, to collaborate in developing strategies to mitigate the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
“By fostering a culture of critical thinking and implementing robust safeguards, we can all harness the benefits of AI while critically safeguarding the integrity of information and ultimately our sense of truth,” concluded Ashford-Brown.
Cura Terrae, an English environmental services company, has acquired Scottish climate consultancy EnviroCentre as it continues to expand with backing from private equity group Palatine.
EnviroCentre will become part of Cura Terrae’s Land and Nature division, bringing expertise in geo-environmental services and water management and engineering, as well as enhanced capabilities in Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and ecology.
This addition will enable the expanded group to offer a comprehensive environmental service across the entire UK, with the newly acquired four Scottish locations enhancing Cura Terra’s national network and supporting clients as they respond to increasingly complex environmental needs.
This acquisition marks Cura Terrae’s fifth since its formation in 2022 and represents the group’s largest transaction to date. It is a significant milestone in Cura Terrae’s ambition to build a connected, collaborative group of environmental specialists and reinforces its mission to empower businesses to take care of the Earth.
“We’re proud to welcome EnviroCentre into the Cura Terrae group. From the outset, it was clear that we shared not only technical goals, but a common purpose,” Nick Dilworth, Cura Terrae CEO said.
“This acquisition brings complementary expertise and geographic reach to the group, while adding a team of people whose values closely align with our own.
“The addition of EnviroCentre to the Cura Terrae group will provide fantastic opportunities for our people to flourish with clients benefiting from a greater depth and breadth of services.”
EnviroCentre will provide a significant boost to Cura Terrae’s presence in Scotland, bringing the total number of professionals in the Land and Nature business to over 175 across the UK, and the broader Cura Terrae group to around 400.
“Joining Cura Terrae is an exciting step for our team,” Duar Fleming, MD of EnviroCentre said.
“In order to grow the impact of our work we wanted to find a partner who understood our culture, respected our people, and shared our long-term goal to r to enhance the environment.”
The integration team is focused on working closely with EnviroCentre’s senior leadership team to ensure a smooth transition for clients and employees, focused on continuity of service quality and delivering added value to all.
Cura Terrae were advised by Hill Dickinson Manchester Corporate along with employment colleagues David Parry and Isobel Pye. Forvis Mazars LLP provided Financial Due Diligence and Tax Due Diligence .
Bellweather Green Corporate advised the shareholders of EnviroCentre and taxation advice was also provided by tax specialists, Robertson Craig. The EnviroCentre shareholders have been supported on strategic matters over a period by consultant Kevin Windram culminating in this exit to a carefully selected partner.
The transaction was supported by Cura Terrae’s major shareholder Palatine Private Equity through their Impact Fund and funded via committed facilities from existing banking partner Shawbrook bank.
A dating safety app exclusively for women has faced a major data breach as thousands of member’s images have been exposed by hackers.
Tea Dating Advice is a US-based app designed for women to conduct background checks and share important information about men they run into on other dating apps in an effort to make online dating safer for women.
The app has 1.6 million users, but hackers gained access to around 72,000 imaged issued by women, often used for identification verification. Many of the images, therefore, include photo IDs, even though Tea says in their privacy policy that these images are deleted immediately after they are authenticated.
Members who signed up before February 2024 were affected by the breach, Tea said, assuring users it “acted fast” as it collaborated with “some of the most trusted cybersecurity experts” to mitigate the impact.
The app, which was released in 2023, garnered new notoriety recently as more and more women signed up to the app. However, it also faced criticism for being anti-men.
The app doubles as a security checker and a confidant – women can check if potential partners are registered sex offenders or married, as well as run reverse image checks to see if potential dates are catfishing them.
Tea also lets women share information with other users about men they have been on dates with to warn other women of potentially problematic or dangerous behaviour, but also allows women to share positive stories about men.
While Tea says that the current breach cannot be connected to posts, and the firm blocks screenshots of posts so they cannot be shared outside of the app, the recent breach challenges these protections.
Tea disclosed that a further 59,000 imaged from the app which showed posts, direct messages, and comments from over two years ago were accessed in the breach.
Tea said it was “taking every step to protect this community – now and always.”
Despite website infrastructure playing a continually bigger role than ever in businesses, teams still face regular issues tied to web hosting, as downtime, security threats, and costs create headaches.
Research from Liquid Web based on a survey of over 500 business owners, developers, and IT decision-makers across sectors and company sizes revealed 2025’s biggest pain points when it comes to web hosting in 2025.
Costs remain the top challenge, as 57% of businesses site expenses as their biggest hosting challenge of the year so far. Businesses waste an average of $418 (£310) per month resolving hosting-related problems, adding up to over $5,000 a year.
This was followed by slow website performance (38%), and frequent downtime (34%), which tend to hurt organisation’s intake. Even larger businesses with greater resources cited these issues, showing website infrastructure is key for everyone.
“You can’t scale a business on shaky infrastructure. Fast, reliable hosting ensures your website keeps up as your traffic, customers, and operations grow. It’s the engine behind sustainable digital growth,” Sachin Puri, president of Liquid Web, said.
Liquid Web found that 42% of businesses have been with their hosting provider for one to three years, with 41% regretting after switching providers, indicating that loyalty may pay off.
Most respondents (72%) do say they are at least somewhat or slightly satisfied with their current hosting providers, with only 3% not at all satisfied. About a quarter (26%) were extremely or very satisfied, however.
Still, security threats seem common, with nearly half of businesses facing hacking attempts in the past year. About a third (32%) suffered data breaches due to poor hosting security.
Downtime is also costing businesses, as one in five are losing over $2,500 (£1,858) a month due to website downtime. Nearly half of all businesses say they are affected by website downtime, with some hit monthly, which can have disastrous financial consequences.
Despite these issues, with website hosting being so essential, nearly half (47%) of businesses are expecting their hosting budgets to rise in 2025. About half (49%) also plan to invest in AI-based tools to better optimise their hosting performance.
“In 2025, businesses should stop viewing hosting as a commodity and start treating it as a critical investment in security, performance, and growth,” Ryan MacDonald, chief technology officer at Liquid Web said.
Administrative Data Research UK, a public sector data outfit that leverages data to garner insights into public policy, has gained £168 million funding from UKRI.
UKRI’s reinvestment in ADR UK will continue its work linking UK-wide data with research projects.
The public sector holds vast amounts of data and unlocking it in a responsible way can provide insights and drive policy improvements that make a real difference to our lives and livelihoods.
ADR UK does this by facilitating secure access for accredited researchers to that data, unlocking evidence that may otherwise remain hidden.
In the next investment phase, ADR UK will be supporting a range of research programmes, including projects to improve cancer detection using health and administrative data through the Cancer Data Driven Detection programme in partnership with Cancer Research UK and others.
The funding will also support policies to help drive economic growth and improve living standards by enabling ADR UK to further expand the linked economic datasets available to researchers and policymakers.
These will aim to support critical research to better understand the drivers of UK productivity by linking employment, business, benefits, and income data, giving policymakers a more complete picture of how the UK economy works.
“Our £168m investment in ADR UK is a sign of UKRI’s commitment to harnessing data to drive economic growth, better public services, and outstanding research,” said Stian Westlake, executive chair of the Economic and Social Research Council which hosts ADR UK.
“Linking government social, economic and health data in a secure manner that preserves citizens’ privacy is a powerful driver of better research and better public policy, and a vital resource for the scientists and researchers in the UK and beyond.”
Global fintech investment is stabilising, Innovate Finance says, but the UK dropped to become now only the third-largest FinTech market globally, losing its second-place spot to the UAE.
In the first half of 2025, global FinTech investment reached $24 billion across 2,597 deals, a 6% increase on H2 2024. The US remains dominant, with $11.5 billion raised across 1,082 deals, while other markets like India ($1.4 billion) and Singapore ($798 million) are gaining ground.
For the first time the UAE is the second-largest FinTech market globally with $2.2 billion in investment mainly due to the $2 billion deal of Binance in H1 2025.
The UK is now the third-largest FinTech market globally with $1.5 billion and 240 deals in the first half of the year and first in Europe, ahead of France and Germany combined. However, global competition for capital is increasing with India and Singapore not far from the UK.
Despite funding challenges, UK FinTech companies continue to outperform on core business metrics. New analysis in the report shows that 11 of the UK’s most profitable Fintechs – Allica Bank, Atom, Funding Circle, Iwoca, Monzo, OakNorth, Revolut, Starling, Tandem, Wise and Zopa – generated a combined $3.3 billion in profits before tax in 2024, $848 million in tax charge, and employ over 26,000 people.
The US remains dominant, with $11.5 billion raised across 1,082 deals, while other markets like India ($1.4 billion) and Singapore ($798 million) are gaining ground.
FinTechs across the rest of Europe excluding the UK raised $2.9 billion in H1 2025, up 28% from H2 2024. France and Germany saw strong performances, with $693 million and $668 million raised respectively.
“Despite the broader market adjustment, it is encouraging to see signs of stabilisation and resilience, in the UK and across Europe,” Janine Hirt, CEO of Innovate Finance, said.
“The UK FinTech sector has proven its value. It is profitable, job-creating and globally recognised – 11 of the UK’s most profitable FinTechs alone reported combined profits before tax of $3.3 billion in 2024 and employ over 26,000 people.
“To retain our global lead however we need to continue working with industry, government and regulators to improve access to growth capital and innovation. We at Innovate Finance are proud to play a key role in a new initiative with the City of London Corporation and the British Business Bank to help connect scale-ups with investors. This will also help connect growing firms with the new institutional capital unlocked by the Mansion House Accord.”
The escalating tariff and trade war moved into the top rank of emerging risks for the second quarter of 2025, according to Gartner, Inc.
Gartner’s Quarterly Emerging Risk Report series captures enterprise risk management (ERM) leaders’, risk management professionals’, auditors’, and senior executives’ views on emerging risks or over-the-horizon risk.
The Q2 2025 report, based on a survey of 223 senior risk and assurance executives, also revealed mounting concern around the low-growth economic environment and consumer spending slowdowns, contributing to uneasiness about slowing global economy.
“The top five emerging risks in Q2 point to two broad themes for enterprises: A volatile low-growth macroeconomic environment, and a disruptive new technology that poses significant compliance risks rapidly growing in mainstream adoption,” said Gamika Takkar, director, research, in the Gartner Risk & Audit Practice.
“Risk leaders need to ensure their organizations are prepared for potential disruption to supply chains and increases to the cost of doing business in a global market,” said Takkar. “These impacts have the potential to be more disruptive at a time of slowing global economic growth.”
AI-related information governance-driven risks, moved from the fifth most cited spot in 1Q25 to the fourth rank in Q2, and Shadow AI moved into the top 5 as the popularity and ease-of-access to public AI tools soars, and organizations face challenges in effectively monitoring its use.
In the current environment, executive leaders are increasingly emphasising cost optimisation. However, cost-cutting measures that are rushed or poorly planned can also pose a risk to organisations.
“Executive leaders expect ERM to play a critical role by thoroughly evaluating how policy changes could affect organisational performance, risk exposure, internal controls, and overall business strategy,” said Takkar.
“Half of executive leaders Gartner surveyed indicated that they depend on qualitative insights from internal teams, such as compliance and ERM to guide them.”
To effectively gauge the impact of cost-reduction strategies on operations, risk profile, key strategic initiatives and long-term growth, risk leaders should use qualitative assessment methods to evaluate actions.
For instance, if delaying a key strategic initiative is a potential approach, Gartner recommends these three steps to fully evaluate the impact:
Assess how changes affect strategic goals, short- and long-term business risk profile. Ask if delayed action adversely impacts a key strategic transformation that will sustain or create strategic value.
Identify optionsto stay focused on key transformative initiatives. Consider the potential of collaborating with executive management to allocate resources or adjust other strategic goals to sustain an initiative that could be cut.
Develop performance and strategic metrics to trigger adjustments to cost reduction. Consider whether a timely threshold trigger of market share or portfolio growth indicate revaluating a potential delay.
“Broad, rapid cost reductions that fail to consider their impact on both immediate and long-term risk profiles and strategic objectives may ultimately diminish efficiency and outweigh potential savings,” said Takkar.
“Organisations that identify and manage risk actions will better protect their organization from current economic challenges.”
Thousands of network outages have been reported to DownDetector from multiple mobile networks in the UK.
EE, Three, Vodafone, and BT all saw reports of network outages spike today, with users reporting a range of issues from the inability to make calls to internet outages and a lack of signal.
Vodafone and Three told the BBC that they did not suffer from network outages, despite the reports on DownDector showing a spike of outage reports at around 2pm today for both companies.
However, a spokesperon for Vodafone did say the network was experiencing difficulties, and that “due to some technical issues some customers will be experiencing issues making or receiving calls.”
BT, which owns EE, did confirm that it was “currently addressing an issue impacting our services,” apologising to users.
“We’re working urgently to fix this issue and will provide a further update as soon as possible,” a spokesperson said.
The reports of other outages across networks may be due to users’ inability to connect to EE or BT phone numbers.
While some O2 users have reported issues, a company spokesperson said that the network was operating as normal.
Outages for EE were reported across the UK, with figures from DownDetector indicating the London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow were worst hit, though this may just be population bias.
