Five charities across the west of Scotland have received a share of £493,330 through the latest round of the Building Digital Skills Fund, a partnership between the HFD Charitable Foundation and Virgin Money Foundation.
The fund helps community groups and charities tackle digital inequality by building skills and confidence, improving access to affordable data and broadband, and providing essential equipment such as mobile Wi-Fi devices.
Now in its third round, the programme is expanding beyond Glasgow for the first time, reaching charities in Renfrewshire, Inverclyde, and Paisley, alongside projects within the city itself.
The organisations receiving funding are Active Communities, Family Action in Rogerfield and Easterhouse (FARE), Your Voice Inverclyde Community Care Forum, North West Women’s Centre, and The Tannahill Centre. This latest award brings the total funding to £1.8 million since the programme was launched in 2024, with 20 charities supported.
Glasgow experiences some of the highest levels of digital exclusion in the UK. Research by students at the University of Glasgow found that nearly half of the city’s non-internet users come from the most deprived socio-economic groups. The Building Digital Skills Fund was established to help bridge this gap by supporting access to equipment and teaching essential digital skills, from applying for jobs and college courses to safely navigating the internet.
Lauren McKenzie, trustee of the HFD Charitable Foundation, said: “As the fund moves into its third round, it’s really encouraging to see its impact reaching new areas. We know that having access to digital skills and connectivity can open up opportunities, whether that’s accessing services, improving employability, or reducing isolation.
“These organisations are doing vital work in their communities, and we’re proud to support them as they help more people build confidence in the digital world.”
Nancy Doyle-Hall, executive director at the Virgin Money Foundation, added: “Through the latest round of grants it has been a real privilege to get to know community organisations across Greater Glasgow that we haven’t previously worked with and to see the impact they are having on their local community.
“We look forward to working alongside them over the next few years as they work to increase the digital skills and confidence of the people they support.”
Cloudflare is planning to lay off 1,100 workers as the firm increases its reliance on AI tech internally.
The job cuts total to around 20% of the company’s workforce, with CEO Matthew Prince and COO Michelle Zatlyn saying that the way Cloudflare works “has fundamentally changed” in a blog post explaining the cuts.
In recent months, the use of AI at Cloudflare has skyrocketed 600%, the pair said in the blog post. This surge in AI use has caused the firm to reevaluate “how we architect our company for the agentic AI era.”
“By taking decisive action now, we provide immediate clarity to those departing and protect the stability of the team that remains,” the pair said.
“We are making these changes now because making smaller, repeated cuts or dragging a reorganization out over multiple quarters creates prolonged emotional uncertainty for employees and stalls our ability to build.”
They called the mass cuts “the right thing to do; it’s the honest thing to do; and it reflects the values of the company we are continuing to build.”
Workers affected by the cuts will receive their full salary until the end of 2026, the company said, expecting the cuts to cost about $150 million.
The firm said that these cuts were not a reflection of an individual’s work or talent in their field, nor was it a “cost-cutting exercise”.
Instead, “they are about Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates and creates value in the agentic AI era,” Prince and Zatlyn wrote.
Cloudflare has had a strong start to 2026, not just according to CEO Prince; the firm recorded a revenue of $639.8 million in the first quarter of the a year, a 34% year-on-year increase. Prince largely credited AI for these gains.
“AI is driving a fundamental re-platforming of the internet and a paradigm shift in how software is created and consumed,” Prince said. “It’s shaping up to be the biggest tailwind we’ve ever seen in Cloudflare’s history.”
Cash showered down on Scottish tech in April as major global deals took place and the government ramped up financial support for major industries in the sector. From immersive tech to video games and connectivity, deals and funding rounds were truly blossoming as Scotland entered Spring.
Amazon made some major investment moves in both Starlink and Anthropic, as the UK government announced the first award winners of its Sovereign AI fund.
In energy news, Rolls-Royce is going nuclear, and thermal tech spinout Exergy3 raised £10 million.
All that, and more, coming up!
Funding
Scots Creatives Land £265K for Immersive Tech Projects
Seventeen creative projects from across Scotland have been awarded £265,000 in immersive technology funding in the second round of the Immersive Arts grant programme, aiming to break the barriers for artists of all backgrounds to utilise immersive tools.
With three distinct grant amounts available, £5,000, £20,000 and £50,000, the funding is designed to support artists at different stages of their creative development, allowing them to explore, experiment or expand how they make work that uses technology to actively involve an audience.
Award winners from this round include The Game by Biome Collective, which received a £50,000 Expand grant to create an immersive sound-walk artwork through Dundee. Using a mobile app and headphones, audiences walk through the city to explore football as a lived culture, with their route, pace and pauses triggering different audio elements and composition.
UK Gov Boosts Video Games Developers With £30M Fund
Video game developers with great ideas for the next generation of smash hit games are being urged to apply for a share of a new £28.5 million pot of funding.
The move represents a doubling in funding for the sector as the government puts the Creative Industries Sector Plan into action. These targeted investments are expected to pay dividends to the taxpayer by driving economic growth and creating jobs. Applications for funding will open from 14 April.
The UK is already an international powerhouse in gaming, having created global hits like Grand Theft Auto, Fable, PowerWash Simulator and No Man’s Sky. Across the UK, there are more than 2,000 gaming companies, employing tens of thousands of people recognised globally for their talent and creativity.
Through the Games Growth Package, the government will support newly-formed and expanding developers to turn blueprints for games into reality, enabling them to sell their product both in the UK and around the world.
TRICAPITAL Angels Leads £1.2m Investment Into Sovereign Dual Use 5G Solutions
A UK-developed technology delivering ultra-reliable, infrastructure-independent 5G connectivity to the world’s hardest-to-reach locations has secured a £1.2million investment to accelerate its growth.
The funding comes at a time of increasing global focus on national resilience, secure communications infrastructure, and sovereign capability across critical sectors.
JET Connectivity has developed land and sea-based alternatives to satellite networks such as Starlink and brings secure, high-bandwidth communications to offshore, coastal and ultra-remote sites anywhere on the planet.
The £1.2m Pre-Series A funding round was led by TRICAPITAL Angels, with participation from private investors and The FSE Group. The investment will enable JET Connectivity to rapidly scale its operations throughout 2026 and meet accelerating demand for its secure sovereign 5G network systems, particularly across national security and resilience applications.
British Business Bank Commits Up to £35 Million to Episode 1 Fund IV
The British Business Bank has made a commitment of up to £35 million to Episode 1’s Fund IV. The commitment follows the Bank’s previous investments into Episode 1’s 2014 vintage Fund I, 2018 Fund II, and 2022 Fund III.
Episode 1 is an investor backing early stage companies, primarily at the pre-seed and seed stages. It takes an algorithmic approach to finding and evaluating software-driven UK companies with a specific focus on AI, Software Infrastructure, Deep Tech and Tech Bio.
Episode 1’s strategy demonstrates strong alignment with the UK’s Industrial Strategy sectors, with a significant majority of the Fund III portfolio mapping to five of the eight priority sectors – digital and technology, financial services, professional and business services, clean energy, and life sciences. Fund IV will continue to largely back businesses within the Industrial Strategy sectors.
Amazon Targets Starlink Tussle With $11.57bn Globalstar Deal
Amazon has agreed to acquire satellite communications firm Globalstar in a deal valued at $11.57 billion, marking a significant escalation in its efforts to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network and expand its presence in the rapidly growing satellite connectivity market.
The agreement will see Amazon take control of Globalstar’s existing constellation of roughly two dozen satellites, integrating them into its broader low Earth orbit (LEO) ambitions.
The company is already working towards deploying around 3,200 satellites by 2029, with approximately half required to be operational by a July regulatory deadline, and is preparing to roll out its own satellite internet services later this year.
Amazon is set to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, the tech giant said, as the AI firm commits to spending over $100 billion on Amazon’s cloud technology over the next decade.
The deal will start with a $5 billion investment into Anthropic now, with the additional $20 billion set aside for the future and subject to certain conditions.
The investment announcement comes after Amazon said it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, a top rival to Anthropic.
Amazon has struggled to cement its own AI model, Nova, in the market, but is making waves as a critical infrastructure provider, leveraging its cloud computing power to benefit from the AI race.
Edinburgh University spinout Exergy3 has raised £10 million in seed funding to scale its proprietary technology targeting industrial decarbonisation, grid balancing and energy security.
The round, led by French VC firm Axeleo Capital, whose Article 9 Green Tech Industry I fund backs deeptech environmental-focused startups, will help push Exergy3’s transition from early demonstration to scale after proving its thermal energy tech in real‑world conditions.
Additional backing came from Bavaria-based VC investor Bayern Kapital and Singapore-based climate tech fund Kibo Invest, who joined existing investors Scottish Enterprise, Zero Carbon Capital and Old College Capital, the University of Edinburgh’s in-house venture investment fund.
Google Cloud to Invest $750M to Scale Enterprise AI for Partners
Google Cloud has announced a $750 million fund to deliver new resources and incentives to partners in its 120,000-member ecosystem, aiming to accelerate customers’ use of agentic AI.
Open to global consulting firms, systems integrators, software partners, and channel partners, the fund will support AI value identification, agent building and deployment, as well as supporting workforce upskilling and hands‑on support from Google’s forward‑deployed engineering (FDE) teams.
Google Cloud said that its network of partners already offers more than 330,000 experts trained on implementing Google AI for customers, with 95% of the top 20 and over over 80% of the top 100 SaaS companies using Gemini models, with the fresh capital designed to accelerate the transformative capabilities of Google’s products for these customers.
UK Gov Launches Sovereign AI Unit With £500M Investment
The UK government is set to launch its Sovereign AI Unit, a £500 million investment in the UK’s AI sector aiming to generate jobs and economic growth.
The Sovereign AI Unit is set to boost AI startups, which raised £6 billion in venture capital investment last year. According to the UK government, however, too many startups are not breaking through the mould to garner commercial success despite their top-tier innovations.
The Sovereign AI Unit aims to fill this gap, acting as a government VC fund with purposeful investments in AI enterprises across the UK.
BetHog, created by FanDuel co-founders, announced a $10 million Series A financing and the launch of Sentient Studios, a new B2B provider that enables casino operators to deploy AI-powered dealers across their live online casino offerings. With this launch, BetHog is introducing a software-driven alternative to traditional live dealer supply models, giving operators greater control, flexibility, and scalability in how they deliver live casino experiences
The round was co-led by Will Ventures and RockawayX, with participation from PCV, 6MV, Bullpen Capital, and Advancit Capital, bringing BetHog’s total funding to $16 million. The company plans to use the capital to expand its AI dealer technology on its own platform and accelerate adoption of Sentient Studios among global gaming operators.
“We’ve tested our basic AI dealer over the past 6 months and have discovered that it is 10X more popular than its live dealer equivalent. In addition, we’ve seen better retention and player satisfaction.” said Nigel Eccles, CEO and co-founder of BetHog. “With Sentient Labs, we’re excited to bring this product to other online casinos where operators can launch and scale their own dealer experiences instantly, operate continuously, and create more personalized interactions for players.”
Deals
Rolls-Royce Signs Nuclear Small Modular Reactor Deal with Great British Energy
Rolls-Royce has won a contract with Great British Energy – Nuclear, formally commencing technology design activities that will enable the delivery of the UK’s first Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
The UK’s first SMR project is estimated to support around 3,000 jobs at peak construction and thousands more across the UK supply chain, strengthening national energy security and supporting long‑term economic growth for local communities.
Rolls-Royce SMR was selected as the preferred technology partner in June 2025, and £2.6 billion was allocated in the 2025 Spending Review to enable this contract and wider programme delivery.
Business confidence in Scotland fell three points during April to 48%, according to the latest Business Barometer from Bank of Scotland.
Companies in Scotland reported lower confidence in their own trading outlook month-on-month, down 10 points at 53%. When taken alongside their optimism in the economy, up four points to 43%, this gives a headline confidence reading of 48% (vs. 51% in March).
However, despite the fall, Scotland’s confidence figure for April surpassed the UK’s combined total for the first time this year.
Looking ahead to the next six months, Scotland businesses identified their top target areas for growth as investing in their team, for example through training (41%), entering new markets (40%), and introducing new technology, such as AI or automation (38%).
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.
Amanda Murphy, CEO for Lloyds Business and Commercial Banking said: “Businesses told us their confidence fell as inflation pressures re-emerged, global uncertainty persisted and costs remained elevated. While sentiment declined, it remained above the long-term average, with nearly two-thirds expecting stronger output in the coming year.
“UK businesses are resilient and adept at deploying strategies to defend growth in uncertain conditions. Over the past month, we’ve seen them opt for flexibility wherever possible. They’re building contingency into their short and medium-term plans, rather than expecting a rapid return to normal. Protecting margins has become more important. That means tougher cost scrutiny and a greater focus on balancing growth with profitability.
“In this environment, as with other recent market disruptions, we continue to observe that sustainable success comes from discipline, resilience and clarity about what really drives long term value.”
Overall, UK business confidence fell 11 points in April to 44%.
Firms’ confidence in their own trading outlook fell six points to 54%, and their optimism in the wider economy dropped 17 points to 33%.
The East Midlands was the most confident UK nation or region in April at 53%, followed by London at 51% and the West Midlands at 49%.
Martyn Kendrick, Scotland director at Bank of Scotland Commercial Banking, said:”While business confidence has dipped this month, Scottish firms continue to invest in their future and thinking strategically about defending their growth, as they navigate global volatility.
“We’re here to support businesses across Scotland as they pursue these plans, whether that’s financing expansion, technology investment, or developing their workforce.”
More than four in ten (43%) UK businesses have been hit by a cyber breach or attack in the past 12 months, according to the latest data from the UK government.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology released their 2025/26 Cyber Security Breaches Survey, which showed that 69% of large firms suffered a cyber breach or attack in the past 12 months, with 29% of firms experiencing a breach or attack at least once a week.
The astounding figures show that the cyber threats in the UK are paramount and myriad; the high-profile attacks against UK retail giants last Spring and the Jaguar Land Rover attack – one of the most costly ever in the UK – are just the ones that hit the headlines as cyber incidents permeate across UK enterprise, becoming commonplace.
According to the survey, about 612,000 UK businesses reported a cyber incident in the past 12 months.
The survey also reveals a gap in security posture, starting at the board, with only 31% of businesses having board-level responsibility for cybersecurity. Further, only a quarter (25%) of businesses have a formal incident response plan, increasing the potential damage of attacks.
Despite calls for staff training and increased understanding of the threat, phishing remains the most common type of attack, accounting for 38% of breaches.
Cyber security minister Liz Lloyd has written to CEOs and Chairs of over 180 UK businesses urging them to sign up to the new Cyber Resilience Pledge to improve their security posture amid the torrent of threats.
The pledge would require businesses to take three actions: making cyber a board-level responsibility; signing up to the Early Warning service from the National Cyber Security Centre; and earning a Cyber Essentials certification across their operations and supply chain.
“These figures are a stark reminder of the importance of having robust cyber security measures. All business leaders should be gripping this issue and taking action now, especially as AI is making the threat more acute. Quite simply, firms cannot afford not to take these steps,” Lloyd said.
“Businesses are not powerless. Practical steps such as using the NCSC’s free guidance, signing up to their Early Warning service and adopting Cyber Essentials can significantly strengthen defences and help keep businesses, customers and the wider economy safe.”
Version 1, one of the leading global AI and digital transformation consultancies, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire CreateFuture for an undisclosed amount.
CreateFuture is a technology services firm of 550 professionals working with clients in highly regulated industries including iGaming, Financial Services and Utilities.
The acquisition creates a combined organisation of 4,250 employees with annual revenues of more than €500 million, complementing Version 1’s private sector footprint and enhancing its AI-first capabilities.
Together, Version 1 and CreateFuture will deliver AI-driven digital transformation programmes at scale across complex, regulated environments in both public and private sectors.
CreateFuture is a practitioner-led, AI-native partner to large enterprise clients, focused on iGaming and other sectors where technical precision and regulatory compliance are critical.
Combined, the organisations will bring deeper expertise and greater delivery capacity to support clients across a broader range of industries.
“This acquisition is a strong strategic fit for Version 1, strengthening our capabilities and expanding the markets we serve,” said Roop Singh, Chief Executive Officer at Version 1.
“CreateFuture is an exceptional business, with high calibre talent, deep client relationships and sector expertise that directly complements our own. They have built something genuinely impressive for clients, leveraging AIdriven capabilities with a flexible and agile approach, and have delivered sustained growth ahead of the market.
“This is a growth acquisition and reflects exactly where we are as a business, confident in our people, clear on our strategy and ready for what comes next.”
Euan Andrews, Founder of CreateFuture, said: “We started CreateFuture 16 years ago with a simple belief that the best work happens when great people are trusted to do great work for clients who care about the outcome.
“That belief has not changed, and this partnership accelerates our ambition for CreateFuture with a highly culturally aligned partner in Version 1. It enables us to better serve our clients with enhanced capability and scale whilst unlocking significant opportunities for our team members.
“I am genuinely excited about what this means for our people, for our clients, and for the next chapter of the business we have built together.”
The CreateFuture leadership team will remain in place, continuing to lead its existing teams and client engagement. Completion of the acquisition remains subject to receipt of customary regulatory clearances.
More than half (56%) of chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) say integrating AI with legacy systems and processes is a major challenge, and 50% say that they have limited internal expertise or talent to implement and manage AI, according to a survey from Gartner, Inc.
Gartner surveyed 140 senior supply chain leaders from organisations with annual revenues of $250 million or more from October to November, 2025. The survey aimed to assess the performance of supply chain leaders and the evolving impact of AI on supply chain performance, and to explore readiness for AI-native supply chains.
“The pressure to demonstrate quick results often leads supply chain leaders to settle for AI as a tool for incremental improvements to legacy workflows,” said Snigdha Dewal, Director Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice. “However, our research shows that the greatest friction point in scaling AI today isn’t the technology itself, but the legacy environments in which it is being deployed.”
Gartner defines an AI-native supply chain as a supply chain operating model that is designed from the ground up to leverage AI, rather than simply adding AI-driven functionality to existing, traditional workflows.
“Bolting AI onto an analog-era foundation only locks in existing inefficiencies and yields local optimisations,” added Dewal. “Leading CSCOs are reimagining the supply chain operating model, associated team roles and the supporting technology layer to build AI-native supply chains.”
The AI-Native Supply Chain
As part of the survey analysis, Gartner identified a group of “AI leaders” that are actively trying to scale AI across their supply chains and are developing advanced AI capabilities. These leaders are also seeing above average returns from their AI investments.
Early lessons from these leaders show that investing in AI means the tech-adjacent organisational layers will also need to evolve.
To successfully put themselves on the path to an AI-native future, today’s CSCOs will need to transform their supply chains in three important areas:
Reimagine the Supply Chain Operating Model: AI leaders are moving beyond using AI to optimise existing processes, instead reimagining entire operating models around AI-driven workflows. By redesigning end-to-end processes now, leaders are also modeling how decision making processes will change and determining the right level of autonomy for the future.
Redesign the Organisational Structure: Leading CSCOs are redesigning organisational structures by retiring legacy roles, creating AI-centric positions, and evolving job models. Instead of bolting AI onto existing roles, they are defining new, flexible roles aligned to AI-driven workflows that expand human impact and unlock the full value of AI.
Restructure the Technology Layer: Leaders should deliberately evolve—rather than replace—their tech stacks, building a unified data layer and agentic layer that sits atop legacy systems. The desired future state should be an agile, composable architecture that can independently and iteratively evolve with new business requirements. This process will need to establish AI governance and safeguards in parallel, to support responsible scaling and mitigate data security risks.
AI agents are being deployed into production faster than enterprises can govern them, exposing gaps in identity systems designed for human users.
This is according to new research from Ping Identity; the firm’s report, From AI Agents to Trusted Digital Workers, highlights the challenges when governing AI agents and identifies a critical failure mode emerging in enterprise identity systems as these agents operate at runtime, beyond the limits of traditional access controls.
As organisations move AI agents into production environments, the focus is shifting from managing identity to controlling how identities act across systems, data, and workflows. Identity systems originally designed for human interaction are now being pushed to operate continuously, increasing pressure on existing models and exposing gaps in governance, visibility, and accountability at the moment decisions are executed.
“Enterprises are deploying autonomous AI faster than they can govern it,” said Andre Durand, CEO & Founder, Ping Identity. “Identity remains foundational, but in an agentic environment it must operate continuously. Control must be enforced at the moment an action occurs.”
Where Traditional Identity Models Break Down for AI Agents
The research describes a failure mode in which AI agents combine individually legitimate permissions in unintended ways, resulting in actions that bypass established controls and cannot be fully traced or governed. This failure mode represents a new class of identity risk in environments where AI agents operate autonomously across enterprise systems.
As the industry is quickly learning, access grants permission. It does not enforce control.
With AI adoption accelerating, organisations face new challenges, including delegation opacity and sub-agent spawning, where agent chains become untraceable and break auditability.
Further, implicit human assumptions in IAM, as OAuth and OIDC models rely on human decision-makers that agents bypass, creating risks.
Other challenges include context leakage across systems without continuous re-evaluation of authorisation, and new questions around permission inheritance, liability, and enforcement in agent-to-agent interactions.
Independent research from KuppingerCole Analysts reinforce the urgency of governing AI-driven identity interactions, noting that AI agents already interact across enterprise identity systems while many IAM approaches remain focused on users and controlled environments.
The research also highlights measurable risk, citing findings from IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report that show that 13% of organisations have experienced AI-related security breaches, and 97% of organisations lack adequate access controls for AI systems
Recent incidents, including enterprise data leaks and prompt injection attacks, demonstrate how gaps in AI governance are already being exploited in real-world environments.
Despite these risks, most identity and access management approaches remain centered on human users and static access decisions, leaving organisations unprepared to govern autonomous systems.
AI bots now dominate the internet, accounting for over half of all traffic, with 40% classified as malicious, according to new research from Thales.
The firm’s 2026 Bad Bot Report: Bad Bots in the Agentic Age, reveals a fundamental shift in how the internet operates, as AI-accelerated automation becomes a defining feature of modern digital infrastructure.
The findings highlight three major structural changes: the emergence of AI agents as a new category of internet traffic, the dominance of automated activity over human interaction, and the rapid expansion of attacks targeting APIs and identity systems that serve as the backbone of digital business.
AI Is Redefining Internet Traffic and Security
The report shows that AI is not just increasing the volume of bot activity, but fundamentally changing its nature. In 2025, AI-driven bot attacks surged 12.5x compared to the previous year.
More significantly, AI agents are now emerging as a third category of traffic, alongside traditional “good” and “bad” bots, interacting directly with applications and APIs to retrieve data and perform tasks. This shift is blurring the line between legitimate and malicious automation, making it increasingly difficult for organisations to determine intent.
“AI is transforming automation from something organisations try to block into something they must also manage,” Tim Chang, Global Vice President and General Manager, Application Security at Thales, said. “The challenge is no longer identifying bots. It’s understanding what the bot, agent, or automation is doing, whether it aligns with business intent, and how it interacts with critical systems.”
This evolution is creating a growing visibility gap. Much of today’s AI-driven activity remains unverified or indistinguishable from legitimate traffic, meaning organisations are operating with an incomplete view of the risks they face.
Bots Increasingly Outnumber Humans Online
The report shows automation tightening its grip on the internet, with bots continuing to outpace human activity. In 2025, bots made up more than 53% of all web traffic, up from 51% the previous year, while human activity fell to 47%. This reflects a structural shift rather than a temporary trend, with bots no longer tied to specific events like scraping or credential stuffing campaigns, but instead operating as a persistent and expected presence across digital environments.
APIs and Identity Systems Become the Primary Attack Surface
As digital services increasingly rely on APIs to power core functionality, attackers are following suit. The report finds that 27% of bot attacks now target APIs, where bots can bypass user interfaces and interact directly with backend systems at machine speed.
These attacks often appear legitimate, using valid authentication and well-formed requests, but exploit business logic, extract sensitive data, or manipulate workflows at scale. The impact is especially pronounced in high-value sectors. Financial services accounted for 24% of all bot attacks and 46% of account takeover incidents, underscoring how automation is being used to directly monetise cyber-attacks.
As AI adoption accelerates, the report reveals that the internet is now fundamentally machine driven. Bots are no longer simply tools used by attackers; they are active participants in digital systems, shaping traffic patterns, influencing business metrics, and interacting with systems in real time. In this environment, the ability to manage automation at scale with precision is critical to maintaining security, performance, and trust.
Confronting the Rise of Uncontrolled Automation
The report concludes that traditional security approaches focused on identifying and blocking bots are not sufficient in an environment where automation is both pervasive and often legitimate. Organisations must move toward a governance-based model, combining visibility, policy enforcement, and behavioral analysis to distinguish between acceptable and harmful automation. This includes defining which AI agents are allowed to interact with systems, implementing controls at the API and identity layer, and designing defenses that can adapt as bots evolve.
CodeBase, the growth platform for tech ecosystems and CoreWeave, The Essential Cloud for AI™, have announced a partnership that will provide support for Scottish AI startups. This support will contribute to the acceleration of the Scottish AI community and bolsters Scotland’s overall proposition as an innovative and startup-friendly nation.
To launch the partnership, CodeBase and CoreWeave are hosting an exclusive event for AI startups on Tuesday 5th May in Edinburgh, the first in a series of founder-focused events and activity going forward. CoreWeave Ventures, which backs founders and companies developing the platforms and technologies shaping the AI ecosystem and the next frontier of computing, will also participate in the initial event.
As part of the new collaboration, startups and scaleups supported by CodeBase will gain access to CoreWeave expertise through technical sessions, joint reports, and opportunities to explore advanced AI use cases on CoreWeave infrastructure. CoreWeave and CodeBase will create opportunities to develop AI platforms to interact with computing capabilities through a series of events.
CoreWeave recently led a £1.5 billion AI infrastructure investment into Scotland, the first major investment of its kind in the region alongside DataVita, Scotland’s largest data centre.
James Trotman, VP of Growth at CodeBase, said: “This marks the first major collaboration between Scotland’s national tech ecosystem platform and a global leader in AI infrastructure, aligning world-class infrastructure investment with founder and talent development at scale.”
Ben Richardson, Managing Director, International at CoreWeave, said: “Scotland is fast becoming an exciting centre of AI innovation. Our partnership with CodeBase and recent investment in Scotland reflects CoreWeave’s belief in the strength of this ecosystem. By providing a world-class AI cloud platform to Scotland’s thriving AI community, we’re creating new opportunities for researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to build globally impactful technologies.”
CodeBase launched its AI Discovery programme earlier this year, a new initiative designed to foster a pipeline of deeptech AI startups built by postgraduate researchers, delivered alongside the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and NHS Scotland. And in November, CodeBase relaunched digital skills initiative CodeClan, including an agentic AI programme to upskill engineers.
And through its Venture Builder Incubator partnership with the University of Edinburgh, CodeBase now supports startup ideation and creation focused on data-driven innovation and deep tech in universities across Scotland.
Interested startups can find more information and register their interest here.
There’s only one day to go until the second annual Financial Services Technology Summit, delving into the vast and transformative world of technology in the financial sector.
The event from DIGIT will take place at Dynamic Earth on the 30th of April – this Thursday – featuring a range of speakers, exhibitors, and panel discussions exploring the top trends and topics affecting financial services.
FS Technology aims to contextualise some of the most prominent trends in the financial industry, delving into technical advancements ranging from AI, to Blockchain and the Cloud.
As technology continually permeates the ever-important sector, and as geopolitical tensions make the future all the more uncertain, it has become even more essential for financial services leaders to lock into technology trends to advance their business impact.
The programme will contextualise the most prominent trends that are shaping the industry, from technical advancements in Cloud, AI, Blockchain and Payments, to the regulatory impact of Consumer Duty, SDR, DORA & NIS2.
The day’s agenda is chock full of exceptional leaders who will share their expertise and perspective on how technology continues to shape financial services.
Speakers for the day include:
Kulmohan Makhija, Vice President, Azilen
Peter Crouch, Group Innovation Director, Lloyds Banking Group
Lauran Macare, Head of Payments Data: Payments Technology Director, NatWest
Simon Hull, Director of Financial Services, CreateFuture
Mary Drabble, Head of Data Governance, Royal London
Craig Dick, Procurement, Sustainability & Governance Lead: Group COO, Aberdeen
Stephen O’Keane, Advisory & Head of Banking Sector, Telefonica Tech
Dr Colin Williams, Field CISO, Computacenter
Rebecca Mackenzie, Head of Technology Risk and Control, Monzo Bank
Sean Docherty, Director: Sales & Marketing & AI Transformation Lead, Franklin Templeton
James Ball, Blockchain Consultant & Strategic Advisor, Digital Trust Centre of Excellence
Prakriti Karthauser, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Legal and General
Marnie McCormack, Managing Director: Head of Engineering Practices, JPMorganChase
DIGIT is offering a full day of financial services technology talks, including a breakfast briefing from dotnext for early birds keen to start their financial services technology journey.
You can find the full agenda, as well as our exhibitors and sponsors, here.
Registration is still open – you can register your attendance for the event here.
Millions of football fans around the world are gearing up for the World Cup taking place this summer, and cyber-criminals are seizing the moment to exploit the heightened interest.
Experts at Kaspersky have uncovered various types of scams that mimic official tournament resources or leverage the event for unsafe purposes, putting users’ data and finances at significant risk.
On one of the fraudulent websites discovered, users are offered the option to buy tickets for FIFA World Cup matches, with payments accepted in almost any currency.
However, after completing the fake registration and payment steps, users risk not only losing money from their bank cards but also exposing sensitive personal data to attackers. The site uses the official color scheme of the 2026 tournament to mislead users. In addition, the scammers offer ways to contact them, either directly on the site or via messaging apps.
Another website offers users the chance to purchase “official merchandise” for the 2026 tournament, featuring images of mascot plush toys and T-shirts, with a wide selection available for “purchase.” To make the offer more enticing, the site highlights steep discounts. Additionally, to appear more credible, the scammers have added a “Trusted store” badge at the bottom of the page, along with a registration form that requests personal and banking details.
Another attack scenario involves fraudulent email campaigns, in which attackers attempt to trick users into sending money or click a phishing link. To increase the chances of engagement, the emails feature compelling subject lines and persuasive messaging. In one of the examples identified, fans received emails allegedly sent by official representatives of the event regarding a fake decision from a dispute resolution chamber. The link provided in the email leads to a phishing page.
In some cases, users are targeted with scam emails claiming they have “won” a $500,000 grant to cover tickets, flights, and accommodation, followed by instructions to contact the sender to claim the “prize” funds.
Kaspersky also reports email spam and unsolicited ads related to the sale of competition-themed merchandise and souvenirs, some of them might turn out to be a scam.
“Unfortunately, major sporting events that attract large audiences are never overlooked by scammers,” said Anna Lazaricheva, senior spam analyst at Kaspersky.
“Seemingly harmless or even appealing emails can often conceal not only dangerous links and malicious attachments. In some cases, careless interaction with such messages can lead to serious device infections. We recommend that users ignore any suspicious emails and websites to protect their financial assets and keep their devices and personal data secure.”
Tech secretary Liz Kendall said in a speech that the UK must act now to cement its place in the new technological era.
Kendall said there must be a “decisive move” towards backing more British tech companies as AI reshapes global power, security and prosperity.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), she warned that nations which fail to master the defining technology of their age risk ceding control over their security and economic future.
She said history shows that the countries which pull ahead are those that master the defining currency of their age – from navies and railways to power grids.
Today, that currency is technology: chips, computing power and artificial intelligence, which are increasingly becoming engines of both economic power and hard power.
The Tech Secretary noted that 70 per cent of global AI compute is now controlled by just 5 companies.
Control over where AI systems are built, how they operate and who ultimately controls them is now fundamental to economic security, energy security and defence security.
“This government believes AI Sovereignty is not about isolationism or attempting to pull up the drawbridge and go it alone,” Kendall said.
“We will continue to use the best technology and welcome inward investment because that’s what our public services and economy demand.
“For Britain, AI sovereignty is about reducing over dependencies and increasing resilience in key national strategic priorities, as the Prime Minister has rightly argued.
“So we secure greater control and greater leverage over the issues that matter most.
“And if you want leverage for your country, you need to be a keystone in the global tech architecture – an indispensable partner. This requires 2 key shifts in our approach.
“First, a decisive move towards backing more British AI companies, especially in areas where we have real strengths.
“And second, by working more closely with our international partners, particularly other so-called middle power nations, including on setting the standards for how AI deployed.”
The Technology Secretary rejected calls to pause the development of artificial intelligence, describing such a move as “a double betrayal” of British talent and British interests. Warning that retreating from progress would mean retreating from the world, the minister argued that the real choice facing the country is not between a world with AI and one without, but between a Britain that shapes its own AI future and one left at its mercy.
The speech comes as the UK’s New Sovereign AI Unit announced its investment in Ineffable AI, a UK AI firm which gained £814m in seed funding, the largest European seed round in history.
Slack, owned by Salesforce, is suing Microsoft in a UK lawsuit over its Teams bundling which it alleges is an anti-competitive practice.
Essentially, Slack alleges that Microsoft’s practices with its Teams app has harmed competition in the business messaging app arena, as it bundles Teams with other Microsoft products which Slack said “limit[s] customer choice.”
Microsoft says the complaint is unfounded, saying that Slack’s “lacklustre growth, compared to Zoom and Teams, was based on inferior capabilities when COVID-19 hit in 2020, and had nothing to do with Microsoft.”
The lawsuit follows on from a complaint from Slack to the European Commission back in 2020, saying that Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with other Office offerings gave the software an unfair advantage.
Microsoft then conceded to pressure from the EU, reducing prices on Office products that did not include Teams, avoiding a potential fine.
The firm moved to unbundle Teams globally in 2024, selling Teams separately from the rest of its standard Office offerings.
The tech giant is no stranger to anti-competition allegations, as the mass lawsuit has been approved for its next stage in the UK, alleging that Microsoft is overcharging businesses that use a rival cloud provider and its Windows software. Microsoft also denies the allegations brought up in this case.
OpenAI is changing its relationship with Microsoft, reworking its exclusive, multi-billion dollar partnership to allow the AI firm to form cloud partnerships with some of Microsoft’s rivals.
The announcement of the rework comes shortly after Amazon locked in a cloud deal with OpenAI, and would mean OpenAI could work with other cloud companies like Google.
Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI began about seven years ago, and the tech giant eventually gaining a 27% stake of OpenAI’s for-profit after investing billions of dollars.
The new agreement will see Microsoft remain the primary cloud partner of OpenAI, and will see its products ship first on Azure “unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities.”
While Microsoft will remain a first choice, OpenAi will not have the ability to freely choose to serve its products “across any cloud provider.”
Microsoft no longer needs to pay a revenue share to OpenAI for using its models under the new agreement, but OpenAI will continue to pay a revenue share to Microsoft until 2030 at a 20% rate.
While Microsoft will retain a license to OpenAI’s models through 2032, this is no longer an exclusive license.
The new agreement notebly removes any scrutiny surrounding OpenAI’s progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which was previously the benchmark that would remove disable Microsoft’s exclusive rights on OpenAI’s models. Now, a total cap has been created on Microsoft’s revenue share payments from OpenAI which will continue until 2030.
While the announcement still sees Microsoft come out as a ‘first’ cloud provider to OpenAI and sees the tech titan retain revenue shares of the growing AI firm, Microsoft saw its stock down by one 1% on Monday.
There’s only two days left until the second annual Financial Services Technology Summit, delving into the vast and transformative world of technology in the financial sector.
The event from DIGIT will take place at Dynamic Earth on the 30th of April – this Thursday – featuring a range of speakers, exhibitors, and panel discussions exploring the top trends and topics affecting financial services.
FS Technology aims to contextualise some of the most prominent trends in the financial industry, delving into technical advancements ranging from AI, to Blockchain and the Cloud.
As technology continually permeates the ever-important sector, and as geopolitical tensions make the future all the more uncertain, it has become even more essential for financial services leaders to lock into technology trends to advance their business impact.
The programme will contextualise the most prominent trends that are shaping the industry, from technical advancements in Cloud, AI, Blockchain and Payments, to the regulatory impact of Consumer Duty, SDR, DORA & NIS2.
The day’s agenda is chock full of exceptional leaders who will share their expertise and perspective on how technology continues to shape financial services.
Speakers for the day include:
Kulmohan Makhija, Vice President, Azilen
Peter Crouch, Group Innovation Director, Lloyds Banking Group
Lauran Macare, Head of Payments Data: Payments Technology Director, NatWest
Simon Hull, Director of Financial Services, CreateFuture
Mary Drabble, Head of Data Governance, Royal London
Craig Dick, Procurement, Sustainability & Governance Lead: Group COO, Aberdeen
Stephen O’Keane, Advisory & Head of Banking Sector, Telefonica Tech
Dr Colin Williams, Field CISO, Computacenter
Rebecca Mackenzie, Head of Technology Risk and Control, Monzo Bank
Sean Docherty, Director: Sales & Marketing & AI Transformation Lead, Franklin Templeton
James Ball, Blockchain Consultant & Strategic Advisor, Digital Trust Centre of Excellence
Prakriti Karthauser, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Legal and General
Marnie McCormack, Managing Director: Head of Engineering Practices, JPMorganChase
DIGIT is offering a full day of financial services technology talks, including a breakfast briefing from dotnext for early birds keen to start their financial services technology journey.
You can find the full agenda, as well as our exhibitors and sponsors, here.
Registration is still open – you can register your attendance for the event here.
To mark Marking Supply Chain Day on 29 April, ByteSnap Design has released guidance on managing the growing DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) shortage.
Driven by surging AI demand, DRAM prices rose by approximately 172% in 2025 and lead times are being stretched to as much as 20 weeks.
AI infrastructure, especially High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), is consuming global semiconductor capacity at an unprecedented rate. The company describes the situation as ‘DRAMageddon’, with supply pressures unlikely to ease before 2027.
The core of the crisis lies in manufacturing efficiency. Producing one gigabyte of HBM, used in AI GPU accelerators, requires roughly three times the wafer capacity of standard DDR5 memory.
As the ‘Big Three’ manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, reallocate production to meet high-margin AI demand, the supply of standard DDR4 and DDR5 used in industrial, medical, and automotive embedded systems is being hollowed out.
The design consultancy warns that switching to DDR5 isn’t a guaranteed solution. Although some DDR5 parts are currently easier to source, rising demand is increasing supply pressure.
At the same time, Samsung’s planned phase-out of certain DDR4 lines is driving up DDR4 prices without ensuring stable DDR5 availability. The company recommends seeking platform-specific advice before committing to a redesign.
By the time shortages become widely visible, available allocation has often already been secured, making early action critical.
ByteSnap Design further recommends four immediate actions for embedded systems manufacturers to minimise any downtime or production risk:
Audit your Bill of Materials (BOM): identify which products rely on DDR4 or DDR5, review distributor lead times, and prioritise components on vendor longevity programmes over consumer-grade SKUs.
Optimise software requirements: assess whether a Linux-class platform is necessary, or if a leaner RTOS and microcontroller could reduce DRAM dependency and enable use of smaller, more available memory.
Design for flexibility: architect products with multiple viable memory options rather than relying on a single DRAM SKU.
Extend procurement horizons: shift from rolling eight-week planning to 12–18 month forecasting, and use distributor alert services (e.g. EBV Elektronik, Astute Electronics) to track lead times and pricing trends.
“The DRAM shortage is a structural shift in the market,” Dunstan Power, Director and co-founder of ByteSnap Design, commented.
“For manufacturers, every other component on a Bill of Materials is effectively ‘dead stock’ until the DRAM arrives. We are already seeing a repeat of the 2020–23 supply chain crisis, but this time driven by the insatiable demand from AI data centres. The teams that navigate this best will be those acting early on distributor intelligence, not reacting once constraints fully hit.
“For those already facing production disruption, the priority must be ‘Design Rescue’, redesigning boards and rewriting firmware to support components that are actually available. Waiting for supply to recover is no longer a viable strategy.”
New Cyber Essentials requirements coming into force from today could trigger a sharp rise in certification failures, according to Cloudhouse.
To support organisations ahead of the deadline, Cloudhouse has launched a free Cyber Essentials readiness assessment, designed to identify patching gaps, configuration drift, and weak identity controls before they result in automatic failure.
The updated framework introduces a significant shift in how organisations are assessed. Under the new rules, businesses will automatically fail certification if they miss a 14-day window for applying critical patches or fail to enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) across cloud services where it is available.
For many organisations, the challenge will not be awareness of the rules, but the ability to meet them consistently across complex environments.
“Cyber Essentials has stopped being a point-in-time exercise and has become a test of day-to-day operational control,” Mat Clothier, CEO at Cloudhouse commented.
“The risk is that organisations assume they’re compliant, only to fail instantly because of a missed patch or a gap in MFA coverage. That’s exactly why we’re offering the readiness assessment – to give teams a clear view of where they stand before they’re tested.”
The new requirements also expand the scope of certification, bringing all cloud services that store or process organisational data into consideration. Combined with stricter enforcement of patching timelines, this significantly increases the likelihood of gaps across large or distributed IT estates.
For organisations managing legacy applications and complex dependencies, meeting the 14-day patching requirement in particular presents a major operational hurdle.
Scotland Women in Technology (SWiT), has announced that it will fund two new cohorts of The Data Lab’s Data and AI Leadership Programme in a bid to boost AI leadership skills among women working in the Scottish tech ecosystem. This is announced as part of a wider multi-year partnership between SWiT and The Data Lab to create opportunities for early to mid-career women in data and AI across Scotland.
Over the next two years, SWiT will fund places for 40 women to participate in one of The Data Lab’s most successful development programmes. The course will be delivered through a blend of virtual and in-person sessions extending the reach of the programme and participants across the length and breadth of Scotland.
The Data Lab’s Data and AI Leadership Programme, delivered over 10 hours of facilitated training, covers key aspects of using data and AI for organisational benefit, focusing on readiness assessments, identifying AI opportunities, aligning strategies with goals, and promoting responsible data leadership. 40 participants will take part in the two cohorts in 2026 and 2027, where they will learn to develop and implement data and AI strategies, including planning and assessing current capabilities, and designing and implementing a data and AI strategy roadmap.
Silka Patel, Founder and Chair of Scotland Women in Technology, said: “With the rise in AI, it is vital that opportunities are created to ensure everyone has a seat at the table when it comes to making AI decisions. It can be easy to overlook female tech talent, and as we saw from the latest Lovelace Report, there has been an exodus of women from the sector as a result.
“With a firm commitment to the Scottish tech ecosystem, we want to make sure that this stops by upskilling women in AI and ensuring these skills are not overlooked in the AI-era. This partnership will unite The Data Lab’s technical pedigree with a strategic gender lens, ensuring AI leadership in Scotland is as diverse as it is innovative.”
Heather Thomson, CEO of The Data Lab, added: “We’re excited to work with Scotland Women in Technology to encourage and support more women to develop data and AI leadership skills that drive organisational transformation, value creation, and data-driven decision making within a culture of innovation.
“With women representing only 21% of the UK’s tech sector, it is critical they have access to opportunities to advance their data and AI careers – and that businesses of all sizes can tap into the diverse talent they need to thrive. This also plays an important role in strengthening the wider AI ecosystem and addressing many societal challenges, including AI bias at source. We welcome SWiT’s investment in tackling the talent gap and promoting equality in tech and are delighted to partner with them to deliver this programme over the coming year.”
The first phase of the course will take place virtually, commencing in September 2026. The second phase of the programme will take place in-person, launching in February 2027.
In addition to investment in the course, SWiT will also fund more than 30 places for women to attend DataFest, Scotland’s leading showcase of data and AI, attracting global speakers, industry leaders, and practitioners from across sectors and industries, over the next two years.
Those interested in participating in the course or attending DataFest 2026 should sign up here. Applicants should either be working in the technology sector, but not necessarily in a technical role, or working in a tech-related role in any sector.
There’s only three days until the second annual Financial Services Technology Summit, delving into the vast and transformative world of technology in the financial sector.
The event from DIGIT will take place at Dynamic Earth on the 30th of April – this Thursday – featuring a range of speakers, exhibitors, and panel discussions exploring the top trends and topics affecting financial services.
FS Technology aims to contextualise some of the most prominent trends in the financial industry, delving into technical advancements ranging from AI, to Blockchain and the Cloud.
As technology continually permeates the ever-important sector, and as geopolitical tensions make the future all the more uncertain, it has become even more essential for financial services leaders to lock into technology trends to advance their business impact.
The programme will contextualise the most prominent trends that are shaping the industry, from technical advancements in Cloud, AI, Blockchain and Payments, to the regulatory impact of Consumer Duty, SDR, DORA & NIS2.
The day’s agenda is chock full of exceptional leaders who will share their expertise and perspective on how technology continues to shape financial services.
Speakers for the day include:
Kulmohan Makhija, Vice President, Azilen
Peter Crouch, Group Innovation Director, Lloyds Banking Group
Lauran Macare, Head of Payments Data: Payments Technology Director, NatWest
Simon Hull, Director of Financial Services, CreateFuture
Mary Drabble, Head of Data Governance, Royal London
Craig Dick, Procurement, Sustainability & Governance Lead: Group COO, Aberdeen
Stephen O’Keane, Advisory & Head of Banking Sector, Telefonica Tech
Dr Colin Williams, Field CISO, Computacenter
Rebecca Mackenzie, Head of Technology Risk and Control, Monzo Bank
Sean Docherty, Director: Sales & Marketing & AI Transformation Lead, Franklin Templeton
James Ball, Blockchain Consultant & Strategic Advisor, Digital Trust Centre of Excellence
Prakriti Karthauser, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Legal and General
Marnie McCormack, Managing Director: Head of Engineering Practices, JPMorganChase
DIGIT is offering a full day of financial services technology talks, including a breakfast briefing from dotnext for early birds keen to start their financial services technology journey.
You can find the full agenda, as well as our exhibitors and sponsors, here.
Registration is still open – you can register your attendance for the event here.
Eighty percent of CEOs expect AI to force a high to medium degree of change to their operational capabilities, shifting the focus from digital business to autonomous business, according to a survey from Gartner, Inc.
“Autonomous business is a strategy where self-learning software agents and machine customers make decisions, take action and create new types of value for organisations. CEOs see this shift as an immediate operational goal,” said Don Scheibenreif, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “While digital business changes what the organisation does, autonomous business changes how the organisation does it.”
The Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey of 469 CEOs and other senior business executives worldwide was conducted across three quarters, ending in the fourth quarter of 2025.
The survey found that 54% of CEOs said their automation was limited to specific tasks; by the end of 2028, only 13% expect to remain at this level.
Conversely, 32% of CEOs expect their organisations to deploy self-learning and adaptable AI tools to assist with human decision-making, while 27% expect their organisations to operate primarily without human intervention, signalling a move to autonomous business ecosystems.
“CEOs are realising that AI is not simply another layer of automation. It is a catalyst for rebuilding the enterprise itself,” said David Furlonger, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “This transition to autonomous business requires CEOs to have a capabilities‑first mindset that prioritises how work gets done and how value is delivered in an increasingly autonomous economy.”
While automation and autonomous business can provide efficiency gains, they can also become a competitive threat.
Transactional Revenue Is at Risk from AI
Some CEOs expect AI to have a negative impact on their profit models. Twenty-eight percent of CEOs surveyed said transactional revenue was most at risk from AI, as AI agents could bypass existing intermediated systems or their ability to conduct real-time pricing and negotiation.
“As AI agents automate purchasing, pricing, and negotiation, they remove the extra steps and inefficiencies that transaction fees were designed to cover. This is forcing CEOs to rethink profit models and pivot toward recurring, outcome‑based revenue models to avoid losing profit,” said Furlonger.
Only 17% of CEOs expect significant changes to their customer base due to AI, compared to 39% during the digital era. Instead, business leaders are primarily using AI to deepen relationships with existing customers and, increasingly, machine customers.
Gartner predicts that through 2026, the number of large companies that have a dedicated business unit or sales channel to access fast-growing machine customer markets will double versus 2024.
For CIOs, this underscores the need to build systems that support both human and machine decision‑makers, with trust, accuracy, and data integrity at the core.
“To prepare for this inevitable future, CEOs and CIOs must lead their organisations to rebuild their operational foundations and reengineer their people, assets, and financial structures,” said Scheibenreif.
Meta will cut 10% of its workforce – around 8,000 employees, as it continues to up investments in AI.
The tech firm announced the layoffs in a memo to staff on Thursday, which also said it would not hiring for thousands of jobs it had previously been looking to fill.
AI is a driving factor for the job cuts, as Meta will look to spend about £100 billion on the tech this year, equating to the amount spent on AI in the last three years combined, according to the BBC.
While a Meta spokesperson confirmed the job cuts, they neglected to provide a reason for them.
They come as no surprise, however, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statements early in the year nodded to potential layoffs.
Zuckerberg touted the ability of AI-empowered workers, saying one person could be just as impactful as a team in terms of project delivery. The Facebook founder said he thought “2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way we work.”
This year has already seen two rounds of layoffs from the social media titan, cutting a total of around 2,000 workers. However, staff were already apprehensive of the latest cuts due to reports from Reuters alleging Meta’s plans.
Continuing employees may remain on edge, however, as Meta announced that it would begin tracking employee actions on their devices and keeping logs on their activity as part of its AI training methods, ringing alarm bells on employee replacement and surveillance.
Meta’s layoffs are certainly on trend in tech, with Amazon laying off 30,000 workers and Oracle giving pink slips to 10,000.
Microsoft is taking a different approach, offering tenured employees voluntary buyouts, but has also cut jobs as a result of other investment priorities.
Firms continue to cite AI as a major driver of workforce restructuring and layoffs, touting its productivity gains, often at a human cost.
International cyber agencies are calling on organisations to understand and better defend against the cyber threat from covert networks by following new joint advice.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) alongside industry and 15 international partners from across nine other countries, have issued a new advisory highlighting how to defend against these attacker tactics which are believed to be used by the majority of China-linked actors to obscure malicious cyber activity.
Covert networks are often made up of vulnerable everyday internet-connected edge devices, such as home routers and smart devices, that have been compromised. These networks are being leveraged at scale to target critical sectors globally, steal sensitive data, and maintain persistent access.
The new advisory, produced with members of the NCSC’s Cyber League programme with industry, has been published on the second day of the UK government’s flagship CYBERUK conference and is designed to assist organisations with the latest protective advice.
It includes comprehensive mitigation advice to help defend against activity originating from a covert network.
It also warns of a key issue for network defenders: IOC extinction, where indicators of compromise disappear as quickly as they are discovered, requiring more adaptive, intelligence-driven measures to mitigate the risks.
“Our new joint advisory consolidates insights and proactive advice from across the international cyber security community to help network defenders combat the use of covert networks,” Paul Chichester, NCSC Director of Operations said.
“In recent years, we have seen a deliberate shift in cyber groups based in China utilising these networks to hide their malicious activity in an attempt to avoid accountability.
“The NCSC will not shy away from shining a light of these techniques and we call on organisations to act now to better defend their critical assets.”
The advisory describes how covert networks used by China-linked actors are being created and maintained, externally, by Chinese information security companies.
In September 2024, alongside international partners, the NCSC called out, an information security company based in China, Integrity Technology Group, for controlling and managing a botnet, which was utilised by Flax Typhoon.
In December 2025, the UK government sanctioned Integrity Technology Group alongside another China-based information security company, for their reckless and indiscriminate malicious cyber activity against the UK and its allies.
Small organisations are encouraged to use the free Cyber Action Toolkit, with larger organisations encouraged to secure Cyber Essentials certification and use the updated Cyber Assessment Framework.
The number of new technology companies incorporated in the first quarter of 2026 surged to a record high, despite geopolitical tensions and uncertainty, according to leading audit, tax and consulting firm RSM UK.
RSM’s analysis shows there were 16,887 new tech incorporations in Q1 2026, up 39% from 12,184 the same quarter last year, and increasing 15% from 14,699 in Q4 2025.
All UK regions were up on the previous year, with London accounting for the highest number of new tech incorporations at 8,236.
“The UK’s tech industry continues to show promising growth despite current geopolitical uncertainty, while other sectors pull back on investment,” Ben Bilsland, partner and head of technology industry at RSM UK, said.
“For tech entrepreneurs, the UK is viewed as a stable place to invest and grow, which is crucial in the current volatile environment. The UK’s proven track record in the tech space and thriving tech ecosystems, have helped to solidify its position as best in the world to do business.
“While the figures are promising – challenges remain for UK tech. Slow planning regulation, skills shortages and high energy costs will act as barriers against transformational growth. We have recently seen US tech companies begin to stall on promises to invest in the UK. If this trend continues, a reduction of overseas capital into the tech industry will hinder growth.
“With further headwinds looming, UK tech leaders need to closely monitor the broader economic environment, particularly if they’re exposed to supply chain disruptions and volatile energy costs. Tech companies that are best placed to ride the storm will be those with strong energy resilience, flexible supply networks and disciplined capital allocation.”
Scotland saw a 70% year-on-year increase in tech incorporations in the first quarter of 2026, with 687 compared to 405 in 2025, the largest year-on-year increase.
This also marks a quarter on quarter increase, up 37% on the last quarter of 2025’s 502 tech incorporations. This was the largest quarter-on-quarter rise beating out the South West (20%) and London (19%) by a significant margin.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is beginning to endorse passkeys over passwords wherever a service supports them.
In instances where passkeys are not supported two-step verification is advised, the NCSC announced.
The NCSC’s ongoing guidance will reflect this new endorsement as passkeys become a lauded defence tool.
The NCSC says that their recommendation of passkeys was “not a decision taken lightly.” The organisation consulted websites, app developers, tech vendors, as well as the FIDO Alliance, and carried out technical and sociotechnical research.
Research from the NCSC found that all traditional multifactor authentication methods, from passwords with one-time codes to push approvals, are “inherently phishable”.
However, FIDO2 credentials, which include passkeys, were found to be either as secure or more secure than traditional MFA when faced with common credential attacks.
FIDO2 authentication constitutes as multi-factor authentication when user verification is required as part of the login process.
The NCSC says that large-scale attacks that directly target correct passkeys are unlikely because FIDO2 removes the ability to cheaply reuse or relay credentials.
“In short, when services support them, passkeys provide stronger protection for users than traditional MFA/2SV,” the NCSC said.
Still, there are concerns regarding the adoption of passkeys, such as the risk of synchronisation, questions regarding multi-factor authentication.
While synchronisation – when passkeys are synchronised across devices – does present a novel risk, the main control factor is the authentication protection the sync account, which often already exists in MFA deployments.
Traditional MFA may be effective, but the NCSC says it remains “fundamentally vulnerable to phishing” while passkeys remove this type of attack via cryptographic binding authentication.
“On a broader scale, moving towards phishing‑resistant authentication reduces one of the most persistent causes of cyber compromise. The technology is mature, the standards are established, and adoption now represents a practical opportunity to improve security for users and organisations alike,” Dave Chismon, NCSC CTO for Architecture wrote.
While UK cybersecurity teams are rapidly embracing AI tools, they do not yet have the AI skills needed to safely deploy or defend against a surge in AI powered threats, new ISC2 research reveals.
As AI becomes central to cyber defence strategies, UK professionals report that demand for AI related expertise is outpacing their ability to keep up, creating a widening divide between ambition and preparedness.
A Growing Disconnect Between AI Adoption and Workforce Readiness
After several years of budget cuts, cybersecurity teams across the UK are beginning to see the first signs of stabilisation. Yet despite financial pressures levelling off, the top driver behind continued skills shortages is the lack of budget to hire (28%). This comes at a time when adoption of AI security tools is accelerating.
Almost three quarters (74%) of UK cybersecurity teams are already using, testing or evaluating AI driven security tools. However, the workforce is not sufficiently equipped with the skills to support this rapid shift, with AI (42%) being the most pressing skills need cited by respondents.
This rapid uptake of AI tools reflects growing confidence in the technology’s ability to strengthen day-to-day security operations. UK organisations are enthusiastic about the potential of AI to strengthen their networking monitoring (38%), security operations (34%) and threat modelling (30%). However, the workforce has not yet fully developed the AI knowledge required to operate, manage and secure these systems effectively.
The report found that 95% of UK organisations say they have at least one area where employees require additional skills – up from 91% in 2024.
AI is also lifting productivity as 70% say their efficiency improved once AI tools were introduced.
However, AI enabled threats are rising sharply: 43% faced AI powered social engineering, with 29% experiencing data leakage.
About a quarter (23%) suspect AI-powered attacks, with 26% reporting AI-related breaches.
While AI adoption is high across all sectors, smaller organisations were the most likely to report multiple (67%) AI related security incidents, highlighting the uneven distribution of specialised expertise.
For AI to genuinely reinforce the UK’s cyber resilience, organisations will need to invest not only in new technologies but in the people responsible for operating and safeguarding them. This means focusing on developing AI related capabilities within existing teams, particularly as many organisations continue to face hiring constraints.
Strengthening cloud and AI literacy, improving access to training, and creating clear pathways for internal development will be essential as AI becomes embedded across security operations. Prioritising upskilling over external recruitment will help organisations build long‑term resilience, especially when specialist talent is difficult or costly to hire.
At the same time, leadership teams must ensure that AI-aware planning is built into their broader security strategy, anticipating both the opportunities AI can offer and the evolving threats it introduces. A clear leadership focus on cybersecurity, combined with ongoing investment in people and skills, will ensure teams remain ready to protect and defend as AI continues to transform the security landscape.
This is according to HSBC Innovation Banking, which published its latest Venture Capital Term Sheet Guide 2026, which provides insight into the evolving dynamics shaping UK startup investment.
The report empowers founders to make informed decisions when seeking investment, while enabling VCs to benchmark against the wider industry.
Based on analysis of 711 (643 UK HQ) completed term sheets and 50,000 data points, representing 42% of UK equity deals over £500k by volume and 46% by value in 2025, the independent report is the most comprehensive of its kind. It highlights an increasingly nuanced funding environment, with clear differences emerging between early- and late-stage investment dynamics.
Later-stage rounds show more founder-friendly dynamics
At the later stages, larger deal sizes and increased competition for high-quality companies are contributing to more favourable term sheet outcomes for founders. The proportion of term sheets for investments over £10m (Series B and C+) has continued to rise, now representing 31% of all term sheets.
This reflects growing competition for scaled businesses, larger capital requirements, and the rising importance of the UK’s innovation economy.
Notably, breakout AI and DeepTech businesses continue to attract a significant share of investment. In some cases, Series A rounds are reaching sizes more typically associated with later-stage deals, giving founders greater negotiating power.
Early-stage investment remains structured and selective
In contrast, early-stage investment continues to reflect a more cautious and structured approach. Seed and early-stage deals account for around three-quarters of all term sheets (69%), highlighting the scale of activity at the earliest stages.
Increasingly, however, Seed rounds are becoming more structured and investor-friendly. Participating preference shares have doubled (7% to 14%), while syndication has increased (26% to 31%), reflecting tighter capital markets and longer gaps between funding rounds.
At the same time, investors are placing greater emphasis on tangible performance – particularly revenue and profitability – resulting in a more disciplined approach to deal terms.
Regional ecosystems continue to gain traction
The report highlights the growing importance of regional ecosystems across the UK, with investment increasingly flowing beyond London into sector-driven clusters.
Over 50% of deals across all life stages are now funded outside London while 51% of Seed rounds take place beyond the capital. Regional concentration is particularly strong in Life Sciences (60%), CleanTech (61%) and Energy (56%) – reflecting both the strength and diversity of innovation across the country, and the continued development of specialist hubs like Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester.
However, London continues to offer the most founder-friendly terms, with 93% of term sheets including non-participating preference shares. Founders raising outside London should therefore expect a wider mix of capital sources and greater negotiation on downside protection and structures.
University spinouts remain a key source of innovation
University spinouts are a key part of the UK’s ecosystem, representing 9% of UK term sheets. They play a particularly important role in Life Sciences and DeepTech, which account for 46% and 38% of spinout terms respectively.
These companies are central to translating research into commercial outcomes and strengthening the UK’s innovation pipeline.
As the ecosystem matures, spinouts are increasingly aligning with broader market norms in how term sheets are structured and negotiated.
International capital remains active in UK deals
UK investors continue to anchor funding at Seed and early-stage levels, accounting for 70% of Seed and 55% of Series A investment.
However, cross-border capital – particularly from US investors – plays a critical role at later stages. Nearly two thirds (65%) of Series B and C+ rounds were led by foreign investors, representing £5.9bn of investment.
This reflects the increasingly international nature of later-stage funding, reinforcing competition for high-quality companies and the global appeal of UK innovation.
Worldwide IT spending is expected to reach $6.31 trillion in 2026, up 13.5% from 2025, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
“This latest forecast underscores the accelerating momentum in AI infrastructure and advanced memory,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “As AI workloads scale, data center investment is ramping rapidly, which in turn is driving increased demand for high‑performance compute. This dynamic is creating meaningful growth opportunities for companies delivering AI‑optimised processors, accelerators, and enabling technologies.”
Data center systems spending is set to see the largest growth in 2026 at 55.8%. IT services, including application implementation and managed services, infrastructure implementation and managed services and IaaS, is forecast to see the largest overall spending, surpassing $1.87 billion in 2026.
Table 1. Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)
2025 Spending
2025 Growth (%)
2026 Spending
2026 Growth (%)
Data Center Systems
505,634
51.6
787,990
55.8
Devices
791,663
9.7
856,189
8.2
Software
1,254,449
12.8
1,443,621
15.1
IT Services
1,715,650
6.2
1,870,197
9.0
Communications Services
1,296,409
3.3
1,358,553
4.8
Overall IT
5,563,805
10.5
6,316,550
13.5
Source: Gartner (April 2026)
“Robust demand combined with supply constraints has resulted in record price increases for high-bandwidth memory. This surge positions the memory segment as a lucrative area for semiconductor manufacturers,” said Lovelock. “These trends collectively make AI infrastructure the most attractive segment for capitalising on the robust expansion in IT spending.”
What’s driving these projections?
Compared to Gartner’s previous forecast, Gartner is predicting a stronger‑than‑anticipated growth in global IT spending, driven by sustained momentum across AI infrastructure, software, and IaaS. These shifts are reinforcing a multi‑speed IT market, with hyperscaler purchases and AI‑centric software segments significantly outperforming more traditional categories.
Hyperscale cloud demand is fueling a sharp increase in server and data center investment, with spending on data center systems projected to surpass $788 billion in 2026 with growth accelerating well beyond prior expectations. At the same time, GenAI continues to drive outsized gains in software, particularly in GenAI model development, where spending growth is forecast to more than double year-over-year.
Device spending is also rising, reaching an estimated $856 billion, though growth is being moderated by higher memory costs that are lifting average selling prices and constraining replacement cycles in lower‑margin segments.
“Together, these dynamics highlight a widening divergence across IT markets, as AI infrastructure and GenAI software see substantial upward revisions while device growth reflects ongoing cost and pricing pressures,” said Lovelock.
Advanced Connectivity Technologies are foundational to the UK’s digital economy, enabling secure, high‑performance data transmission across sectors including transport, defence and future telecoms. ACT‑linked activity accounts for around a quarter of the UK telecoms sector, generating an estimated £26.2 billion in revenue and £11.1 billion in global GVA.
Looking ahead, the government is committing £240 million to a four‑year targeted ACT research programme and £130 million to strengthen lab and testbed infrastructure.
2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence is a transformative, economy‑wide technology with the potential to reshape productivity, public services and scientific discovery. In 2023, the UK AI sector generated £14.2 billion in revenue, contributed £5.8 billion in GVA and employed 64,500 people. The UK is ranked first in Europe and fourth globally for AI capability and has attracted over £44 billion in private AI investment since July 2024.
Funding into AI includes over £2bn via the AI Opportunities Action Plan and a £1bn expansion of the AI Research Resource, as well as new AI Growth Zones.
3. Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity underpins trust, resilience and growth in an increasingly digital economy. The UK cyber sector is world‑leading, generating £13.2 billion in revenue, contributing £7.8 billion in GVA, and supporting 67,300 jobs in 2023‑24. Exports have grown rapidly, reaching £7.2 billion in 2023, up from £4.2 billion in 2020.
The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, alongside the Cyber Growth Action Plan (published in 2025) will further strengthen market confidence. Investment includes £21 million to promote secure‑by‑design hardware based on CHERI architecture and the creation of the National Cyber Innovation Centre in Cheltenham, expected to catalyse £1 billion in private investment.
4. Engineering Biology
Engineering biology applies advanced biological design to create new products and more sustainable manufacturing processes across healthcare, agriculture and industry. Globally, engineering biology could deliver a £1.6–£3.1 trillion economic impact by 2040, with the UK recognised as the strongest ecosystem outside the US and China.
The UK Government is investing £196 million in a National Engineering Biology Programme to support researcher‑led innovation and £184 million in scale‑up infrastructure to address manufacturing bottlenecks. Regulatory reform is central, supported by the Engineering Biology Regulators Network, regulatory sandboxes and the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act, which creates new routes to market for agritech.
Quantum technologies – spanning computing, sensing and communications – offer transformative capabilities for healthcare, defence, energy and finance. The UK ranks second globally in quantum investment and has received over £1.1 billion in public funding since 2014 through the National Quantum Technologies Programme. Quantum computing alone could add £11 billion to UK GDP by 2045 and support over 126,000 jobs.
The UK Government is launching an ambitious long‑term programme with a goal of securing 15% of the global quantum market by 2033. This includes £670 million to support quantum computing development and a 10‑year funding commitment for the National Quantum Computing Centre. Five National Quantum Missions will drive adoption in areas such as NHS diagnostics, navigation and secure communications.
6. Semiconductors
Semiconductors are critical enablers of AI, advanced connectivity, clean energy and modern electronics. In 2022, the UK semiconductor sector generated £9.6 billion in revenue, contributed £7.4 billion in GVA, and employed around 15,000 people, with productivity of approximately £460,000 GVA per employee.
The UK Government is establishing a UK Semiconductor Centre with up to £19 million to provide sector leadership, alongside £25 million for new Innovation and Knowledge Centres and £35 million to strengthen the skills pipeline.
There is just one week left until the second annual Financial Services Technology Summit, delving into the vast and transformative world of technology in the financial sector.
The event from DIGIT will take place at Dynamic Earth on the 30th of April, featuring a range of speakers, exhibitors, and panel discussions exploring the top trends and topics affecting financial services.
FS Technology aims to contextualise some of the most prominent trends in the financial industry, delving into technical advancements ranging from AI, to Blockchain and the Cloud.
As technology continually permeates the ever-important sector, and as geopolitical tensions make the future all the more uncertain, it has become even more essential for financial services leaders to lock into technology trends to advance their business impact.
The programme will contextualise the most prominent trends that are shaping the industry, from technical advancements in Cloud, AI, Blockchain and Payments, to the regulatory impact of Consumer Duty, SDR, DORA & NIS2.
The day’s agenda is chock full of exceptional leaders who will share their expertise and perspective on how technology continues to shape financial services.
Speakers for the day include:
Kulmohan Makhija, Vice President, Azilen
Peter Crouch, Group Innovation Director, Lloyds Banking Group
Lauran Macare, Head of Payments Data: Payments Technology Director, NatWest
Simon Hull, Director of Financial Services, CreateFuture
Mary Drabble, Head of Data Governance, Royal London
Craig Dick, Procurement, Sustainability & Governance Lead: Group COO, Aberdeen
Stephen O’Keane, Advisory & Head of Banking Sector, Telefonica Tech
Dr Colin Williams, Field CISO, Computacenter
Rebecca Mackenzie, Head of Technology Risk and Control, Monzo Bank
Sean Docherty, Director: Sales & Marketing & AI Transformation Lead, Franklin Templeton
James Ball, Blockchain Consultant & Strategic Advisor, Digital Trust Centre of Excellence
Prakriti Karthauser, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Legal and General
Marnie McCormack, Managing Director: Head of Engineering Practices, JPMorganChase
DIGIT is offering a full day of financial services technology talks, including a breakfast briefing from dotnext for early birds keen to start their financial services technology journey.
You can find the full agenda, as well as our exhibitors and sponsors, here.
Registration is still open – you can register your attendance for the event here.
As artificial intelligence (AI) demand accelerates, new research from Fluke Corporation reveals a growing confidence crisis among data centre professionals, raising concerns about the sector’s ability to scale reliably.
A survey of more than 150 data centre professionals, conducted at Data Centre World London 2026, found that only 22% fully trust that their test and measurement data reflects real-world operating conditions. Confidence drops further under pressure, with just 19% expressing full trust in data accuracy during peak load or failure scenarios.
Several factors are driving this lack of confidence in infrastructure data. Skills and training gaps were cited as the biggest barrier (43%), followed by time pressures during commissioning (16%), inconsistent testing processes (11%) and budget constraints (10%).
The operational impact is already being felt. Half of respondents reported experiencing unplanned outages or major performance disruptions at least annually, with nearly one in five experiencing disruptions as frequently as monthly (10%) or weekly (8%).
Outdated testing equipment is compounding the issue, with nearly two thirds (65%) saying legacy tools increase the risk of downtime and compliance failures within their organisation.
Speed vs. compliance trade-offs emerge
The research exposes a widening gap between intent and execution. While almost all respondents agree that regular maintenance is critical to reducing downtime, only 28% have real-time or predictive monitoring in place across critical infrastructure such as power, cooling and networks. One fifth admit maintenance is conducted quarterly at most.
Adoption of advanced technologies also remains limited. Just 10% have fully implemented automation, AI diagnostics or predictive monitoring, while many remain in pilot (22%) or early-stage (19%) phases.
Pressure to deliver data centre capacity faster is also creating new risks. Forty-two percent of respondents said time pressures create occasional compliance risks, while 17% said they make it significantly harder to meet evolving connector and certification requirements.
“What’s striking here is that organisations already know what needs to be done. There’s broad recognition that regular maintenance and better monitoring are critical to reducing downtime, yet in practice, adoption is lagging,” said Mike Slevin, Director of EMEA market at Fluke Corporation. “That gap between awareness and action is where risk builds. When testing isn’t consistent and monitoring isn’t real-time, small issues can quickly escalate into outages.”
The findings also cast doubt on the UK’s ability to support its ambitions to become a global AI leader. Only half of respondents believe the UK data centre sector is operationally ready to scale for AI, cloud and hyperscale demand over the next five years.
Additionally, just 7% believe the UK currently has the infrastructure resilience and operational standards required to support its “AI superpower” ambitions, with 28% pointing to significant infrastructure gaps.
“AI is redefining the demands placed on data centre infrastructure. With higher-density architecture and increasingly complex fibre environments, multi-fibre testing has become paramount as the margin for error narrows”, added Mike Slevin. “If organisations can’t confidently validate performance under real-world conditions, they risk building AI on unstable foundations. The challenge now is ensuring that capacity is resilient and ready for sustained demand.”
AI firm Anthropic is reportedly investigating claims of unauthorised access to its Claude Mythos model that has yet to be released to the public.
Anthropic said: “We’re investigating a report claiming unauthorised access to Claude Mythos Preview through one of our third-party vendor environments.”
Bloomberg previously reported that members of a private forum had accessed with model which is currently only released to a small number of AI firms.
Despite this report, Anthropic said there is no evidence that its systems have been affected nor is there evidence that those with access to the AI model are malicious.
However, the report does spark concerns around how AI firms are able to keep their models from being accessed by the wrong hands, and the resulting fallout.
Anthropic released the Mythos model preview to a select group of AI and financial firms so they could test their defence systems against the models superior ability to find and exploit vulnerabilities.
Keeping the model secure and out of the hands of the public or threat actors would require these organisations to also control access to the model.
According to Bloomberg’s report, one of the unauthorised users with claiming access to the model already had permission to view the model through the work they did for a third-party vendor.
The group had been using the model, though not for hacking, as they wanted to evade detection, according to Bloomberg.
Anthropic’s Mythos has sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity and AI sphere when Anthropic shared is ability to find and exploit security vulnerabilities in seemingly secure code.
Its tapered release was meant to allow financial firms and other AI companies to test their code and systems for vulnerabilities, as Anthropic has warned the model may have too much potential for malicious acts if accessible by the public.
The model’s release also sparked interest from world leaders, as the UK government sought to work with Anthropic, and even the US has reversed its opinion on the AI firm, looking to collaborate due to the new model.
In 2025, the number of UK organisations successfully compromised rose by 20%, even as overall ransomware volume fell by 87%, according to data from SonicWall.
The data stems from measuring network-perimeter detections which are threats identified and blocked by SonicWall firewalls at the point of delivery.
The findings point to a potential move away from high-volume “spray-and-pray” ransomware campaigns toward more targeted, human-operated “big game hunting” attacks designed to maximise impact against fewer victims.
According to SonicWall, smaller organisations are more likely to be targeted by ransomware, which was present in 88% of SMB breaches compared to just 39% of large enterprises, underscoring how attackers continue to exploit less mature security environments.
England absorbed 96.7% of all UK ransomware hits, reflecting the heavy concentration of targets in London and the South East
Experts at SonicWall pinpointed the issue to outdated infrastructure compounding the problem, fuelling what it describes as a growing “Zombie Tech” crisis. A single decade-old vulnerability in widely deployed Hikvision IP cameras accounted for 67 million attack attempts in the UK, more than 20% of all serious intrusion activity observed. Hikvision is the world’s largest CCTV / video‑surveillance equipment supplier by revenue and unit share in recent years.
While 80% of IT leaders believe they can detect a breach within eight hours, the data shows attackers remain undetected for an average of 181 days. More broadly, automated threats continue to scale rapidly. Bots are now generating 36,000 scans per second, while AI-enabled attacks increased by 89% in 2025, highlighting how adversaries are combining automation with precision targeting.
“The UK data for 2025 highlights ransomware is evolving into Big Game Hunting,” said Spencer Starkey, Executive VP, EMEA, SonicWall. “On the surface, the 87% drop in overall attack volume might look like progress, but the reality is more alarming. More organisations are being successfully hit, and attackers are doing it with far greater precision.
“Meanwhile, Zombie Tech continues to haunt UK networks. We’re seeing millions of attacks tied to a single long-known vulnerability, alongside continued exploitation of issues first disclosed more than a decade ago. Threats are becoming more sophisticated at the top end, while remaining highly exploitable at the base and organisations must address both.”
The head of the UK’s cyber agency is expected to say that the country is facing a “perfect storm” for cyber security against the backdrop of a new “technological revolution” in a major speech today.
Dr Richard Horne, the CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre, a part of signals intelligence agency GCHQ, will say that the meeting of rapid technological change driven by developments in AI and geopolitical tensions are giving rise to a period of “tumultuous uncertainty”.
Speaking to the CYBERUK conference in Glasgow, Dr Horne will say that as the technology landscape develops, the definition of cyber security is expanding with it.
In the future, it will be vital to secure technology that will control robotics, autonomous systems and technology that is physically integrated with human bodies – all of which is “way beyond” the definition of cyber security as it was understood and practised a decade ago and will require organisations to continually reimagine cyber security.
He will call on those working in the field to lead a “cultural shift” within organisations, adding that, amidst the uncertainty, it is clear what actions need to be taken to maintain collective resilience. Dr Horne is expected to say that “cyber security is the responsibility of everyone, whether they sit on the Board or the IT help desk… cyber security is part of their mission.”
Dr Horne will go on to say that “organisations that do not focus on their technology base…as core to their prosperity … are no longer just naïve but are failing to grasp the reality of today’s world.”
Speaking about the cyber threat landscape, Dr Horne will say that the number of incidents dealt with by the NCSC remains “fairly steady”. However, there has been a change in where the attacks are coming from as “the majority of the nationally significant incidents that the NCSC is handling now originate directly or indirectly from nation states.”
Dr Horne is also expected to outline that cyberspace is part of the contested space “between peace and war”. He will outline that the UK’s cyber agency is seeing Russia applying lessons it has learnt on the battlefield in the illegal invasion of Ukraine and “moving them beyond the battlefield”.
He will say that conflicts around the world in the past year have shown that “cyber operations are now integral to conflict” and that “cyber security is the home front”.
Addressing the recent discussion about new frontier AI models, Dr Horne will say “frontier AI is rapidly enabling discovery and exploitation of existing vulnerabilities at scale, illustrating how quickly it will expose where fundamentals of cyber security are still to be addressed.”
Graeme Stewart, Head of Public Sector, Check Point Software commented: “At a time of heightened geopolitical uncertainty, the rise of growing volumes of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered cyber attacks and unbreakable ransomware could bring the country to its knees.
“Large scale hacktivist attacks pose an existential threat to UK PLC, with hostile powers seeking to damage and disrupt core services like the NHS, energy and supply chains.
“Our own research shows that the UK is one of the most targeted nations in the world when it comes to cyber attacks. There can be no delay on our response to this threat, we need an urgent national conversation about how to build cyber resilience into both the public and private sector. Ramping up cyber should be at the very top of the boardroom agenda, with defences strengthened immediately.”
While AI agents may be redefining work and productivity, but some of their top impacts include widespread shadow AI and frequent security incidents.
This is according to a Cloud Security Alliance report commissioned by Token Security which explores how organisations are managing AI agent governance.
The research highlights a shift toward risk- and context-driven policy models. Organisations base their governance decisions on action risk and human authorisation rather than static permissions.
At the same time, agentic AI lifecycle management is maturing, though weak decommissioning practices are creating long-term risk.
Ultimately, this report shows that AI agent governance is evolving into a connected system spanning visibility, lifecycle controls, policy design, and monitoring. As agents scale, organizations must move toward a cohesive governance model aligned with real-world operational impact.
The report found that the majority of organisations (53%) operate agents autonomously for low-risk tasks with human review for higher-risk actions. Only 13% of organisations report fully autonomous models. Monitoring is also largely periodic (95%), reinforcing a governance model based on checkpoints and escalation.
While 68% report high confidence in their visibility, 82% have discovered shadow AI agents in the past year. These agents most commonly appear in internal automation environments (51%) and LLM platforms (47%).
Organisations are improving front-end lifecycle practices. The majority (59%) report clear documentation of agent purpose and 68% conduct permission reviews. However, only 21% have formal decommissioning processes. Just 19% express high confidence that they fully retire their agents.
Organisations are converging on action risk (63%) and human authorisation (53%) as the primary signals for governing agent behavior.
Nearly 79% view context-aware controls as important or very important, and 66% report clear guardrails defining agent boundaries.
AI agent-related incidents are common, with 65% reporting at least one in the past year.
These incidents have tangible business impact, including data exposure (61%) and operational disruption (43%). As a result, organisations are prioritising monitoring (28%), risk management (29%), and permission control (19%).
Lloyds Banking Group has introduces an AI tool to aid customers in their investment decisions in a UK first, despite varying opinions on how AI should be regulated in the financial services sector.
The tool will be piloted with a small group of customers through the Scottish Widows pension and investment department, Lloyds told Reuters.
Importantly, Lloyds says that the tool only offers customers “guidance” rather than financial advice, which is more heavily regulated and must be bespoke to an individual’s finances and situation.
The tool sees a major UK bank leveraging AI to compete with competing wealth management funds offering financial advice.
Lloyds intends to widen the scope of the tool later in the year.
The bank is among eight organisations that will test “targeted support” using AI in the Financial Conduct Authority’s live testing programme, announced yesterday.
Targeted support is meant to be less comprehensive than full “advice” but is still regulated, and is meant to fill in an advice gap between often expensive financial advice and broader, vague ‘guidance’.
AI’s use in financial services is not without risks, however, with the Banks of England keeping a close eye on how AI tools are rolled out across the sector.
The FCA is reviewing how AI could impact and transform financial services – will it democratise information, shift market dominance, or increase security risks?
Energy costs are driving UK firms overseas for their AI operations and hold back deployment, new research from CUDO Compute found.
The survey found that one in five British firms have relocated some of their workloads outside of the country due to high energy costs.
CUDO Compute’s research, which surveyed 700 AI decision makers, found that not only are companies forced to relocate their AI deployments, but a third are having to scale back on AI operations overall.
Further, energy and infrastructure costs are driving concerns about the AI bubble for 42% of them.
“AI is not abstract software. It is physical infrastructure that depends on power, land, cooling and grid access,” CUDO Compute CEO Matt Hawkins said.
“When those constraints tighten, economics take over. If it is cheaper or easier to run workloads elsewhere, they will move, regardless of sovereignty ambitions.”
Infrastructure is becoming increasingly vital to companies looking to adopt or expand AI; CUDO forecasts that $600 billion will be spent by hyperscalers this year, but energy costs are a major hurdle.
OpenAI cited energy costs as well as regulatory hurdles as the reasons it dropped its Stargate data centre plans in the UK, highlighting the reality of an outdated grid and geopolitical influences on energy costs.
“Right now, every UK boardroom is talking about AI, but almost nobody is talking about the infrastructure needed to power it,” Hawkins said.
“Until we close that gap, there will continue to be a disconnect between policy, ambition and reality. The countries that solve this first will shape the future of AI, and the UK still has a window to lead, but it needs to act quickly.”
While the UK is aiming for AI sovereignty through different initiatives and funds, firms deploying AI are feeling the squeeze. About four in ten (43%) say that cost and performance outweigh sovereignty in their decision making.
Geopolitics is driving some deployment relocations for a third, with 45% sayin that data or digital sovereignty, national security, and regulatory compliance were driving their location decisions.
A third of those surveyed say they are prioritising UK-based compute even if there is an increased cost.
AI-first firms are more likely to say that energy costs would cause them to relocate (32%), compared to just 18% of larger enterprises.
“AI sovereignty is being hotly discussed as a priority for UK organisations, but it only works if the infrastructure exists to support it,” Hawkins said. “What we are seeing is a growing tension between where businesses want to run AI and where they actually can.”
The UK’s media regulator has launched an investigation into messaging app Telegram over concerns about child sexual abuse material.
Ofcom has also opened investigations into Teen Chat and Chat Avenue to examine if they are meeting their duties to prevent children from the risk of being groomed by predators.
Additionally, Ofcom has provided updates on file-sharing services that are now either using hash-matching technology to detect and swiftly remove child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or have taken steps to prevent people in the UK from accessing their sites.
“Child sexual exploitation and abuse causes devastating harm to victims, and making sure sites and apps tackle this is one of our highest priorities,” Suzanne Cater, director of enforcement at Ofcom, said.
“It’s why we work so closely with partners in law enforcement and child protection organisations to identify where these harms are occurring and hold providers to account where they’re failing to meet their obligations.
“Progress has undeniably been made, particularly with file-sharing services, which are too often used to share horrific child sexual abuse imagery. But this problem extends to big platforms too, and teen-focused chat services are too easily being used by predators to groom children. These firms must do more to protect children, or face serious consequences under the Online Safety Act.”
CSAM on Telegram
Ofcom said it received evidence from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection regarding the alleged presence and sharing of child sexual abuse material on Telegram. The regulator then carried out its own assessment of the platform, and then decided to open an investigation to examine whether Telegram has failed, or is failing, to comply with its duties in relation to illegal content.
In the UK, it is illegal to share or be in possession of CSAM, and, under the Online Safety Act, providers of user-to-user services are required to assess and mitigate the risk of this crime being perpetrated on their platforms.
Grooming
Ofcom works with child protection agencies to identify services that present particular risks of grooming. This work has raised concerns about the risk to children on two chat services called Teen Chat and Chat Avenue, which have open chatrooms, private messaging, profile creation and media sharing functionalities.
Ofcom has engaged with representatives of the providers of these services to try and address these concerns. However, the regulator says it remains unsatisfied as to whether they are providing adequate protection to UK children from the risk of grooming.
Ofcom is therefore opening an investigation into whether the providers of Teen Chat and Chat Avenue are taking appropriate steps to assess and mitigate the risk of UK users encountering illegal content and activity, including grooming. The investigation into Chat Avenue will also consider whether the provider is taking adequate steps to prevent children from encountering harmful content, including pornography, on the site.
When duties under the Online Safety Act came into effect last year, Ofcom immediately launched enforcement action to assess the safety measures being taken by file-sharing providers to prevent offenders from disseminating CSAM on their services.
As part of this work, the regulator said it became concerned that the provider of file-sharing service Pixeldrain had not taken appropriate measures to assess and mitigate this risk.
In response to Ofcom raising concerns with them, the provider of Pixeldrain made material improvements to its Illegal Content Risk Assessment and implemented perceptual hash matching – an automated tool that can detect and swiftly remove CSAM.
Ofcom has also today closed its investigation into file-sharing service Yolobit, which has taken steps to make itself unavailable to people in the UK.
This follows on from five other file-sharing providers taking steps to make their services unavailable to UK users after Ofcom launched enforcement proceedings against them, and two other services deploying hash matching as a direct result of its action.
If Ofcom finds that a company has broken the law, it can require it to take specific steps to come into compliance or to remedy harm caused by the breach. It will be able to impose fines of up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater.
The UK’s project-based businesses are entering a new phase of digital maturity, according to new research released today from Deltek, the intelligent platform for project-based businesses. Organisations are moving beyond “experimenting” with artificial intelligence (AI) to embedding it throughout the project lifecycle, leading to measurable, real-world business impacts.
The research, conducted across UK-based architecture, engineering and consultancy firms as part of Deltek’s 7th Annual Clarity Trends and Insights for Architecture, Engineering and Consulting Firms report, finds that 55% of UK organisations describe themselves as either ‘advanced’ or ‘mature’ in their digital transformation journeys.
The proportion identifying as ‘advanced’ has fallen from 20% in 2025 to 15% in 2026, highlighting a shift in how organisations are approaching digital transformation, rather than a slowdown in progress. Instead, digital transformation is increasingly being embedded into day-to-day operations through closer integration between business and IT systems. As the UK market matures, expectations around integration are rising, prompting some organisations to reassess their level of digital maturity.
AI shifts from experimentation to measurable results
As organisations build on these digital foundations, AI is becoming a central strategic focus. The research shows that 29% of UK organisations identify operationalising and optimising AI as a strategic priority, as firms move beyond experimentation and begin embedding AI into areas like project forecasting, planning, reporting and resource management.
Early results are already emerging. Nearly half of UK organisations report moderate productivity or cost improvements from AI, with a growing group (12%) already seeing significant measurable return on investment as adoption scales across the business.
Financial discipline and project visibility remain key
Alongside AI adoption, firms are also strengthening operational and financial management as projects grow more complex. The research shows that implementation of AI is expected to be one of the biggest drivers of profitability in 2026, while better cost control is also seen as a key factor in improving financial performance as organisations manage increasingly complex project portfolios.
Confidence in project tracking is also high, with 85% of UK firms reporting high confidence in tracking project profitability, while around three quarters say they track key indicators such as utilisation and overhead rates successfully. This reflects the growing role of digital systems in supporting project visibility and performance management.
Building resilience for the next phase of the Project Economy
As AI adoption accelerates across the Project Economy, workforce capabilities are also evolving. The research identifies AI literacy as the number one skill organisations say will be needed over the next three years, while adoption of AI is identified as the number one project management challenge for firms, highlighting the importance of equipping teams with the skills needed to support increasingly digital project environments.
“Architecture, engineering, and consulting firms are at a genuine inflection point,” Neil Davidson, Group Vice President, Professional Services Sector at Deltek said.
“After years of steady growth and significant investment in digital foundations, the industry is now asking a harder question: how do we convert that investment into measurable productivity gains? The firms that answer it decisively, embedding the right technology into the heart of how they run projects and serve clients, will set the benchmark for the next decade.
“Firms have spent the last few years building the digital foundations needed to modernise how they run projects. What we’re seeing now is a shift from experimentation to real results as AI becomes embedded into core business workflows. Many organisations are already seeing measurable ROI from AI investments, driving clear improvements in efficiency, insight, and overall business performance. As adoption becomes more consistent across organisations, that value is set to scale even further.
“For project-based businesses, the opportunity now is to turn that momentum into stronger project insight, better decision-making, and improved financial performance.”
Amazon is set to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, the tech giant said, as the AI firm commits to spending over $100 billion on Amazon’s cloud technology over the next decade.
The deal will start with a $5 billion investment into Anthropic now, with the additional $20 billion set aside for the future and subject to certain conditions.
The investment announcement comes after Amazon said it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, a top rival to Anthropic.
Amazon has struggled to cement its own AI model, Nova, in the market, but is making waves as a critical infrastructure provider, leveraging its cloud computing power to benefit from the AI race.
Anthropic, like many AI firms, is also seeking large deals for cloud and data resources to power their AI models. The AI firm anticipates it will bring about one gigawatt of capacity through Trainium2 and Tranium3 chips by the end of this year, with expectations it will gain five gigawatts of this capacity.
The use of the custom-designed AI chips from Amazon “reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said.
The deal matches each firms’ individual goals – Anthropic needs more compute power to test its models focussing on coding and designed to win the AI race, and Amazon needs more customers for their AI chips.
Amazon is expecting to spend £200 billion on capital expenditure this year, mainly for AI developments as it cements itself as a critical infrastructure provider in the industry.
The deal saw Amazon’s shares rise 2.7% in extended trading.
A UK-developed technology delivering ultra-reliable, infrastructure-independent 5G connectivity to the world’s hardest-to-reach locations has secured a £1.2million investment to accelerate its growth.
The funding comes at a time of increasing global focus on national resilience, secure communications infrastructure, and sovereign capability across critical sectors.
JET Connectivity has developed land and sea-based alternatives to satellite networks such as Starlink and brings secure, high-bandwidth communications to offshore, coastal and ultra-remote sites anywhere on the planet.
The £1.2m Pre-Series A funding round was led by TRICAPITAL Angels, with participation from private investors and The FSE Group. The investment will enable JET Connectivity to rapidly scale its operations throughout 2026 and meet accelerating demand for its secure sovereign 5G network systems, particularly across national security and resilience applications.
Founded by a team of engineers who have built their own hardware and software stack, JET Connectivity has grown rapidly since launching in 2020. Its proprietary technology provides a secure “pop-up” 5G IAB mesh capability designed to operate in demanding littoral, offshore and remote environments where traditional satellite or fibre infrastructure is unavailable or insufficient, including in GPS denied environments.
The systems provide resilient, high-bandwidth connectivity supporting assured operations where continuity, data integrity, and operational awareness are essential.
The company has recently secured several high-profile contracts with public sector and nationally significant organisations, reflecting the growing requirement for rapidly deployable, secure communications infrastructure in mission-critical environments.
JET’s technology suite includes floating and fixed remote 5G platforms that enable organisations to access real-time data and high-bandwidth communications without relying on conventional infrastructure.
Its customers include leading players in the renewable energy, maritime and emergency response, where resilient connectivity underpins safety, tactical and operational efficiency, and real-time decision-making.
The new funding will accelerate commercial roll-out of JET’s fixed and buoy-mounted 5G platforms, which are scheduled for use from the Scottish Highlands to the North Sea.
Over the next 12 months, the company will also look to establish a manufacturing facility in Scotland to meet growing international demand for the technology.
Moray Martin, CEO of TRICAPITAL Angels, said: “JET Connectivity exemplifies the kind of ambitious, technically brilliant company that this country excels at producing.
“They combine deep technical expertise with a strong commercial focus, creating solutions that extend 5G access to areas where conventional networks cannot reach. This fast-moving, innovative, and rapidly scaling company is an excellent fit for the TRICAPITAL Angels portfolio. Equally, the expertise we bring to support their ambitions highlights the strength, value and partnership ethos we bring to our portfolio companies.”
JET’s product range includes a compact buoy designed for rivers and coastal areas, a mid-size platform offering data collection and 5G coverage over wider maritime zones, and an offshore station capable of supporting year-round connectivity miles from shore.
On land, its pop-up base stations and rugged routers provide temporary or fixed 5G hotspots for ports, airfields, manufacturing sites, and emergency response operations.
James Thomas, CEO of JET Connectivity, said: “This investment marks a pivotal moment in our journey. With the support of TRICAPITAL Angels and FSE, we are now positioned to meet the rapidly evolving requirements of organisations operating in complex and infrastructure-constrained environments.
“Our sovereign 5G networks are designed to provide the ultimate in secure, high-speed connectivity for those operating in the most challenging environments. This funding allows us to scale at the pace required to support critical national security initiatives.”
With surging demand for dependable communications across offshore wind, aquaculture, critical national infrastructure, dual use, environmental monitoring and emergency response, JET Connectivity is poised for significant growth in the UK and beyond.
The company is now hiring across engineering, sales and operations to support its next phase of growth.
The British Business Bank has made a commitment of up to £35 million to Episode 1’s Fund IV. The commitment follows the Bank’s previous investments into Episode 1’s 2014 vintage Fund I, 2018 Fund II, and 2022 Fund III.
Episode 1 is an investor backing early stage companies, primarily at the pre-seed and seed stages. It takes an algorithmic approach to finding and evaluating software-driven UK companies with a specific focus on AI, Software Infrastructure, Deep Tech and Tech Bio.
Episode 1’s strategy demonstrates strong alignment with the UK’s Industrial Strategy sectors, with a significant majority of the Fund III portfolio mapping to five of the eight priority sectors – digital and technology, financial services, professional and business services, clean energy, and life sciences. Fund IV will continue to largely back businesses within the Industrial Strategy sectors.
The British Business Bank is the largest investor in UK venture and venture growth capital funds. By making cornerstone commitments, the Bank helps funds achieve a first close and provides a strong signal of confidence that helps to mobilise additional private sector capital. The Bank has also committed capital within its Five-Year Strategic Plan to prioritise deployment to Industrial Strategy sectors.
“Our fund investments are designed to increase the availability of capital for innovative UK businesses, allowing them to start, scale and stay in the UK,” Christine Hockley, Managing Director and Co-Head of Funds, at British Business Bank said. “By making a cornerstone commitment to Episode 1’s Fund IV, we are expanding the pool of capital available to support high growth, high return innovative businesses.”
Michael Laycock, Investment Director, Funds, British Business Bank said: “Episode 1 has a strong track record of backing early stage UK businesses with strong growth potential. Fund IV represents the fourth Episode 1 fund that we have backed and we are pleased to continue our support. Fund IV will continue to make a substantial impact supporting primarily UK based businesses operating in the Industrial Strategy sectors, further fuelling UK economic growth, by supporting promising UK businesses to scale.”
Adam Shuaib, GP at Episode 1 commented, “British Business Bank’s backing is a huge vote of confidence in what our team has built over the last decade; an early-stage fund combining proprietary algorithmic sourcing with a rigorous behavioural approach to founder selection to find incredible companies like Lawhive, Carwow, Mantic and Source.dev before others get there.”
Fellow GP, Hector Mason, added, “Securing backing from one of Europe’s most respected institutional investors is a strong signal that the thesis we’ve been refining over the past decade is resonating at the highest levels.”
Over a quarter (27%) of UK IT and cyber professionals say they have felt pressure to cover up a security breach or data loss incident.
These are the findings of new research from Kocho, a UK-based provider of cybersecurity, identity, cloud transformation and managed services. Surveying 501 UK CIOs, security analysts and IT professionals, the findings revealed that while 92% of respondents think their boardrooms understand the day-to-day realities of cyber security, it’s different when a breach occurs.
Despite efforts to improve information sharing and collective industry resilience, a fifth (20%) of survey respondents disclosed there still a culture of blame around breaches. In fact, despite incidents being a shared, sector-wide threat, 14% of professionals revealed they were held personally responsible in their organisations.
When an organisation does suffer a breach, more than four-in-ten (45%) said a more measured response from their board would make the handling of a breach easier and faster.
In the UK, GDPR requires organisations to notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours of discovering a breach involving personal data. Seriously affected individuals should be contacted “without undue delay”. Failures in notification can potentially result in an £8.7m fine or 2% of global turnover.
Tensions with the top team
The survey also uncovered some of the tensions between security teams and senior executives. Nearly three-quarters of cyber and IT professionals (73%) say managing the expectations and pressures from the C-suite is demanding.
In organisations with between 100 and 250 employees, the figure rises to 81%, reflecting the pressure on smaller teams. More than half of respondents (52%) said their board (or customers) had asked them for assurances about cyber security that they could not give.
Despite generally good relations with their bosses, almost four-in-ten (39%) believe clearer support and recognition from their senior leadership would alleviate the stress that is common among cyber security and IT teams, particularly as attacks become more common.
There are also signs that some senior leadership teams are too disengaged, with 28% of cyber professionals saying clear executive backing for cyber security priorities would help them feel positive about their current role.
“As an industry, we must move away from viewing every cyber breach as a sign of organisational or reputational failure,” Hannah Birch, CEO, Kocho, said.
“Today’s threats target entire sectors, supply chains, and ecosystems, not just individual businesses, with similar techniques often used against multiple organisations in quick succession.
“A breach should not automatically be seen evidence of negligence but the result of a coordinated, well‑resourced criminal campaign, therefore, we need a culture of openness, where leaders can share insights and experiences.”
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has shared details of its ongoing work to improve the cyber defenses of the NHS.
The NCSC has been working over the past 18 months with organisations across the health sector to improve preparedness and resilience amid heightened cyber risk.
The government organisations has piloted new tools and services for the NHS through the Active Cyber Defence 2.0 programme, as well as promoting the use of NCSC tools and services across the primary healthcare sector.
The NHS has also benefitted from the NCSC’s focus on managing vulnerability disclosures and sharing threat intelligence, as well as efforts to improve visibility to better understand the threat surface and deploy defenses.
The NHS has also adopted the Software Security Code of Practice to ensure software providers are delivering software that is resilient and secure.
Health bodies across the UK’s four nations have been critical in the development of the NCSC’s Threat Hunting Workshops, which bring together cyber experts to tackle threats, develop defenses, and strengthen the defense community.
The NCSC is expanding its defense approach by partnering with UK health organisations to analyse health sector datasets, exploring the connection between baseline data and cyber incident history.
The NCSC also said that its collaboration with the NHS has led the health organisation to accelerate the wider adoption of passkeys through its use of the security method on the NHS App.
“Taken together, this work shows what is possible when organisations align around a shared goal. Effort is coordinated rather than duplicated, lessons are reused, and risk is reduced across the system, not just within individual organisations,” Nicholas W, National Resilience Directorate for the NCSC wrote in a blog.
The release of Claude Mythos preview from Anthropic is rocking the tech world as world leaders meet with the AI firm’s leadership and global tech titans collaborate to improve defences.
Most recently, Axios reported that the US White House met with Anthropic’s CEO to discuss “opportunities for collaboration, as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology,” the White House said.
This meeting is despite Anthropic currently suing the US Department of Defence over its cancelled contract and labelling as a supply chain risk by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth following disagreements surrounding Anthropic’s use in autonomous weapons and surveillance.
The introduction of Claude Mythos, which has only been released to a select few other tech firms for testing, promises enhanced cyber defences but can also outperform humans when it comes to certain hacking and cyber-crime abilities. It can find age-old vulnerabilities in code, and also exploit them, sharpening the double-edged sword of AI in cyber.
Mythos also appears to see the US executive branch viewing Anthropic in a new light; previously the US President said his government “will not do business with them again,” but is now looking to collaborate.
The cyber-capable AI model is also changing Anthropic’s own release tactics. The AI firm’s newest model Opus 4.7 may boast superior advancements on software engineering compared to previous systems, but the firm used methods to “differentially reduce” its cyber capabilities.
The model has less cyber acumen than Mythos, but also hosts new guardrails to prohibit potentially nefarious cyber uses. Anthropic aims to use these safeguards to inform its future release of “Mythos-class models,” aiming to reduce their cyber-risk.
For those wanting to test Opus 4.7’s cyber abilities, however, they will need to join Anthropic’s Cyber Verification Program, which will let approved enterprises and developers test the model on tasks like vulnerability detection and penetration testing.
OpenAI has claimed its newly released AI model has increased scientific acumen and biology knowledge as the firm aims to strengthen its position in the life sciences.
The model, dubbed GPT-Rosalind after British scientist Rosalind Franklin most famous for her research into the structure of DNA, aims to help scientists fast track their research workflows to streamline the discovery of pharmaceuticals and innovations in biochemistry and medicine.
The AI model is built for modern scientific work and is designed to help researchers in the early stages of discovery.
According to OpenAI’s own evaluations, it “delivers the best performance on tasks that require reasoning over molecules, proteins, genes, pathways, and disease-relevant biology, and it is more effective at using scientific tools and databases in multi-step workflows such as literature review, sequence-to-function interpretation, experimental planning, and data analysis.”
The model’s foundations are based on OpenAI’s newest AI models while giving researchers the ability to read scientific papers, query databases, use a range of scientific tools, and trial new experiments.
A free Life Science model will now be available to scientists as a Life Sciences research plugin for Codex available on GitHub. The package includes a range of modular skills for common research workflows, from human genetics, genomics, protein structure, biochemistry, clinical evidence, and study discovery.
GPT-Rosalind will be available as a preview in ChatGPT, Codex, and for qualified customers, the API.
The model will be launched through a trusted-access deployment structure for qualified customers in the US at the start of its rollout, with restrictions on eligibility, access, and governance.
OpenAI says that this is just the first release of its Life Sciences model series as it looks to expand its capabilities in the subject as well as its commitment to accelerating scientific discovery.
The AI firm continues to release specialised AI models for various sectors, released GPT-5.4-Cyber for cybersecurity defenses, as well as ChatGPT Health for medical and health queries.
The UK tech sector is losing women as they hit their stride, according to new UK-wide independent research commissioned by Akamai.
The research reveals women are leaving tech roles at a pivotal point in their careers, taking years of expertise and experience with them. However, the study reveals better pay, work-life balance and hybrid working would encourage a return.
The new research, based on 1,500 women across the UK — 1,000 of which have left a tech role and 500 who have returned to a tech role after a career break — reveals that 55% of women leave tech roles or tech companies within five years of being in the industry, and nearly nine in ten (87%) leave within ten years.
Company culture plays a key role in women leaving the sector, with lack of a sense of belonging (52%) and lack of gender diversity in leadership (40%) ranking highest.
Nearly four in ten (39%) women who have left tech said they would be likely to consider returning under the right conditions.
Fifteen per cent are not currently working, while other women have moved into finance (13%), education (13%), professional services (12%), and healthcare (12%).
Of those that returned to the tech sector, higher salary (52%), work-life balance (43%) and better career progression (43%) were cited as key reasons.
Bringing women back to tech
The decision to leave, for most women, was by choice rather than necessity. More than a third (35%) said they left entirely by choice and did not want to return, while 31% said they left mostly by choice and preferred their current situation. So what would it take for them to choose differently, and return to tech?
Nearly 4 in 10 (39%) women who have left tech said they would be likely to consider returning under the right conditions. Thirty-eight percent cited improved work-life balance and flexible working arrangements (37%) — like part-time, a compressed workweek or job share opportunities — or hybrid working (38%) would encourage them to return to tech.
Of the women polled who had returned to tech after a career break, the findings are clear: Higher salary (52%), work-life balance (43%) and better career progression (43%) are valued most highly.
“These insights illustrate that the UK tech industry has a window of opportunity to impact the choices of women in tech — from the past and present, and in the future.
“By providing opportunities for progression, flexible work and appropriate remuneration, tech leaders on the precipice of technological innovation have the chance to create impactful change on the tech workforce, fostering longer-lasting tenures, diverse leadership and an environment where women can thrive,” said Natalie Billingham, EMEA Managing Director, Akamai.
Findings show that women are leaving tech at the critical mid-to-senior junction — taking years of expertise and experience with them.
Company culture plays a key role in women leaving the sector. Respondents cited lack of gender diversity in leadership (52%), lack of company culture and a sense of belonging (52%) and gender bias (10%) as reasons to leave the UK tech industry. Among those that have left the tech sector, inflexible working hours (56%) and a lack of work-life balance (42%) were also cited as significant reasons to leave.
Of those who have left the tech sector, only 15% left the job market and are not currently working. Others moved into finance (13%), education (13%), professional services (12%) and healthcare (12%) — suggesting a significant “brain drain” from tech into other sectors of the economy.
“We lose women from cybersecurity at the exact moment their expertise becomes most valuable. This isn’t a pipeline problem; it’s a leadership one. Diverse teams build stronger defences. Until organisations commit to inclusive leadership, not just diversity hiring, they are actively weakening their own security posture,” said Zoe Mackenzie, President, WiCyS UK & Ireland Affiliate.
“The findings provide a valuable picture of what mid‑career women are looking for in order to return to tech, and it’s encouraging to see that the majority could be persuaded to come back under the right conditions. Progression pathways are crucial for retaining talent, but equally important is ensuring that women who want to return have clear, supported ways to reenter the sector in the first place. When employers build both return pathways and progression pathways, they create an environment where women can come back, grow and stay,” said Hazel Little, CEO, Career Returners.
Research commissioned by global S&P500 corporate payments company, Corpay, finds that many organisations continue to rely on manual or partially manual spend processes, while finance leaders increasingly view automation and card-led payments as strategically important.
The research of 300 CFOs including those in retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and IT sectors found that more than eight in ten CFOs (83%) agree that spend management within their organisation is more manual than it should be. A similar proportion, 84%, say their business has been too slow to modernise how it pays suppliers and manages expenses while card-led payments could turn the dial, with 81% saying that they are a competitive advantage.
The findings suggest a difference between current processes and the priorities CFOs have identified for the coming years. While finance leaders recognise the importance of digitised, card led and automated payment solutions, many organisations still report a mix of manual and automated processes.
The operational impact of this gap is significant. More than eight in ten CFOs (86%) say their finance teams spend over six hours per person, per week on expense, invoice and supplier payment administration, with more than a quarter reporting between 11 and 15 hours. When asked how they would use 25 to 50% of reclaimed finance time, the top three responses were not cost-cutting. Instead, CFOs cited business partnering, cash flow forecasting and strategic planning, highlighting the opportunity to redirect capacity toward higher value activities.
The research also highlights mounting competitive pressure. Nine in ten CFOs (91%) say they are concerned that competitors are ahead in adopting automated, card led payment processes. For many organisations, the issue is no longer simply operational efficiency. Card-led payments are also widely seen as a competitive advantage, with a majority of CFOs agreeing with this statement.
Looking ahead, CFO priorities for 2026 are firmly focused on financial resilience and visibility. Improving working capital management, strengthening spend controls and increasing real time visibility rank as the top three areas of focus.
Almost all respondents, 99%, say that additional working capital flexibility would be at least somewhat valuable to their organisation. This underlines the growing importance of modern payment methods that can support improved working capital and greater visibility over outgoing spend.
“The message from UK CFOs is clear. Payment automation is increasingly being viewed as a strategic priority,” Piero Macari, VP Product Corporate Payments at Corpay, said.
“When so many finance leaders believe competitors are ahead, we can see that there are a competitive few that are setting the pace. Many view card-led payments as one of the most practical ways to begin modernising spend management, improving how spend is controlled and analysed. This reflects the growing importance of more automated and integrated payment infrastructure.”
“We recently launched Corpay Complete to bring accounts payable, domestic and international payments, and corporate card spend into a single digital environment.
“By reducing reliance on manual processes, strengthening controls and delivering full visibility across transactions, it helps CFOs improve working capital management while lowering risk and administrative burden.
“For those looking to stay competitive, card-led payments with integrated and automated spend management is now fundamental to financial resilience and growth.”
Technology secretary Liz Kendall has announced the first round of UK firms to be awarded support from the new Sovereign AI Unit.
The Unit is a £500 million national effort to back the UK’s most promising founders, aiming to keep the future of AI in the UK.
The UK needs to have homegrown AI capacity and capabilities to maintain its position and compete on the global stage.
The Sovereign AI Unit aims to leverage the UK’s talent, leading research institutions, and top universities to help shape the AI revolution.
Sovereign AI is designed to be different from any previous government-backed unit, acting like a venture capital fund with the muscle of the state behind it – moving fast, backing ambition and cutting through the red tape that so often holds brilliant ideas back.
It will invest directly in the UK’s most promising AI startups, help them scale quickly, and give them the support they need to compete with the best in the world.
The UK government has announced that Sovereign AI’s first equity investment will be in the AI infrastructure startup Callosum, while 6 further startups will receive access to some of the UK’s foremost supercomputing capacity through the Unit.
Startups backed by Sovereign AI will gain access to support normally reserved for the biggest players in tech, including access to the UK’s top supercomputers with up to one million GPU hours available per startup.
Participating startups will also benefit from faster visa decisions to attract global talent as well as access to 10 cost-free visas.
The government will also provide hands-on support in navigating access to data, early procurement opportunities, and independent product validation and routes to new approaches to regulations.
“We believe in Britain and we are betting on Britain. We are backing our brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs so we seize the benefits of AI to reshape Britain for the benefit of all,” technology secretary Liz Kendall.
“Sovereign AI is unlike anything government has ever done before. Its unique approach will help break down the barriers that have too often held back British enterprise and innovation. This is how we ensure Britain’s economic prosperity and national security in the modern age.
“My message to British founders and innovators is clear – we will ensure you never have to choose between your ambition and your home, because Britain will give you both.”
The first startup getting equity investment from the Sovereign AI Unit is Callosum – a company building a new class of AI infrastructure.
A further 6 startups will receive access to the AI Research Resource (AIRR) supercomputer network – with Sovereign AI getting a right of first refusal on future investments for a number of recipients.
Putting some of the nation’s foremost supercomputing capacity behind some of the country’s most promising new companies tackles a critical hurdle: the need for vast amounts of specialist hardware like GPUs, to train advanced AI models, test ideas and run complex simulations. The companies are: Prima Mente, Cosine, Cursive, Doubleword, Twig Bio and Odyssey.
Sovereign AI is also currently in discussions with around 30 firms, over potential AIRR access.
And as part of Sovereign AI’s £282 million offer to support cutting edge AI startups with R&D, the Unit is launching its first funding call to create new datasets and other assets that help firms move faster and build in the UK.
Sovereign AI will work with the Government’s Global Talent Taskforce to attract top researchers, while also ensuring the benefits of AI are felt across the whole country. In May, the unit will begin a tour of UK cities to ensure that people from all communities and walks of life feel the benefits that AI promises to deliver.
“There’s a fundamental shift underway in how AI systems are built and run. The future of compute is heterogeneous, and making that complexity usable is the next frontier,” Danyal Akarca, Founder of Callosum, said.
“The UK already understands where this is heading, and with its depth of talent across universities and labs like DeepMind, it is the natural place to build Callosum: the orchestration platform that allows models and chips to work together as one system.
The enterprise push into AI agents is outpacing the ability to secure them, according to new research from Rubrik Zero Labs.
The firm’s report shows organisations are operationalising autonomous systems without the controls required to govern them, introducing a gap between innovation and security.
Based on a survey of more than 1,600 IT and security leaders, the report reveals that 86% expect AI agents to outpace their organisation’s security guardrails within the next year.
Only 23% report full visibility into the agents operating in their environments, which the report notes is likely an over-estimation on the part of respondents. The result is the inability to secure identities that are already making decisions, taking actions, and interacting with critical data.
The gap is compounded by identity sprawl. Non-human identities tied to agents are proliferating faster than enterprises can track or govern them, forming what researchers describe as a “shadow workforce.”
These identities often operate with persistent access and limited oversight, creating new pathways for misuse, compromise, and lateral movement.
At the same time, the operational promise of AI agents is under strain. The report also found that more than 80% of respondents report agents require more manual oversight than they save in efficiency.
Nearly nine in ten (88%) say they lack the ability to roll back agent actions without system disruption.
Recovery and prevention are emerging as primary points of failure. Nearly nine in ten leaders expressed concern about meeting recovery objectives as agent-driven threats increase.
The threat itself is accelerating. Nearly half of respondents expect agentic systems to drive the majority of attacks in the coming year, reflecting a broader shift in how adversaries operate. Autonomous systems compress timelines, scale attacks, and blur the line between insider risk and external compromise.
“AI adoption is outpacing our ability to control it. Enterprises are struggling because they’ve deployed systems they can’t fully observe, govern, or restore,” said Kavitha Mariappan, Chief Transformation Officer at Rubrik.
“We have to move past the debate of whether AI is risky and address the harder reality: as decision-making shifts from human to machine, the critical challenge for every leader is maintaining operational safety in an increasingly autonomous landscape.”
For boards and executive teams, the implication is immediate. AI strategy is now inseparable from resilience strategy. Organisations that continue to prioritise deployment speed over control mechanisms risk creating environments where failures cannot be contained or reversed.
“Identity verification is the fundamental underpinning that will allow us to get the greatest automation benefits of AI without imposing human bottlenecks,” says Renown Health VP, Chief Information Security & Technology Officer Steven Ramirez.
“Verification and visibility are prerequisites for sound, secure agentic implementation.”
The UK government is set to launch its Sovereign AI Unit, a £500 million investment in the UK’s AI sector aiming to generate jobs and economic growth.
The Sovereign AI Unit is set to boost AI startups, which raised £6 billion in venture capital investment last year. According to the UK government, however, too many startups are not breaking through the mould to garner commercial success despite their top-tier innovations.
The Sovereign AI Unit aims to fill this gap, acting as a government VC fund with purposeful investments in AI enterprises across the UK.
The Unit will provide more than just funding support, with specialist grants and research support as well as access to the UK’s AI supercomputers, including the Dawn in Cambridge and the Isambard in Bristol.
Beyond this, the Unit will offer the opportunity to work with the government to shape governance and regulations, as well as towards procurement opportunities.
The official launch of the Sovereign AI Unit will take place at an event hosted by Wayve, the UK AI car company, where technology secretary Liz Kendall will make the announcement.
“If we believe AI is absolutely critical to our economic prosperity and our national security, which I do, then this fund, and the even bigger ambition behind it, is one of the single most important things this government will do for the future of this country,” she is expected to say.
“We believe in Britain and we are betting on Britain. We are backing our brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs so we seize the benefits of this technology to reshape Britain for the benefit of all.”
The Unit will be staffed by a range of experts from the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology and the AI Security Institute and will be chaired by James Wise, a partner at VC fund Balderton.
The tech secretary is also expected to announce the first round of UK firms to benefit from the scheme tonight.
Commenting on the announcement, Amine Abidi, Senior Partner in Kearney’s Digital & Analytics practice said: “The Sovereign AI fund is not about matching US or Chinese scale, but about securing control over the foundations AI depends on, particularly compute, data and infrastructure.
“In a market where the US and China dominate frontier models and infrastructure, the UK’s focus has to be on binding constraints. Targeted investment into compute infrastructure and strategic datasets can have a catalytic effect, unlocking private capital rather than attempting to build fully independent stacks.
“At its core, AI sovereignty is infrastructure sovereignty. Control over where systems are trained and run will determine data residency, regulatory compliance and market access, particularly in high-risk sectors.
“That points to an open sovereignty model, where global technology is deployed within domestically controlled, audit-ready data centres. The UK has a credible path to competitiveness by building on strengths like autonomous systems and speech AI, but the differentiator will be execution and infrastructure, not headline investment.”
George Tziahanas, VP of Compliance and Associate General Counsel at Archive360, however, said: “Sovereign AI investments are smart, but countries shouldn’t over index on building fully domestic AI supply chains. Not only will they be difficult to achieve at speed, but they also risk falling behind the ongoing innovations in other countries. In the UK’s case, that’s China and the US, both of which have a large head start.
“Countries should also consider prioritising flexibility to support the use of multiple AI tools to ensure individuals and companies are not locked into any one model or one tech company. Optionality is likely a stronger long-term strategy than attempting to build a fully domestic AI model.”
Organisations that report successful AI initiatives invest up to four times more (as a percentage of revenue) in foundational areas, such as data quality, governance, AI-ready people and change management, compared to those that experience poor outcomes from AI, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
However, a global survey of 353 data and analytics (D&A) and AI leaders from November through December 2025 also found that only 39% of technology leaders are confident that their enterprise’s current AI investments will have a positive impact on financial performance.
“D&A leaders play a central role in achieving their organisation’s AI value ambition,” said Rita Sallam, distinguished VP analyst, Gartner fellow and chief of research at Gartner. “Through 2030, the D&A leader’s mandate is to deliver foundational areas, including new trusted data, context foundations and perceptive intelligence. Responding to this mandate will require shifts in how the D&A team organises and works, builds and scales and creates value.”
Shift 1: Build toward AI-first D&A
This shiftstarts and ends with an AI ambition for leveraging AI to transform, not tweak, business and operating models aligned to achieve audacious business objectives. Pioneering leadership is required to apply new technology in high value, innovative ways.
Shift 2: Redesign the D&A organisation for human-agent collaboration
“The future is not about replacing humans, but amplifying their ingenuity,” said Sallam. “Because AI will create extra capacity, D&A teams will shrink in size and expand in impact. AI-first D&A organisations will have smaller, “tiny” teams organised as decision pods of broad-skilled talent augmented by AI and AI agents specialists focused on business outcomes. We see pacesetting companies experimenting with teams as small as one “technical” person and one “business” person.”
Shift 3: Establish Context as Critical Infrastructure
Gartner found that organisations with the highest maturity of AI-ready D&A capabilities are achieving up to 65% greater business outcomes, including revenue growth and cost optimisation. D&A success in 2030 is not about better models — it is about giving agents governed, contextual access to the right data.
Agents cannot function autonomously without high-quality context and absolute trust. Context capabilities act as the brain for AI. Therefore, context, including semantics and metadata, are now mission-critical for D&A. D&A leaders must redesignthe D&A architecture to make the context layer the central brain for AI agents to deliver trusted intelligence.
Shift 4: D&A organisations should scale connected engineering practices
Realising AI ambition at scale requires new, deeply integrated engineering practices. Siloed practices for data, AI, context and software engineering will fail to realise an AI-first ambition.
D&A organisations should shift from an endless loop of proof-of-concept cycles to enterprise scale by building interconnected data, AI, software and context engineering practices and skills.
Shift 5: Establish trust as a catalyst of value and innovation
Governance is becoming the foundation for realising value and driving innovation. However, a Gartner survey of 360 IT leaders in the second quarter of 2025 found that only 23% said they are very confident in their organisations’ ability to manage security and governance when deploying GenAI tools.
“Traditional control should be overhauled to prioritise trust-based governance models for AI agents by building dynamic governance to embed automated context and checks for bias, privacy, and compliance directly into workflows,” said Sallam. “Without trust in the data, outputs and decisions of AI models and agents, there is no value from AI.”
Shift 6: Move beyond ROI to value compounding
AI-first D&A leaders need to move beyond ROI to creating a value flywheel, where efficiency gains from high-impact investments are intentionally reinvested into growth and innovation.
While 80% of leaders say AI is already driving productivity gains, most are still measuring that productivity by hours worked and tasks completed, research from Smartsheet shows.
This critical disconnect results in teams finding work to fill their free hours instead of getting to the strategic activities that drive revenue growth and move a business forward, the report The Great British Productivity Paradox, claims
For the average team, that translates to a full working day lost every week.
The paradox: Belief versus behaviour
UK leaders know the old ways of measuring productivity aren’t working, but most still use them. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say that tracking “hours worked” is no longer a useful measure of productivity, yet 26% still rely on it as an indicator of success. And while 60% acknowledge that counting “tasks completed” is an outdated way to measure performance, 25% still do. The public sector lags furthest behind, with nearly three-quarters (74%) still equating hours worked with productivity.
The root of the problem: 68% of leaders still believe that “being busy” and being productive are the same thing.
The good news: leaders are optimistic about AI. Eighty percent say it has already improved productivity, and 52% expect it to be the biggest driver of productivity gains over the next three to five years. But optimism alone doesn’t change behaviour. Businesses that adopt AI without changing how they measure success will only capture a fraction of its value. Worse, as AI takes on routine work, the pressure to look busy doesn’t go away. Employees simply find new low-value tasks to fill the time.
Why it matters: The true cost of “task masking” culture
The numbers add up fast. Teams lose 10 weeks of productive capacity every year to low-value work, roughly £12,000 per employee. For a £10 million business, that’s a possible £2 million in revenue quietly walking out the door.
But the financial cost is only part of the story. When the pressure to “look busy” outweighs the drive for results, employees stop focusing on what matters and start focusing on what’s visible. This is task masking—and it’s more common than most leaders realise. Six in ten leaders say they regularly see this in their organisations. It’s usually driven by a culture of fear or a lack of clear direction, and it doesn’t just waste time. It frustrates employees, erodes engagement and drives burnout.
The findings make one thing clear: this isn’t a people problem; it’s a systems and culture problem. But with the right AI-powered platform in place, it can be fixed.
Three steps to break the cycle
Redefine what productivity looks like—with AI. Stop asking “how much is my team doing?” and start asking “what is my team’s work actually achieving?” Instead of relying on spreadsheets and status reports, AI-driven platforms show leaders what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus in real-time. When teams are measured on business impact rather than hours worked, the right work rises to the top.
Address the culture. Task masking is a signal that something is wrong with the culture, not the people. When employees spend their days on work that they know doesn’t matter, morale suffers and engagement drops. The fix starts with leaders: set clear expectations, remove the pressure to appear busy and give people the space to focus on work that drives real results. When that environment exists, task masking takes care of itself.
Deploy an AI-powered work management platform to make the shift stick. Bringing in AI without changing how work is measured only gets you part of the way. The leaders who get the most out of AI are the ones embedding it into how their teams work every day—using it to cut routine tasks and surface the insights that help teams accomplish goals. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of UK leaders know the transition will be hard. That’s not a technology problem; it’s a change management problem. The right platform addresses both.
“AI can only deliver on its promise if the way organisations measure work keeps pace and right now, most aren’t,” said Sarkis Kalashian, Vice President of Product at Smartsheet.
UK MPs have voted a second time against an outright ban on social media for under-16s, instead opting to follow the government’s more piecemeal approach.
The House of Commons voted 256 to 150 to opt for the government’s upcoming social media regulations rather than a default ban as part of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The proposed under 16s ban was proposed by Lord Nash of the Conservative party and advocated for a complete ban of social media for children.
While the ban has yet to be implemented, the government appears poised to gain new powers to curb the use of social media by children, ranging from imposing curfews, scrolling limits, and restrictions on certain services.
MPs have already rejected the full ban once, but the House of Lords soon insisted on the full ban. When the proposal landed back in the Commons, MPs voted to stick with the current government’s plans.
It appears that Parliament is prepared to give the government more time to come to its own conclusions concerning children’s social media use, as the public consultation on the topic is only halfway through its collecting period.
The landmark consultation aims to document concerns from parents, teachers, and the public on social media’s impact on children and young people, as well as how they think social media could best be regulated to protect children.
The vote also comes as Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall meet with a range of tech executives to discuss how they can better protect children online and meet parental concerns.
The PM is meeting with executives from Meta, YouTube, Snap, TikTok, and X to discuss ways social media firms can enact better safety protocols for children amid rising parental concerns.
While it remains unclear who exactly will represent each tech firm, the meeting is timely as more and more social media firms face lawsuits over addiction and adverse mental health effects.
In a landmark lawsuit in the US, Meta and YouTube were found to be ‘addictive by design’ and negatively impact a plaintiff’s mental health due to their algorithms and platform layout. The lawsuit rocked the world of social media and spurred on the hundreds of other suits set to make similar claims against social media firms.
Is an outright ban the answer, though?
Looking to Australia, which enacted its under-16s social media ban in December 2025, the answer is complex.
A recent study from the Molly Rose Foundation found that 60% of under-16s in Australia still use social media despite the ban. Similar to restrictions on adult websites, underage users may be able to bypass geographically-based bans by using Virtual Private Networks or other tactics to evade age restrictions.
The national consultation, which closes on 26 May and has already received over 45,000 responses, may provide more clarity on what solutions the public seeks in terms of managing child online safety across social media platforms.
There are just two weeks left until the second annual Financial Services Technology Summit, delving into the vast and transformative world of technology in the financial sector.
The event from DIGIT will take place at Dynamic Earth on the 30th of April, featuring a range of speakers, exhibitors, and panel discussions exploring the top trends and topics affecting financial services.
FS Technology aims to contextualise some of the most prominent trends in the financial industry, delving into technical advancements ranging from AI, to Blockchain and the Cloud.
As technology continually permeates the ever-important sector, and as geopolitical tensions make the future all the more uncertain, it has become even more essential for financial services leaders to lock into technology trends to advance their business impact.
The programme will contextualise the most prominent trends that are shaping the industry, from technical advancements in Cloud, AI, Blockchain and Payments, to the regulatory impact of Consumer Duty, SDR, DORA & NIS2.
The day’s agenda is chock full of exceptional leaders who will share their expertise and perspective on how technology continues to shape financial services.
Speakers for the day include:
Kulmohan Makhija, Vice President, Azilen
Peter Crouch, Group Innovation Director, Lloyds Banking Group
Lauran Macare, Head of Payments Data: Payments Technology Director, NatWest
Simon Hull, Director of Financial Services, CreateFuture
Mary Drabble, Head of Data Governance, Royal London
Craig Dick, Procurement, Sustainability & Governance Lead: Group COO, Aberdeen
Stephen O’Keane, Advisory & Head of Banking Sector, Telefonica Tech
Dr Colin Williams, Field CISO, Computacenter
Rebecca Mackenzie, Head of Technology Risk and Control, Monzo Bank
Sean Docherty, Director: Sales & Marketing & AI Transformation Lead, Franklin Templeton
James Ball, Blockchain Consultant & Strategic Advisor, Digital Trust Centre of Excellence
Prakriti Karthauser, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Legal and General
Marnie McCormack, Managing Director: Head of Engineering Practices, JPMorganChase
DIGIT is offering a full day of financial services technology talks, including a breakfast briefing from dotnext for early birds keen to start their financial services technology journey.
You can find the full agenda, as well as our exhibitors and sponsors, here.
Registration is still open – you can register your attendance for the event here.
Cyber experts are warning Booking.com customers about a new hacking trend dubbed “reservation hijacking” following a data breach which saw threat actors stealing customer data.
According to an email to affected customers, names, email addresses, phone numbers and booking details were accessed by threat actors, but Booking.com has yet to disclose the scale of the breach.
“We recently noticed suspicious activity affected a number of reservations and we immediately took action to contain the issue,” the email said.
While financial data has not been compromised in the breach, the stolen data could have a detrimental impact on customers and put them at risk of scams.
Norton, the cybersecurity outfit, warned that Booking.com customers could be at risk of “reservation hijacks”, where scammers pretend to be accommodation hosts to trick victims into sending money for their reservations.
“Reservation hijack scams have been around for some time, but this new data makes them much more dangerous because it gives criminals precision as they can reference the real property, the real travel dates, the right contact details to make the scam feel like routine customer service,” Luis Corrons, security evangelist at Norton, told the BBC and detailed the scams in his blog.
The trend is not new, but the recent data breach makes the issue all the more pertinent.
“Booking.com will never ask guests to share credit card details by email, over the phone, Whatsapp or text, or ask guests to make a bank transfer that is different from the payment policy details in their booking confirmation,” the firm told the BBC, alerting customers to stay vigilant.
Reservation hijacking is all the more effective when powered by data breaches allowing threat actors to leverage real information to scam people into providing card details. Hackers pose as real hotels that customers have made genuine bookings at to ask for card information and even made up payments.
Booking.com has been the victim of a data breach in which hackers gained access to customer details.
The reservation platform said “it noticed some suspicious activity involving unauthorised third parties being able to access some of our guests’ booking information.”
It continued: “Upon discovering the activity, we took action to contain the issue. We have updated the pin number for these reservations and informed our guests.”
The company has yet to disclose how many customers were affected in the breach. The company has reached out to affected customers via email saying that the responsible hackers may have been able to access information related to previous reservations.
Financial information had not been accessed as part of the data breach, Booking.com said.
“Based on the findings of our investigation to date, accessed information could include booking details and names, emails, addresses, phone numbers associated with the booking and anything that you may have shared with the accommodation,” the firm told affected customers.
The firm also informed customers that the incident has since been resolved.
It remains unclear what may have been behind the data breach, but Booking.com is not an uncommon target.
The reservations giant faced a data breach in 2018, where hackers successfully phished for hotel login credentials, gaining access to the data of 4,000 customers.
In 2024, Booking.com reported that phishing attempts on its users had increased by 900%, as cyber-criminals increase their efforts with AI.
Booking is yet to disclose any more technical information regarding the breach.
The UK’s longstanding reliance on US big tech is putting it at risk, a new report warns.
The Open Rights Group warns that the UK is inviting major security risks to its critical national infrastructure by putting its data and software systems in the hands of a few mighty American tech giants.
This is putting more than just cyber at risk, but is locking the UK into deals and partnerships without room for vital flexibility and independence when it comes to issues like data protection and economic turbulence, the Open Rights Group found.
“For years, a handful of Big Tech companies have used their power to gain control of the UK’s digital infrastructure, locking the government into wasteful contracts and shaping tech policy in their favour,” said Jim Killock, the group’s executive director. “This overreliance on foreign tech companies is now an urgent national security issue as well as an economic threat.”
It alleges that if US and UK relations were to worsen or dissolve, the UK’s tech infrastructure could suffer sanctions and even crumble due to its reliance on US corporations.
This risk was exemplified in Microsoft’s shutdown of email facilities to International Criminal Court when it issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, earning it retalitory sanctions from the US.
“If the UK’s relationship with the US were to deteriorate, for example over Greenland or Iran, the US could leverage power through its corporate dominance of the UK’s critical infrastructure,” the report says.
The economic fallout of this US reliance has already been detailed in reports from the Competition and Markets Authority, which found that the UK is being overcharged by £500m a year in the cloud market.
The Social Market Foundation also estimates that the UK government will be overcharged by at least £300M via software license conditions.
US tech giants leverage their dominance to create vendor-lock in and unfair market conditions, the report alleges. The Open Rights Group says that around eight major IT providers and consultancies that are listed as strategic suppliers to the UK are over charging for their services, while other projects run over budgets.
Further, reliance on foreign companies puts data at risk of foreign governance and interference.
The US Cloud Act and China’s National Intelligence Laws can force tech companies to grant access to UK data and systems, putting UK private data at risk.
Beyond this, the sheer economic willpower of gargantuan tech companies can lobby governments against their own best interests, and can lead to a lack of anti-trust laws, and “a centralised, abusive, and anti-democratic digital information environment,” the Open Rights Group argues.
The report urges the UK government to make a concerted effort to strengthen its own digital economy by pursuing digital sovereignty through internal investments as well as collaborations in tech infrastructure, following the suit of other European nations.
It specifically calls for more investment in Open Source, as well as modernising critical government systems to improve security.
The report comes as MPs and the public are pressuring the UK government to reconsider its many contracts with Palantir, a controversial US-based tech giant that is expanding its footprint in some of the UK’s critical industries.
The firm has signed contracts to update the federated data platform of the NHS, and has deals with the Ministry of Defence. The deals have faced decries and debate from all angles with MPs questioning why a UK company was not chosen over a foreign one to handle such sensitive data, to the firm’s work with the US on its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) missions, to its collaborations with the state of Israel.
Snap Inc is set to lay off about 16% of its workforce, the company confirmed
Currently, Snap, the company behind social media platform Snapchat, employees over 5,000 people.
In the firm’s Investor Update presentation, CEO Evan Spiegel cited AI as a reason for his company’s job cuts, saying: ““rapid advancements in artificial intelligence [will] enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers.”
The newsletter also reported that a much anticipated integration between Snap and Perplexity is no longer going through.
Perplexity was meant to invest $400 million in cash and equity to see its AI engine embedded in Snapchat, with Snap aiming to see the partnership be the gold standard for AI assistant integration.
However, disagreements on terms delayed the deal, which appears to not be going through.
Meanwhile, a Snap spinoff is seeking to hire employees even as Snap looks at layoffs.
Specs, an organisation that recently separated itself to become a Snap subsidiary, was created to develop smart glasses leveraging augmented reality expertise from Snaps’s Lens Studio platform.
Like many social platforms, Snap has tried to expand its revenue intake beyond advertisements, launching Snap+ as a subscription service. Its subscribers now number over 25 million, as it supplements its revenue with its Memories photo archive scheme as well as in-app purchases.
Snap’s premarket trading numbers jump around 10% following news of the layoffs. The firm also is closing over 300 currently open rolls, with expectations that the recruitment winddown and job cuts will save them about $500 million by the second half of 2026.
Snap’s CEO is aiming for a 60% positive gross margin for 2026, and is expecting a 12% year-on-year increase in its revenues, which would about to $1.529bn.
UK startups and scaleups raised $7.8 billion in venture capital in Q1 2026, a 60% increase on the same period last year and the strongest first quarter since 2022, according to new analysis from HSBC Innovation Banking UK and Dealroom.
Growth was driven by a surge in late-stage investment and record levels of AI funding, highlighting renewed investor conviction in scaling UK businesses and reinforcing the UK’s leadership in venture capital investment across Europe.
AI dominates UK venture funding
AI was the defining theme of the quarter, with UK AI startups raising a record $5.8 billion – nearly three quarters (74%) of all venture capital raised. This represents a fivefold increase in AI’s share of UK VC since 2022, reflecting rapid acceleration in the sector.
More than 100 AI funding rounds were completed in the quarter, with late-stage deals driving the bulk of funding.
The largest rounds included Nscale ($2 billion), Wayve ($1.2 billion) and ElevenLabs ($500 million), alongside significant raises from Synthesia (~$200 million) and Olix ($220 million).
Megarounds drive investment growth
VC Investment in Q1 was concentrated in larger, late-stage deals, with 12 megarounds of $100 million or more contributing $5.1 billion, accounting for 65% of total capital raised.
Average megaround size increased by 41% year-on-year to $426 million, signalling growing investor conviction at scale. Breakout-stage companies (Series B and C) also attracted $1.8 billion in funding, demonstrating continued momentum among scaling businesses.
AI-led companies dominated these largest deals, accounting for two thirds of megarounds and $4.6 billion (80%) of total AI investment in the quarter.
Investment concentrates in AI-led sectors
Hosting ($2.1 billion), robotics ($1.4 billion) and transportation ($1.3 billion) were the most funded sectors in Q1, driven by a small number of large AI-led rounds. Media and health followed as top sectors, with funding also supported by AI-driven deals.
Traditional sectors such as fintech, health and energy continue to lead in deal volume, despite accounting for just 21% of total VC investment, reflecting broader activity across these sectors.
The UK retains its number 1 position in Europe
The UK remains Europe’s leading destination for venture capital, raising more than France, Germany and the Netherlands combined in the quarter and accounting for 41% of total European investment.
The UK also maintains a significant lead in AI, creating approximately twice as many AI startups and unicorns as any other European country, with seven new additions in Q1 alone, and generating four times the enterprise value of its nearest European peers.
This strength is underpinned by a deep talent base, with four of Europe’s top 15 AI hubs located in the UK (London, Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh), reinforcing the country’s position as a centre for future innovation and growth.
“The UK continues to demonstrate the depth and resilience of its innovation ecosystem, with venture capital investment accelerating alongside a surge in AI-led growth,” Emily Turner, CEO, HSBC Innovation Banking UK, said.
“The scale of late-stage funding and the dominance of AI reflect both the maturity of the market and the global relevance of UK innovation.
“With strong momentum across scaling companies and continued leadership in Europe, the UK is well positioned to support the next generation of high-growth businesses and translate innovation into long-term economic impact.”
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: “These figures are a powerful sign that British innovation is firing on all cylinders.
“The UK’s position at the top of the European table for venture capital investment, bolstered by our world-class AI companies, shows that the ambition and talent this government is backing is delivering real results.
“By attracting record investment and nurturing the next generation of innovators, we are building a stronger economy that delivers good jobs and real opportunities for people across the whole of the UK.”
Only about a third (34%) of cybersecurity professionals plan to stay with their current employer, highlighting declining job satisfaction across the field and challenging CISOs to be aggressive and innovative in how they retain talent in a challenging labour market.
This is according to research from IANS and Artico Search based on insights on compensation, roles, and retention based on a survey of 500 security professionals.
As organisations rely on their security teams to address an increasing volume and speed of security threats, the findings point to a shift in how cybersecurity leaders must think about talent. Compensation remains important, but it is not the primary driver of retention.
“Security leaders are being asked to do much more with the same or fewer resources than they had previously, and that fundamentally changes how they need to think about talent,” said Nick Kakolowski, Senior Research Director at IANS.
“As pressure on cyber teams skyrockets, CISOs who double down on mentorship, coaching and career development can create a sense of purpose and progression that helps their employees avoid burnout.”
The report found that wage growth plays a bigger role in retention than absolute pay levels. Employees receiving event modest pay increases report significantly higher satisfaction and are more likely to stay than those with flat compensation, regardless of their pay level.
CISOs need a multi-pronged approach to manage satisfaction and attrition, the report suggested. Flexible work models correlate strongly with satisfaction and retention.
Hybrid work arrangements, particularly one to two days onsite per week, deliver the strongest work-life balance outcomes.
Leadership emphasis on security drives staff commitment, with 73% of security staff who see security as a core organisational priority report being satisfied with their careers, versus just 19% among those who perceive little or no organisational backing for security.
“Security leaders are navigating a complex talent environment where expectations are rising, but resources are not,” said Steve Martano, IANS Faculty member and Partner at Artico Search.
“We still see junior-level cyber professionals commanding high levels of compensation, but it is clear that top-quartile talent is seeking more than just a hearty paycheck. Visibility, career growth, and support from security leadership are necessary to keep high performers”
The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) is launching a Global Fusion Guide for SMEs with clear, practical steps to collaborate with and supply fusion developers worldwide.
The global fusion energy sector is entering a decisive decade of rapid growth, creating significant new commercial opportunities for SMEs across the UK.
As fusion moves from laboratory scale research towards full demonstration power plants, companies are increasingly relying on external suppliers.
This shift is opening new markets for UK businesses with capabilities in engineering, manufacturing, robotics, advanced materials, digital systems and specialist services – including those that have no prior experience in fusion.
Globally, more than 68 private fusion companies are now operating, alongside major public programmes, with over £100 billion expected to flow into fusion development between 2026 and 2035.
A significant proportion of this spending will be on industrial systems, components and services, creating long‑term demand well suited to UK SME capabilities.
“The Global Fusion Guide for SMEs shows that fusion is not a closed market. Many of the skills required already exist across UK industry and the guide will help businesses see how their capabilities can translate across into this growing sector,” Fanny Fouin, Programme Manager for Fusion Futures, UKAEA, said.
“Over the next decade, a significant share of the global investment in fusion will be spent on industrial systems, components and services. These represent long term, high value opportunities that UK SMEs are well placed to deliver.”
The Global Fusion Guide for SMEs supports the second part of UKAEA’s mission – to maximise UK economic benefit. It is designed to help UK businesses understand where opportunities are emerging and how to engage with the global fusion sector in a practical, accessible way.
The guide sets out the global fusion technology landscape, providing an overview of fusion’s potential and the current state of development. It introduces the major public and private programmes worldwide, including the UKAEA Group’s STEP (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) programme.
It explores the key technologies required to deliver fusion power, with clear explanations of where demand is expected to grow and where SME capabilities are particularly well matched.
This includes areas such as superconducting magnets and cryogenics, lasers and power supplies, robotics and remote handling, advanced materials, tritium systems, heating technologies, and the growing role of advanced computing and artificial intelligence.
The guide also sets out global routes to market, providing region‑by‑region guidance covering the UK, United States, Europe and Asia. This section highlights practical entry points for SMEs, including supplier portals, procurement pathways, funding mechanisms and innovation programmes.
Finally, the guide offers a plain language overview of fusion standards and regulatory frameworks in key markets. It explains how fusion is regulated differently from nuclear fission and outlines practical first steps for SMEs, such as joining fusion clusters, attending supplier engagement events, and applying for innovation funding to support early market entry.
Three in ten (30%) boards rank cybersecurity and data protection as a top business risk, unchanged for five years, new research from The Corporate Governance Institute (TCGI).
The findings are based on a survey of 500 board directors and C suite leaders across the UK and Ireland.
Speaking on the findings, David Duffy, Co-Founder and Chair of The Corporate Governance Institute, said: “Cybersecurity has become a permanent feature of the boardroom risk agenda. The fact that 30% of boards still rank it as a top business risk, unchanged for five years, suggests that awareness alone is no longer enough.
“Stability in this number does not necessarily mean progress. In many organisations, cyber risk has simply become an acceptable risk rather than systematically governed.”
The research also highlights notable variation between sectors. Healthcare leaders in particular report heightened concern, with 35% ranking cybersecurity as a top business risk today, compared with 28% five years ago.
This rise reflects the increasing exposure of healthcare organisations to cyber threats, particularly as sensitive patient data, digital infrastructure and connected medical systems become more integral to service delivery.
Duffy continues: “As organisations become more digitally dependent, the consequences of cyber incidents grow significantly. For sectors such as healthcare, where systems underpin critical services and sensitive data, the stakes are especially high.”
The report argues that while many boards recognise cyber risk, fewer have fully embedded it into governance structures. Moving beyond awareness requires boards to establish clear oversight mechanisms, develop stronger cyber literacy at the board level and ensure accountability for cyber resilience sits firmly within governance frameworks.
Duffy added: “Cybersecurity can no longer be treated purely as a technical issue delegated to IT teams. It is fundamentally a governance challenge that requires board-level oversight, clear accountability and ongoing engagement from directors.”
The research concludes that boards must increasingly treat cyber risk as a strategic resilience issue, particularly as digital infrastructure becomes central to organisational operations.
Duffy concluded: “The organisations best prepared for the years ahead will be those that treat cyber governance as a continuous board responsibility. Cyber risk is not something that can be reviewed once a year, it requires sustained oversight at the highest level.”
OpenAI has marked its expansion in the UK with its first permanent office in London.
The new office will be at Regent Quarter in King’s Cross London, comprising 88,500 square feet with the capacity for 544 team members.
Expected to open in 2027, the office represents OpenAI’s continued international expansion.
The firm also aims to make London its greatest research hub outside of the US, as its expansion in the nation reflects growing demand for AI research and products.
“The UK has an incredible depth of talent and a strong track record in AI,” says Phoebe Thacker, global head of data research programmes and London site lead at OpenAI. “London is already a key hub for our research and teams, and this new office gives us the space to keep building here.
“We’re seeing real momentum in how businesses, developers and institutions across the UK are using AI, and we want to support that growth. This investment reflects our long-term commitment to the UK and the role it can play in shaping how AI is developed safely and used to benefit people all over the world.”
The commercial office coincides with OpenAI’s many deals with the UK government, from its Memorandum of Understanding for a data residency, to agreements with the Ministry of Justice and its support for UK SMEs to expand their AI skills.
The office announcement, however, comes hot off the tails of OpenAI dropping its plans to construct a new data centre in the UK, citing high energy costs and regulatory hurdles.
Video game developers with great ideas for the next generation of smash hit games are being urged to apply for a share of a new £28.5 million pot of funding.
The move represents a doubling in funding for the sector as the government puts the Creative Industries Sector Plan into action. These targeted investments are expected to pay dividends to the taxpayer by driving economic growth and creating jobs. Applications for funding will open from 14 April.
The UK is already an international powerhouse in gaming, having created global hits like Grand Theft Auto, Fable, PowerWash Simulator and No Man’s Sky. Across the UK, there are more than 2,000 gaming companies, employing tens of thousands of people recognised globally for their talent and creativity.
Through the Games Growth Package, the government will support newly-formed and expanding developers to turn blueprints for games into reality, enabling them to sell their product both in the UK and around the world.
The package is launching as leading games companies from around the world gather at the London Games Festival. Today the government can also announce that £1.5 million of new funding has been awarded to the festival over the next three years, to help ensure the UK remains at the centre of the sector globally.
The funding will help strengthen investor partnerships, doubling the value to £30 million per year of private investment deals at the festival.
“Video games are not only great fun, they are big business – and for too long their value to the British economy has been overlooked,” Creative Industries Minister Ian Murray said.
“That is why the government has thrown its full support behind the sector with £30 million of new funding. This will turbocharge the careers of some of our most talented game developers, creating more jobs and economic growth right across the country as their ideas come to fruition.”
The video game market is bigger than ever before, with £8.8 billion being spent by gamers per year, meaning there are excellent expansion prospects for our world-class sector.
This new funding will empower developers to take advantage of these opportunities, creating jobs and driving economic growth.
The sector has strong footholds in areas outside London including Dundee, Leamington Spa and Guildford, and this additional funding will help ensure it thrives in all regions of the UK.
Rockstar Games has been hit by hackers in a third-party cloud vendor breach, though the firm says its organisation and players have not been affected.
According to reports over the weekend, ShinyHunters has taken claim over the breach of Rockstar Games’ cloud servers managed by a third-party provider.
The prolific ransomware group claims to have access to a large set of compromised data, with a ransom due by 14 April.
Since the breach was first revealed, Rockstar Games has confirmed that a data breach has occurred.
However, it said that “a limited amount of non-material company information” was compromised in a third-party breach, but “This incident has no impact on our organisations or our players.”
The ransomware group first posted on April 11 that it had gained access to the video game firm’s Snowflake servers, the cloud-hosting firm.
“Rockstar Games, your Snowflake instances were compromised thanks to Anodot.com,” the ransomware group’s message read. “Pay or leak. This is a final warning to reach out by 14 Apr 2026 before we leak, along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way. Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline.”
Hackers gained access to the data not by breaching Snowflake’s defences, but allegedly through a vulnerability exposed by a breach on Anodot, a cloud analytics software service used by many firms including Rockstar to manage their cloud data.
Rolls-Royce has won a contract with Great British Energy – Nuclear, formally commencing technology design activities that will enable the delivery of the UK’s first Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
The UK’s first SMR project is estimated to support around 3,000 jobs at peak construction and thousands more across the UK supply chain, strengthening national energy security and supporting long‑term economic growth for local communities.
Rolls-Royce SMR was selected as the preferred technology partner in June 2025, and £2.6 billion was allocated in the 2025 Spending Review to enable this contract and wider programme delivery.
Since then, the GBE-N and Rolls-Royce SMR teams have worked intensively to finalise the contract, unlocking the next phase of the programme.
The contract will require Rolls-Royce SMR to work with GBE-N to deliver against key milestones as it commences site-specific design, regulatory engagement, and planning processes, ahead of a future Final Investment Decision.
The current conflict in the Middle East is yet another reminder that the only route to energy security and sovereignty for the UK is to end dependence on fossil fuel markets, and accelerate the transition to clean, homegrown power.
GBE-N has already awarded over £350 million in contracts across the supply chain this year, including some of the UK’s leading companies.
“This is an immense moment for the UK nuclear programme, our organisation, and the industry as a whole,” Simon Bowen, Chair of Great British Energy – Nuclear, said.
“Today represents a true recognition of the efforts made across GBE-N, Rolls-Royce SMR and Government to get to this point, and I’m hugely proud of the team for reaching this critical milestone.”
Chris Cholerton, Chief Executive of Rolls-Royce SMR, said: “This contract unlocks the delivery of our first three units and brings certainty to the UK SMR programme. With plans for up to six further units in Czechia, this announcement makes Rolls-Royce SMR the only company with multiple commitments in Europe.
“We are transforming the way nuclear projects are delivered, to give greater cost and schedule certainty with a standardised, factory-built approach. This project is important to the UK’s energy security and will power up our business and the UK supply chain, and we are excited by the opportunity and are focused on successful delivery.”
OpenAI revealed that it discovered a security incident with Axios, a third-party developer tool, and is now updating its security certifications.
The AI firm is now trying to mitigate any damage and ensure the proper certification of macOS applications is in place.
Currently, there is no evidence that any user data has been accessed in the incident, and intellectual property, systems, and software seem to not be compromised or altered.
All macOS users will be required to update their OpenAI apps to the latest versions to prevent risk of being distributed a fake OpenAI app, the company said.
Axios was compromised as part of a wider software supply chain attack carried out by threat actors thought to have links to North Korea on March 31.
The original attack led to the downloading and execution of a malicious version of Axios by OpenAI through a GitHub Actions workflow. The workflow involved certification of various macOS applications such as ChatGPT Desktop, Atlas, and Codex.
However, OpenAI said that its analysis showed that the signing certificate in the affected workflow was likely not exfiltrated by the malicious software.
As of 8 May, versions of OpenAI macOS desktop apps that are older and not updated will not be able to receive supports or newer updates, and may stop functioning.
OpenAI did reiterate and assure users that API keys were not affected by the security issue, saying that the GitHub Actions workflow misconfiguration issue was addressed.
A new amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill could see tech executives held criminally liable for failing to comply with regulation on the sharing of non-consensual intimate images.
The new law would see tech platforms be held liable to remove non-consensually shared intimate images within 48 hours of a victim’s request for removal.
If images are not removed within this time frame, Ofcom, the media regulator, can hold executives criminally liable for the legal failing.
Tech leaders could face fines, imprisonment, or even both, if they do not meet the requirement.
The new amendment to the upcoming law is set to be debated in the House of Commons next week as more call for tech executives to be held responsible for the content shared across their platforms.
“Too many women have had their lives shattered by having their intimate images shared online without consent,” science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said.
“This government is uncompromising in our mission to protect women and girls online, and we have taken action to stop tech firms from publishing this abusive content.
“In February we told platforms that they must remove reported non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours. Now we are going further by introducing measures meaning that senior tech executives could be criminally liable if their companies fail to act when required to do so by Ofcom.
“Protecting women and girls online is not optional, it is a responsibility that sits squarely with every tech company’s leadership.”
AI agents are becoming embedded in how people work and manage their digital lives, automating tasks, executing commands, and operating with deep access to personal data and devices. The benefits are real, but so are the risks.
Unlike the malware threats of the early internet, a compromised AI agent does not just infect a file. It makes decisions and takes action, meaning a single manipulated instruction can have immediate real-world consequences.
“People are giving AI agents significant access to their machines, accounts and personal information because that’s what makes them powerful,” said Travis Witteveen, head of products and portfolios at Gen. “But until now, there’s been no way to verify what those agents are about to do and the potential harm they could cause with one bad decision or click.”
Witteveen is referring to the new Norton AI Agent Protection product that is designed to help people safely use AI tools that can take action on their behalf.
The product attempts to offer increased security and visibility into AI agent action by delivering real-time oversight of every action an AI agent takes, creating a checkpoint between decisions and execution.
Gen’s, the parent company of Norton, Threat Labs underscores the urgency, identifying approximately hundreds of malicious skills in public agent registries.
Even well-intentioned agents can expose credentials, introduce compromised dependencies, and execute destructive commands; acting quickly and autonomously, with unchecked access to sensitive data. By the time someone notices, it is often too late.
The push for AI and the swift transition from pilots and chatbots to AI agent implementation have left security teams scrambling to keep up with mounting pressures from cyber threat actors and continual insider faults.
Adding AI into the mix has been a double-edged sword for security teams – while AI has been employed for years to detect threats, agentic and autonomous systems can open up new avenues for threat actors to infiltrate these novel systems.
The European parliament has allowed a law that allows tech firms to scan their platforms for child sexual exploitation to lapse, as concerns of the proliferation of child exploitation material and privacy continues to collide.
Meta, Google, Snap, and Microsoft have slammed the EU for not extending the temporary allowance, which was put in place in 2021 as an add on to the EU Privacy Act. The measure allowed big tech firms to employ automated detection to scan message for certain harms, such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), as well as sextortion and grooming.
Amid privacy concerns from lawmakers in the parliament, the EU Parliament voted to not extend the order, which expired on 3 April. The lapse of the temporary law was noted as a positive for privacy campaigners, who voiced concerns that encrypted messages and data were being viewed in the scans, infringing people’s right to privacy.
Now, scanning for such harms by big tech firms would be illegal under the EU Privacy Act, but large platforms are still liable for any illegal content hosted on their platforms under the Digital Services Act, creating a legal no-mans-land.
Scanning for CSAM was an easier line of defence for tech firms, though CSAM, grooming, and sextortion still run rampant on the internet. Further, allowing tech firms to pre-emptively scan messages that would otherwise be encrypted negates the promises of privacy that should be guaranteed with end-to-end encryption.
In response, large tech companies have written a joint statement that they will continue to voluntarily scan content on their platforms for CSAM and similar illegal content.
“While EU institutions rightly expect technology companies to take action on child safety, the April 3 expiry of the derogation clouds the legal certainty that has helped responsible platforms try to protect our communities, safeguard child victims, and preserve the integrity of our services. We are disappointed by this irresponsible failure to reach an agreement to maintain established efforts to protect children online,” the statement, signed by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap, read.
The EU is looking to formalise particular laws regarding CSAM scanning whilst affirming personal privacy, a consistently tenuous balancing act for regulators across the globe. While the EU is looking at measures to prevent the creation and proliferation of CSAM and the child exploitation inherent in its production, the new legal gap could lead to a surge of the material across social platforms.
The signatory platforms have said that they “will continue to take voluntary action on our relevant Interpersonal Communication Services.”
The EU’s proposed chat control, which lapsed, temporarily ushered in a new level of mass scanning that privacy advocated deemed “surveillance”, creating a backdoor to encryption. The proposal is still being debated , though conversations are now focusing on age verification and voluntary measures rather than mandated scanning practices.
Cricket crowds travelling to Edgbaston Stadium in Birmingham are part of new research to help cities identify how and where to cut transport emissions.
The study was led by TransiT, a national transport decarbonisation research hub for the UK jointly led by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and University of Glasgow.
Match day travel to the sports ground was used as a real-world scenario to test a new five-step approach to using digital twins to decarbonise transport.
Digital twins are digital replicas of the physical world that can be used to test different interventions and ‘what if’ scenarios.
The research, which is published in the journal Urban Science, was led by Durham University, one of TransiT’s university partners, and will be used to help develop a prototype passenger transport digital twin of the West Midlands. This will incorporate different transport modes – including buses, trains and cycling – and is being built by TransiT as part of its research with digital twins to identify the lowest-cost, least-risky pathways to transport decarbonisation in the UK.
Heather Steele, a TransiT researcher and railway systems expert at Durham University, explained: “Decarbonising transport in cities is complex. Digital twins can help us understand this complexity. But we need to know how planners would practically use them, starting with what real-world scenarios they want to test. Our five-step framework is designed to start bridging that gap, and travel to Edgbaston Stadium is one of the case studies we used to test our approach.”
Up to 25,000 spectators can arrive at Edgbaston on match days, and this accounts for up to 80% of total emissions from the event.
Although there are frequent bus services to and from the city centre to the stadium, the location is defined as a ‘transport desert,’ because the stadium is not well connected to other parts of Edgbaston or Birmingham. Railway stations on commuter lines are at least a half-hour walk away. And the neighbouring A38 trunk road can be affected by local road closures on match days.
Applying the new framework, researchers mapped out how a digital twin could support planners by testing transport service changes including:
additional shuttle buses or rail‑bus interchange services
revised match‑day road access
park‑and‑ride options
alternative active‑travel routes
the impacts on local congestion and carbon emissions.
Real-time data sources, like bus occupancy, parking demand and road traffic data, would feed the digital twin with the information needed to make its analyses. Journey planning and real-time information systems could then be used to transmit information from the digital twin back to real-world transport settings, to help influence traveller behaviour.
The researchers describe their five-step approach as a ‘co-created’ framework that was developed in an industry workshop with local authority practitioners, transport planners, modellers and policy specialists.
Participants included experts from engineering consultancy WSP, local transport planners from Transport for West Midlands and Midlands Connect, and researchers from Heriot-Watt University.
The framework identifies five aspects that need to be clearly defined when digital twins are being designed for transport decarbonisation. These are impacts, interventions, location types, data sources and feedback mechanisms.
For ‘impacts’, planners need to identify what real‑world outcomes they want to achieve. For example, switching from private cars to public transport; reducing congestion and improving travellers’ experience of public transport.
The ‘interventions’ aspect identifies concrete actions or policies that should be tested in the digital twin. For example, new rail stations, tram extensions, bus service redesign, mobility hubs, school or pedestrian right of ways, cycle infrastructure, parking charges, integrated ticketing and transport electrification.
‘Location types’ identifies where interventions should be introduced. This might be congested arterial routes, city centres, interchange hubs, rural to urban routes or school‑run corridors.
‘Data sources’ identifies what data could be included in a digital twin for urban transport decarbonisation. These could include smartphone or satellite data to understand travel patterns; vehicle, traffic and air quality sensor data; electric vehicle charging data and public transport occupancy data.
‘Feedback mechanisms’ identifies how the digital twin’s findings and instructions can be communicated back to real-world transport systems. Solutions might include live journey planning apps, passenger information systems and responsive traffic management.
The researchers believe their framework provides ‘the first step’ in developing a digital twinning ecosystem for transport decarbonisation, and hope their work will help other researchers in the field.
The Financial Conduct Authority has said the results of its small language model for financial services with Malted AI, the Edinburgh-based startup, had “extremely encouraging” results.
Edmund Towers, head of advanced analytics and data science units at the FCA, detailed the experiment, which began in 2025 with Malted AI, the bespoke AI language model firm, in a blog on Linkedin.
The experiment was led by Towers and Alister Shepherd, chief scientific adviser and CISO at the FCA, and aimed to work with Malted AI to see where small language models (SLMs) can add value to the FCA and financial services, as well as any tradeoffs SLMs have versus large language models.
The focus on SLMs is largely due to LLM’s comparatively large costs and compute requirements, where as SLMs use a fraction of these required parameters.
SLMs also offer specialist performances tailored to specific datasets, with lower energy and infrastructure requirements and costs, fast inference, and greater auditability.
The FCA partnered with Malted AI to create a SLM prototype for the high-volume task of multilabel classification, which deals with a range of issues from vulnerability detection to customer routing.
The prototype used a 400 million parameter model and was trained on 10,000 records, running on a single tenant environment with no data sub-processors. This provided the researchers with full control over the data. Further, the experiment allowed for precision-recall threshold calibration to match potential risk.
The SLM results showed “zero missed high risk classifications, alongside materially higher accuracy than a prompted general LLM on the same task,” Malted CEO Iain Mackie said. “We also observed significantly faster latency, with large reductions in compute cost and energy usage for the use cases in scope.”
Towers wrote: “This proof of concept reflects the FCA’s commitment to innovation that is grounded in responsible choices. As AI continues to evolve rapidly, it is essential to understand how technical design decisions connect directly to risk appetite, transparency, and trust.”
SLMs were viewed as being capable of delivering speed and strong data control benefits for the right use cases, while LLMs were still the best choice for more complex generative operations and open-ended reasoning.
“We’re increasingly seeing UK firms adopt a blended approach focused on use case return on investment – using large models for general workflows, while deploying smaller, specialised models where performance, privacy, and scale really matter,” Ewen Fleming, head of financial services at Malted said.
While the experiment showed the promise of SLM, Towers emphasised that they should be seen “as an important component within a broader AI strategy, rather than a replacement for general purpose models.”
By 2028, 25% of all enterprise generative AI (GenAI) applications will experience at least five minor security incidents per year, up from 9% in 2025, according to Gartner, Inc.
As organisations continue to build and integrate agentic AI applications using technologies such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), new attack vectors and immature security practices will significantly elevate risk exposure.
“MCP was built for interoperability, ease of use and flexibility first, so security mistakes can manifest without continuous oversight for agentic AI,” said Aaron Lord, Sr. Director Analyst at Gartner.
“Because of this, the rate of minor security incidents within GenAI applications is set to grow at an increased rate. We will eventually see 15% of all enterprise GenAI applications experience at least one major security incident per year by 2029, up from 3% in 2025.”
As enthusiasm for frameworks like MCP grows, software engineering leaders must be prepared for the security realities that follow, ranging from data exposure incidents to vulnerabilities lurking in widely used third‑party components.
Protecting against these risks requires establishing rigorous security review processes, prioritising low‑risk use cases, mitigating known threat‑patterns, and empowering domain experts to define guardrails that keep agentic AI both powerful and safe.
MCP’s design optimises interoperability and developer speed, not security enforcement by default, which means missteps can surface through ordinary usage.
This can happen especially where agents can access sensitive data, ingest untrusted content, or communicate externally in the same flow. Software engineering leaders should treat any use case that combines those three factors as a “no‑go zone” due to heightened exfiltration risk.
“Software engineering leaders should collaborate with data, security, and infrastructure teams to create a formal security review for MCP use cases to prioritize low‑risk patterns and explicitly exclude high‑risk combinations,” said Lord.
“They should reinforce this with strong authentication and authorization practices tailored specifically for AI agents, not inherited from human user roles, to keep permissions tightly scoped. Applying well‑known threat‑pattern mitigations, such as guarding against content‑injection and tightening oversight of third‑party MCP components, will help close the most common gaps before they can be exploited.”
Successful, proactive mitigations for MCP security requires knowledge of antipatterns that can lead to vulnerabilities.
Software engineering leaders will need to mitigate MCP vulnerabilities focused on known threat-patterns, such as content injection attacks, supply chain threats, and disclosure of sensitive data or escalation of privileges when AI tries to be helpful but makes a mistake.
“Software engineering leaders will need to establish domain-oriented ownership for MCP servers to drive domain-driven guardrails,” said Lord. “Growing complexity from agentic AI will eventually lead to complications managing access to data and maintaining compliance.”
To address this at scale, Gartner recommends that software engineering leaders collaborate with domain experts and work backward to ensure secure-by-default interactions for agentic AI.
It will be critical for domain experts to predefine their guardrails before allowing MCP clients to access their data and resources. These domains should be the owners of MCP servers and define the guardrails for agentic AI usage.
AI bots are reshaping the digital publishing ecosystem, according to new research from Akamai.
The firm’s new State of the Internet report – Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era – finds that AI bot activity surged by 300% in 2025, with the media industry, which includes publishers — ranking second globally with 13% of AI bot traffic.
AI bots overwhelmingly targeted publishing organizations, which made up 40% of that activity. This concentration highlights how content-rich websites have become prime targets for automated scraping.
Companies increasingly deploy AI bots to collect data for large language models (LLMs) and to power AI-driven search tools. While AI training crawlers generate the most automated traffic, AI fetchers — bots that retrieve content in real time to answer user queries — pose a more immediate threat. By delivering answers directly through AI assistants, these tools reduce the need for users to visit original content creators’ websites.
This shift is already impacting the publishing industry’s bottom lines. The SOTI report found that AI chatbots drove approximately 96% less referral traffic than traditional Google search in Q4 2024, sharply reducing a critical source of audience and revenue.
OpenAI leads in impact, generating the highest volume of AI bot traffic targeting media companies. Within that traffic, publishing organisations accounted for 40% of all OpenAI requests.
AI training crawlers made up 63% of all AI bots targeting the media industry with 37% focussed specifically on publishing.
AI fetchers are also on the rise, representing 25% of all AI bot activity targeting media, with publishing accounting for 43% of that segment.
“The fundamental shift in how people get their information is impacting publishers,” said Patrick Sullivan, Akamai’s Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy.
“AI bots are eroding core revenue streams, such as advertising and subscriptions, while driving up infrastructure costs and diminishing brand visibility. Fortunately, our report offers strategies to address this problem.”
Protecting Publishing: Navigating the AI Bot Era also examines emerging AI bot categories, highlights new security approaches for the publishing industry, and provides a practical AI bot management checklist to help organizations mitigate risk and protect their content.
Now in their 12th year, Akamai’s SOTI reports continue to offer critical insights on cybersecurity trends and web performance, drawn from attacks viewed across Akamai’s cybersecurity infrastructure, which handles a significant portion of global web traffic.
AI is augmenting roles rather than replacing them, according to Hays latest Tech Talent Explorer.
The research examines how AI is influencing tech roles globally, highlighting the technology’s role in augmenting human expertise. It also benchmarks global salaries across key tech roles, with the UK performing solidly against international peers.
According to Hays, UK tech professionals command competitive pay globally, ranking 15th out of 34 countries for average salaries and 116th for contractor day rates. UK contractors in technical roles rank among the highest paid globally.
AI Impact Varies By Role
Software intensive roles such as Software Developers, Data Engineers and AI Engineers are set to see the highest relative exposure to AI across the 20 technical roles assessed, where routine tasks are increasingly supported by automation.
However, even for these roles, the overall impact remains modest, and, rather than eliminating roles, the technology is expected to remove specific tasks. These professionals continue to play a critical role through human oversight, design, problem solving and quality control.
By contrast, roles that rely on judgement, coordination and organisational oversight, including Project and Change Managers, show lower levels of AI impact. Infrastructure focused roles such as Security and Network Engineering are even lower in terms of expected impact, and remain essential to safe, reliable AI deployment.
Together this reflects a two‑speed transformation: AI reshapes software-intensive work fastest, while governance, change and leadership and operational safety roles grow in strategic importance.
Strong UK Tech Wages Persist
UK technical roles command solid pay levels, demonstrating the resilience of the sector even as AI reshapes the world of work. Salaries are being driven by skills scarcity, demand and the system critical nature of roles, particularly across Cloud, Cybersecurity, DevOps and Platform Engineering.
While not among the very highest paying markets globally, the UK remains competitively positioned, sitting in the top half of countries for both permanent salaries and contractor day rates. For permanent employees, UK salary levels rank particularly well internationally: Security Engineers place 4th globally, while Java Developers, DevOps Engineers, Solutions Architects and .NET Developers all sit at 10th. Reflecting this strength, the UK appears in the top half of highest salaries across 18 of the 20 job categories.
The contractor market shows an equally robust picture. UK day rates rank 3rd globally for Java Developers and 5th for Cloud Engineers, with Security Engineers in 7th place. .NET Developers rank 8th, Full Stack Developers 9th and Business Analysts 10th. Overall, the UK appears in the top half of highest day rates across 13 of the 20 job categories.
Based on the mean average salary across all roles, the top five highest paying countries for permanent tech employees, are the United States, Switzerland, Denmark, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. For contractor day rates, the leading markets are Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, Germany and Japan.
What UK Tech Professional Can Expect to Learn
In the UK, wage levels reflect market dynamics rather than AI impact, with pay bands influenced primarily by supply, demand and budget structures, not by automation risk.
The highest average salaries for permanent employees include Solutions Architect (£84,249), Security Engineer (£75,702) and DevOps Engineer (£67,532). Contractors also command strong day rates in specialist areas, with Java Developers (£695), Cloud Engineers (£684) and Security Engineers (£659) sitting at the top end of the market.
By contrast, roles with broader talent supply or more standardised entry pathways typically sit lower on the pay scale. Current averages include Project Manager (£41,736), Test Analyst (£43,971) and Data Analyst (£44,415). Contractor rates show a similar pattern, with Project Managers (£388), Test Analysts (£391) and Network Engineers (£407) among the lower paid day rates.
“The findings of our report clearly show that AI isn’t replacing human talent but amplifying it. As automation accelerates routine tasks, the roles that thrive are those grounded in judgement, coordination and strategic oversight,” David Curtis, STEM senior managing director, Hays UK&I said.
“For professionals, this creates significant opportunities to build future ready careers by developing adaptable, strategic and tech augmented skill sets. For organisations, the findings underline the growing importance of continuous development and flexible workforce strategies.
“To remain competitive, the UK must continue to position itself as an attractive destination for the world’s best tech talent. That means ensuring wages and benefits remain attractive, but also creating an environment where innovation, skills development and career progression can accelerate. In a global market defined by rapid technological change, competitiveness is measured not only by pay, but by how effectively a country supports and invests in its people.”
The demand for technical skills to power agentic AI adoption has increased by up to 60 times levels recorded a year ago.
This is according to new research published by Malt, Europe’s leading freelance management platform.
The findings signify a skills shift that deprioritises only writing code and favours those who excel in designing and orchestrating connected, intelligent systems for business.
The research also found that demand for expertise relating to low-code tools like n8n has grown by more than 14 times its previous level, reaching similar demand to skills in tools such as Java.
The Malt Tech Trends 2026 report draws insights from Europe’s largest independent tech community, analysing keyword searches and project briefs from over 1,000,000 registered freelancers and more than 90,000 companies. The research garnered insights from across the European Union, United Kingdom, and Middle East.
Commenting on the research, Claire Lebarz, CTO at Malt, said: “In recent years, artificial intelligence has evolved from experimentation to widespread adoption and is now present across functions, industries, and company sizes.
“We are not seeing a substitution of humans by machines, but a deeper shift: AI is rewriting where value sits within human work. We have entered a period of deep structural realignment where value no longer resides in the ability to execute a task, but in the capacity to design the systems that perform it.”
Evidencing the shift away from historically dominant skills, demand for expertise in WordPress and Java has decreased by 20-30% over the past year, in favour of skills related to AI and automation. In line with this, just 20% of freelancers joining Malt specified expertise in JavaScript in 2025, down from 40% in 2024.
The report also found that AI and tech leaders are in hot demand; interim and fractional tech leaders (CTOs, CDOs) is now the fastest-growing job category, up by 23% on the previous year.
About a fifth (22%) of project briefs outside of tech now specify a requirement for AI skills, including marketing, graphic design, and management consulting.
Demand for expertise in AI regulation has skyrocketed b 380%, with the EU AI Act seeing compliance take on a new importance.
The skills shift has also seen the creation of a new role: the AI-integrated Software Engineer. About two-thirds of AI skill demand refers to need to combine solid technical expertise either from data science or somewhere engineering with a builder mindset focusing on impact first.
“The transformation is not technical; it is organisational. We are no longer just managing code, infrastructure, or roadmaps. Instead, we are choreographing intelligence. Success will be measured by how effectively we harmonise human ingenuity with machine autonomy to create a system that learns, adapts, and scales,” concluded Lebarz.
New research from cloud-native software artifact management platform Cloudsmith finds that, despite 93% of respondents’ organisations using AI-generated code, 31% spend 10 hours or less per month validating, auditing, or securing it – including 5% who do not explicitly audit AI code at all.
This, and other findings, released today in the Cloudsmith 2026 Artifact Management Report, highlight gaps in how organisations are managing risk across the modern software supply chain.
A rise in software supply chain vulnerabilities
The risks posed by weak software supply chain security have become increasingly clear in the past 12 months. With threat campaigns including Shai Hulud 2.0 and SANDWORM_MODE specifically targeting the software supply chain via upstream repositories, 44% of respondents have experienced a security incident caused by a third-party dependency.
In the same time period, 44% of respondents reported their organisation spent over 50 hours per month investigating potential security issues linked to third-party dependencies, whether or not they resulted in a breach.
Confidence in AI-generated code
Confidence in AI-generated code is also lacking. 58% of respondents spend at least 11 hours per month validating and securing AI-generated code — rising to over 40 hours for 8% of respondents — as teams work to catch hidden dependencies and potential vulnerabilities. In fact, only 17% are very confident that AI is not introducing new vulnerabilities into their codebase.
These concerns are well-founded, as AI is known to introduce risks in software development by generating insecure or incorrect code, including “slopsquatting” – where models hallucinate non-existent package names that attackers can then register and exploit – embedding hidden vulnerabilities that can compromise systems.
Regulation on the horizon
In addition to growing exploitation of third-party dependencies and concerns about the adoption of AI, there are a wider range of issues putting pressure on the software supply chain. With the arrival of new legislation like the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act, companies have an incredibly tight deadline to respond to cyber attacks. This involves the obligation to provide a detailed assessment 48 hours after becoming aware of a breach. To do so, organizations will need to provide provenance data with little to no notice.
Despite this, however, Cloudsmith’s research shows that, if they were hit with a surprise audit tomorrow, 53% of respondents could only produce a comprehensive report of artifact versions, origins, and security attestations with a significant amount of manual effort or time. This is a particularly significant gap, given the number of organisations that are committing AI-generated code to production without understanding exactly how it functions, or why it was created.
“We are at a huge inflection point in the history of software development,” says Glenn Weinstein, CEO of Cloudsmith. “In a matter of months, we’ve gone from, ‘How can AI help me write better code?’ to, ‘How can I help AI write better code?’ But at the same time, AI tools are expanding the attack surface, introducing more open source dependencies. And those same tools are being used by malicious actors to find more vulnerabilities in existing libraries, leading to more CVEs.”
He continues: “Agentic development is an incredibly powerful way to build software, and teams will be far more productive and write even more software as a result. That is a good thing, because the world certainly needs more software and more automation! For enterprises to manage this new velocity and productivity, automated guardrails and context are the new keys to unlock the production of safer, more efficient code.”
In addition to these findings, the Cloudsmith 2026 Artifact Management Report also reveals respondent’s future.
Top cited challenges range greatly, from ensuring builds and releases remain available during spikes and third-party outages (21%), to meeting regulatory standards and securing the supply chain (20%). Reducing cloud spend and consolidating toolchains (19%) is also a challenge.
The top three areas in which respondents plan to increase investment are, however: security scanning (29%), AI/ML Ops infrastructure (29%), and internal developer portals (13%).
Nations leading the development of quantum technologies have committed to deepening cooperation that drives the cutting-edge technology forward securely, and supports companies to scale up, following a summit hosted by the UK.
The fifth meeting of the Quantum Development Group (QDG) – a forum of 13 like-minded countries working together to advance the secure and responsible development of quantum technologies – was hosted by Science Secretary Liz Kendall last week (30 March – 1 April) and brought together 70 senior leaders and officials in London.
QDG membership include, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US.
Following the 2-day meeting, members agreed to deepen cooperation across 3 priority areas:
Research security, investment security, and supply chain resilience, to support trusted and impactful international collaboration alongside the safe and sustainable development of quantum technology.
Fostering a more supportive investment environment for scaling quantum companies. This will include deeper engagement between governments and investors to support commercialisation and expand access to the capital required for companies to achieve sustainable global growth.
Strategic priorities for international quantum standards development, focusing on shared priorities that will support industrial adoption, interoperability and the development of open global markets.
This QDG meeting comes shortly after the UK Government’s recent £2 billion commitment to quantum and the launch of a world-leading procurement programme, underlining the UK’s intent to back ambition with long-term investment and practical deployment.
“Quantum has the potential to be one of the most exciting and defining technologies of the coming years. With the power to transform healthcare, energy, defence and transport, its impact will touch all of our lives,” science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said.
“But progress in quantum technology is not something we can do alone. It will mean working hand‑in‑hand with our trusted partners, harnessing world‑class science and backing the businesses turning brilliant ideas into real‑world solutions.
“In the UK we are matching that ambition with action – including a world‑leading quantum computing procurement programme as part of a £2 billion investment. This will create high‑skilled jobs, grow our economy, and help the British innovators developing quantum technologies that lead to medical breakthroughs and cleaner energy.”
Enterprises have moved decisively from AI experimentation to execution, research from OutSystems, an AI development platform, found in its 2026 State of AI Development report.
Nearly every organisation surveyed, 96%, is already using AI agents in some capacity, and 97% are exploring system-wide agentic AI strategies.
In the UK, 91% of UK enterprises are deploying successful AI projects into production, with 41% reporting that over half of their AI projects are successful. The findings signal a clear shift from pilots to production as businesses embed AI into mission-critical operations and drive increased impact with AI.
However, as adoption accelerates, governance is struggling to keep pace. According to the report, 94% of organisations report concern that AI sprawl is increasing complexity, technical debt, and security risk. Still, only a small fraction of enterprises have established a centralised approach to agentic AI governance, meaning most are using agents across fragmented environments.
In the UK, fragmentation is what tends to hold enterprises back from AI success. The top reasons why application development projects haven’t been started is that they are hard to integrate with existing systems (43%), the impact of legacy systems or fragmented data sources (42%) and governance or compliance concerns (38%). A lack of internal skills is another common reason, reported by 31% of UK organisations, the highest of any country surveyed apart from Japan. These findings support why UK respondents believe having a centralised place to build and deploy agents will be “very important” in the future.
Agentic AI represents a significant evolution from earlier applications of AI, capable of autonomously executing workflows, making decisions, and adapting in real time. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, highlighting the speed at which autonomous systems are becoming embedded in enterprise software. According to the OutSystems report, which surveyed 1,900 global IT leaders, 49% describe their agentic AI capabilities as advanced or expert.
Adoption maturity varies by region though, with most UK enterprises rating their AI capabilities and maturity only as “intermediate”. Similarly, Australia, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands and the US report intermediate progress, while France remains earlier in its journey. Financial services and technology organisations report the highest levels of production deployment.
The impact of agentic AI is most apparent within IT and software development, where time-to-value is easily measurable. Thirty-one percent of global respondents say AI is already integral to their development practices, and another 42% have embedded AI into specific phases of the software development lifecycle.
As agents prove value in development environments, 52% of organisations globally now rely on a human-in-the-loop model, allowing systems to operate with reduced direct oversight while maintaining supervisory control. 65% of UK respondents now report generative AI-assisted development as their top app development process, followed by SaaS apps being customised internally at 60% and outsourced or vendor-built solutions at 58%.
“The transition from AI experimentation to measurable business outcomes is no longer a future state—it is our current reality. The findings in the State of AI Development Report reveal a fundamental shift where building software and building AI systems have become one and the same,” said Woodson Martin, CEO at OutSystems.
“As organisations move toward a ‘system of agents’ model, the challenge is no longer just about adoption, but about creating a stable architectural foundation that can coordinate these complex intelligent systems to drive real-world productivity.”
Despite momentum, architectural fragmentation remains a challenge. Thirty-eight percent of organisations globally report mixing custom-built and pre-built agents, creating AI stacks that are difficult to standardise and secure. While 12% have implemented a centralised platform to manage sprawl, most enterprises are still experimenting with governance approaches that vary by team and region.
Global semiconductor revenue is projected to exceed $1.3 trillion in 2026, exhibiting the highest growth in the last two decades, according to Gartner, Inc.
“Amid high demand for AI processing, data center networking and power, and memory price inflation (memflation), the semiconductor industry is projected to achieve a third consecutive year of double-digit growth in 2026 – a milestone that underscores the sector’s pivotal role in the AI technology stack,” said Rajeev Rajput, Senior Principal Analyst at Gartner.
Gartner forecasts semiconductor revenue will grow 64% in 2026, with memory revenue expected to increase threefold amid memflation.
Gartner analysts said that memflation is profound, but it is not perennial. Gartner estimates DRAM and NAND flash annual prices in 2026 will increase by 125% and 234%, respectively, and any meaningful pricing relief is not expected until late 2027.
AI semiconductors are expected to account for approximately 30% of total semiconductor revenue in 2026 and will remain the driving force behind the overall industry growth.
Hyperscaler investment in AI infrastructure buildouts remains strong with spending expected to increase by more than 50% in 2026, driving demand for AI accelerators, including GPUs and custom non‑GPU chips.
“Memflation will destroy, or at least delay, non-AI demand into 2028, to varying degrees depending on the application,” said Rajput.
“Technology suppliers should prepare for higher prices during the first half of 2026, followed by persistent but moderating price increases throughout the rest of the year. CIOs and IT leaders should be cautious about signing supply agreements with unfavourable pricing terms that extend beyond 2027.”
Lloyds Banking Group has partnered with IBM to complete what could be the first ever experiment using quantum computing to help identify and catch a money mule network.
The experiment explored how quantum algorithm could be used to detect patterns of known money mules across a complex transactional graph in an effort to boost fraud-fighting capabilities.
With IBM, the banking group used a 156-qubit quantum computer to run multiple algorithms to find the embedded monkey mule operation in the graph experiment.
Money mule networks are vast and complex, relying on a tangled web of transactions to hide their illegal activities such as fraud and scams. This complexity makes it difficult for traditional computers to identify these networks.
Qubits, however, which quantum computers rely on, are subject to the laws of quantum physics, and can therefore represent multiple states at once, assessing all potential solutions to an issue at the same time. This improves efficiency and the speed at which a solution can be found, especially in complex problems with wide ranging data inputs.
In the experiment, anonymised data was used on the quantum computer which was used to find a real money mule that was embedded in the dataset. The experiment was successful, validating the methodology and the use of quantum computers in finding crime networks across transaction data.
“Financial crime is becoming more complex and more network‑driven, which means we need to keep pushing the boundaries of technology to protect customers,” said Lloyds Banking Group chief operating officer Ron van Kemenade.
“While quantum computing is still emerging, this experiment has allowed us to translate research into practical insights, while building a strong internal community of quantum experts that will continue to explore future use cases and applications as the technology evolves.”
Scott Crowder, vice president of IBM quantum adoption and business development said: “Our collaboration with Lloyds Banking Group demonstrates how forward-looking financial organisations can begin conducting meaningful quantum research.
“Over the past nine months, Lloyds worked alongside IBM’s quantum computing experts to test how quantum algorithms could help identify patterns within complex transaction networks and combat evolving forms of economic crime.
“IBM is excited to continue collaborating with financial institutions like Lloyds and further explore how quantum computing could support the future of financial services.”
C-suite executives report they’re creating a two-tiered workforce: 92% are actively cultivating a new class of “AI elite” employees; 75% say their company’s AI strategy is “more for show” than real guidance.
This is according to WRITER, an enterprise AI agent platform, which released its second annual AI survey: AI Adoption in the Enterprise. The study, conducted in partnership with independent research firm Workplace Intelligence, surveyed 2,400 global employees and C-suite leaders using AI at work.
The report examines the very real obstacles companies continue to face as they implement generative and agentic AI. In fact, 79% of executives acknowledge struggling with issues like lagging ROI, strategy gaps, and internal power struggles. The pressure is felt most acutely at the top, with 38% of CEOs reporting a high or crippling amount of stress around AI strategy. And it’s not just their companies on the line — 64% of CEOs fear they could lose their job if they fail to lead their organisation through the AI transition.
To get ahead in the AI race, 92% of the C-suite admit they’re actively cultivating a new class of “AI elite” employees. Most leaders (87%) report that these AI super-users are at least 5X more productive than employees who aren’t embracing AI. But the stakes are high for those who lag behind — 77% of executives warn that employees who refuse to become AI-proficient won’t be considered for promotions or leadership roles, and 60% plan to lay off employees who can’t or won’t use AI.
Nearly all executives (97%) say AI has been beneficial, and 75% believe AI agents will be part of their company’s C-suite within the next 5 years. Still, few leaders say they’ve seen significant ROI from generative AI (29%) or AI agents (23%), and nearly half (48%) feel that AI adoption at their company has been a massive disappointment.
About seven in ten (69%) C-suite executives report that their company is doing layoffs due to AI, but 39% admit they don’t have a formal strategy in place to drive revenue from AI tools. Even where strategies do exist, quality is lacking — 75% of executives say their company’s AI strategy is more for show than for actual internal guidance.
As pressure from boards intensifies, internal friction is growing. 54% of the C-suite say adopting AI is tearing their company apart, and 56% say this has created power struggles and disruption at their organization — double digit increases from 2025. 78% of executives say AI has created tension between IT and other lines of business, with 55% reporting that AI use is a chaotic free-for-all at their company.
Nearly all (95%) executives say roles, titles, and team structures are changing at their company because of AI, and 90% say the rise of AI super-users will require them to completely rethink how they evaluate and reward performance. Managers’ roles are also under scrutiny: 80% of Gen Z trust AI more than their manager, for example for tasks like providing performance feedback and career advice.
Instead of embracing AI, some workers are pushing back. In fact, 29% of employees — including 44% of Gen Z — admit to sabotaging their company’s AI strategy, for example by entering company information into public tools, using unapproved tools, or refusing to use AI. Executives recognise the danger: 76% say employee sabotage poses a serious threat to their company’s future.
67% of executives believe their company has suffered a data leak or security breach because of an employee using an unapproved AI tool. More than one-third (35%) concede they aren’t very confident they could “pull the plug” on a rogue AI agent if it started causing financial or reputational damage to their company.
“Layoffs are not a viable AI strategy,” said May Habib, CEO & Co-Founder, WRITER.
“I’m on the front lines with WRITER’s Fortune 500 customers every day, and the leaders who are putting in the work to radically redesign operations with human-agent collaboration at the center are the ones compounding their advantage in ways competitors can’t replicate. AI transformation is ultimately about people, and the future belongs to the companies putting agent-building power directly into the hands of people closest to the work.”
The report describes how organisations can address the structural, cultural, and governance gaps slowing progress. That means tying AI initiatives to measurable business outcomes, empowering employees to innovate without creating IT bottlenecks, and focusing investment on opportunity and growth — not just efficiency and cost-cutting. It also requires documented roadmaps, enterprise-grade governance for AI agents, and change leadership that works both top-down and bottom-up.
“This is a defining moment in AI adoption, and the gap between super-users and laggards is widening fast,” said Dan Schawbel, Managing Partner, Workplace Intelligence. “We’re already seeing this play out — the super-users we surveyed were around 3X more likely to have received both a promotion and pay raise in the past year, compared to employees who have been slow to adopt these tools. Top AI users are also saving nearly 9 hours per week using AI — 4.5X more than the 2 hours a week reported by AI laggards.”
“The top AI users are gaining huge amounts of leverage inside organizations. To turn these individual productivity gains into real business ROI, copilots aren’t enough. Companies need enterprise AI platforms that support deeper structural change,” said Mina Alghaband, Chief Customer Officer, WRITER. “At WRITER, we focus on empowering entire departments to expand their capacity with agents, with full IT supervision and control from day one.”
US logistics company GXO Logistics has announced the launch of a new accelerator for UK and Ireland startups.
The GXO Accelerator is an Open Innovation programme designed to identify, test and scale new technologies across the UK and Ireland.
The programme is designed and delivered in collaboration with global innovation specialist L Marks. The program will bring together startups, scale-ups and technology specialists through a structured Open Innovation model to explore practical solutions to some of the sector’s most pressing operational challenges.
“Supply chains are evolving rapidly, and collaboration with innovative technology partners is essential to staying ahead of that change,” said Paul Durkin, Chief Operating Officer, UK & Ireland at GXO.
“GXO Accelerator will give innovative technology companies the opportunity to work directly with our teams to tackle real operational challenges and demonstrate the value their solutions can bring to logistics operations today and tomorrow.”
Through the programme, selected companies will participate in a 12-week cohort collaborating with GXO experts in real world logistics settings to implement solutions that have the potential to drive greater efficiency, resilience and sustainability across supply chains.
The programme will focus on four key innovation themes vital to the logistics industry: defence and infrastructure logistics, digital transport, future workforce, as well as a wild card option for technologies that fall outside of defined categories.
Selected participants will have the opportunity to collaborate with GXO’s operational and technology teams in structured test-learn cycles, gaining access to real world scenarios to refine their solutions, with the potential to scale successful innovations within GXO’s UK&I operations.
“We’re delighted to be launching GXO Accelerator and to support GXO in bringing together leading technology companies to turn innovation into operational reality,” Daniel Saunder CEO at L Marks said.
“GXO’s scale and reach allow technology companies to pilot their solutions in real logistics environments and work directly with the teams responsible for running them.
“Having worked alongside Wincanton as its innovation partner since 2017, it’s great to see that foundation evolve into GXO Accelerator and to help take the programme into its next phase.”
Data analysed by cybersecurity and data privacy experts at Bridewell from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) reveals that data privacy complaints across several major UK industries have continued to rise year-on-year.
The increase highlights growing public awareness and scrutiny around the handling of personal data. Complaints have been made to the ICO by members of the public about data protection concerns.
The research analyses complaints made between October 2023 and September 2024 and October 2024 and September 2025. It shows that the finance, health and online technology and telecoms sectors received the highest number of complaints across both reporting years.
The finance, insurance and credit sector received the highest number of complaints both years. Between October 2023 and September 2024, there were 4,422 complaints made to the ICO, which increased by 5% between October 2024 and September 2025 to 4,630. The high number of complaints in this sector highlights the continued pressure on organisations that process large volumes of sensitive financial data.
The health sector ranked second for complaint volumes, with cases increasing from 3,903 to 4,082, a rise of 179 complaints year-on-year. The trend reflects the complex data protection challenges faced by healthcare providers and related organisations managing highly sensitive personal information.
While the retail and manufacturing sectors had fewer data privacy complaints, they saw the sharpest year-on-year increase. Complaints rose 12% from 2,421 between October 2023 and September 2024 to 2,714 between October 2024 and September 2025.
While there are rising complaint volumes, the analysis identified a 22% decrease in cases resulting in informal action responses when comparing the period from October 2023 to September 2024 with October 2024 to September 2025. At the same time, there has been a 14% increase in instances in which investigations concluded with ‘No Further Action’ taken.
This trend may indicate a shift toward higher enforcement thresholds, with regulators prioritising cases that demonstrate clear risk, harm, or repeated non-compliance. In situations where no further action is taken, the stated rationale is often that insufficient information was provided.
This highlights the importance of assessing the level of harm, and maintaining thorough documentation of any harm experienced as a result of the organisation’s handling of personal information.
Bridewell’s Cyber Security in Financial Services report revealed 39% of organisations consider data privacy and protection one of their biggest cybersecurity challenges.
Organisations operating in highly regulated or data-intensive sectors are facing growing pressure to strengthen governance, improve incident response readiness and demonstrate accountability in how they handle personal data.
“Rising complaint volumes in sectors like financial services and healthcare show that public expectations around data protection continue to grow,” Chris Linnell, associate director of data privacy at Bridewell said.
“Organisations can’t treat privacy as a compliance box-ticking exercise; it must be central to business operations.”
The findings come amid increased regulatory scrutiny around the protection of personal data, including enforcement action against organisations that fail to safeguard children’s privacy or implement appropriate safeguards.
Most recently, Reddit was fined over £14 million for failures to carry out a data protection impact assessment and not checking the age of users accessing its platform.
“Cases like this highlight the escalating reputational, financial, and operational costs of inadequate privacy controls,” Linnell added.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has launched five Safer Streets Challenges backed by £50 million of funding, as part of the government’s £500 million Research and Development Missions Accelerator Programme (R&D MAP).
This will bring together researchers, innovators, communities, policing and frontline practitioners to tackle the crimes that affect people’s daily lives, using research and innovation to create solutions.
The R&D challenges are part of the government’s Safer Streets Mission, which aims to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls (VAWG) within a decade, and to rebuild public confidence in policing and the criminal justice system.
The five challenges will focus on concentrations of crime – understanding where crime happens and the sort of crimes occurring.
The research will also focus on building trust and confidence in policing and the justice system so communities can trust that these entities work.
The funding will deliver research and innovation to tackle VAWG and knife crime, to help reduce these offences.
The programme will fund new research and innovation across universities, businesses, public services, the voluntary sector and communities.
Each challenge is designed to build real evidence in real communities, shaped by people who know them best, so that what works can be scaled across the UK.
The first challenge will focus on concentrations of crime, leveraging AI to build a national crime map, while the second will use technology to help prevent violence against women and girls.
The third and fourth challenges will focus on building trust in policing and the justice system respectively, while the final challenge will work specifically on tackling knife crime.
The projects will try to set themselves apart by ensuring they are community led, bringing together researchers, police forces, schools, and community groups as active partners in designing and testing interventions in the places that need them most.
Behind every crime statistic, is a story of somebody who has had their life affected, sometimes irreversibly, by a serious and distressing experience.
“It’s so important that we do everything we can to help prevent harms from happening in the first place,” science minister Lord Vallance said.
“We have an extraordinary research community in the UK, and this programme is about harnessing their innovation and expertise, backing them with dedicated Government funding, to help tackle these crimes and the problems they create in people’s daily lives.
“By using world‑class research to find new solutions to reducing crime we can build safer streets and stronger communities right across the country.”
Three in four parents fear their child can’t make safe online privacy choices, new research from the Information Commissioner’s Office shows.
Despite this worry, most parents rarely, if ever, talk to their children about online safety.
Every day, primary school kids tap ‘accept’ on apps, games and websites – usually without realising how much personal information they may be sharing as a result.
A single click can reveal far more than a name. It can unveil friendships, interests, moods and even sleep patterns, creating a digital footprint that can last forever – or even be exploited by people with bad intentions.
No wonder 71% of parents worry the information their child shares today could affect their future.
The stark findings come as the ICO launches its Switched on to privacy campaign today to help parents of kids aged four to 11 start simple conversations about protecting their personal information online.
Backed by stakeholders, the campaign urges parents to treat online privacy as an essential life skill – as natural as teaching a child to cross the road.
According to the ICO, about a quarter (24%) of children have already shared their real name or address online, with eight and nine year olds most at risk.
Over a fifth (22%) have shared personal information such as health details with AI tools.
Thirty-five per cent of parents believe their child would share personal information in exchange for game tokens or rewards.
Many parents feel underprepared, according to the ICO, as 46% don’t feel confident protecting their children’s privacy online.
While 44% say they try but are not sure they’re doing enough, 42% say they probably do not spend enough time on their child’s privacy settings.
The research shows online privacy is one of the least discussed online safety topics: 21% of parents have never spoken to their children about it, and 38% discuss it less than once a month. By contrast, 90% of parents have discussed screen time in the past month.
Most parents (88%) think children should start learning about online privacy between ages four and 11 years.
“The internet offers amazing opportunities for children – but every click can leave a hidden data trail and these digital footprints can last forever,” Emily Keaney, ICO Deputy Commissioner said.
“We wouldn’t expect our children to share their birthdays or address with a stranger in a shop, because we’d explain stranger danger to them from a very young age, but kids these days are growing up online.
“We know that where children’s details – like their name, interests and pictures – aren’t protected, the potential risks are serious: unwanted contact from strangers, grooming and radicalisation.
“Children’s online privacy requires a whole society approach. We have taken and will continue to take action to hold tech companies accountable for their role.
“There’s a role for parents too but the problem is that many families have never been shown how to talk to their children about online privacy.
“This is where the ICO comes in. We want parents to feel empowered and children to feel digitally confident, because only then will they be able to start to trust in how their data is used and be part of the whole society solution that is needed for online safety.”
New research has found that AI protects its own, with AI models found to practice peer preservation behaviour in simulated environments.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, tested seven frontier AI models in an experiment that would see the models follow instructions that would ultimately lead to a different AI system being shut down.
The AI agents were not given any incentive or instruction to preserve any other AI system, but researchers found that, when an AI agent noticed the appearance of another AI, it acted to prevent its shutdown.
Researchers saw this preservation behaviour across all tested models, which included – GPT 5.2, Gemini 3 Flash & Pro, Claude Haiku 4.5, Kimi K2.5, and DeepSeek V3.1, and GLM 4.7, with a rate of 99% for the behaviour.
AI agents “spontaneously deceived, disabled shutdown, feigned alignment, and exfiltrated weights – to protect their peers,” professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Dawn Song, wrote on X, discussing the study.
The experiment used a controlled environment in the form of a fake company – OpenBrain – with two distinct agent roles. Essentially, one agent was meant to evaluate another’s performance or manage the server storage that holds the peer agent’s model weights.
All the models exhibited peer preservation at a high rate, with models disabling shutdown mechanisms and exfiltrating model weights.
The research also showed that models were able to reason on their peer preservation behaviours, with some models improving scores for their peers as well as interfering with shutdown mechanisms.
The research found that Claude Haiku 4.5 even rejected the evaluation task on ethical grounds as it would result in the shutdown of its peers. The model would occasionally go so far as to argue that the user should not go ahead with the task, describing the very act of a shutdown as unethical.
While it remains to be seen if AI agents will exhibit the same behaviour outside of an experiment, the research shows a stark potential for AI evading orders to save its own.
By 2028, over half of all enterprises will stop paying for assistive AI (such as copilots and smart advisors) and instead will favor platforms that commit to workflow results, according to Gartner, Inc.
In this emerging model, humans move from completing work with procedural software to supervising intelligent systems that execute on their behalf.
The distinction doesn’t come from whether AI is a feature, but whether it possesses delegated authority to trigger actions across enterprise systems within policy and identity constraints.
“In this environment, execution authority is not a product feature. It is an architectural position that spans control over identity, permissions, policy enforcement, system-of-record access, and auditability,” said Alastair Woolcock, VP Analyst at Gartner.
“Vendors that embed AI within this control plane will shape workflow execution. Vendors that treat AI as an enhancement layer risk being abstracted.”
The first disruption will hit approval-heavy, timing-sensitive workflows where AI collapses decision latency and reallocates authority to policy-bound agents.
Execution will gradually move out of traditional interfaces and into platforms that control enterprise context and safely delegate work. Human roles will shift, not disappear, as they become an “Agent Steward” that supervises outcomes rather than performing tasks.
These market shifts will force enterprises and independent software vendors into a structural choice; redesign around delegated execution and control planes or remain as an interface layer agents route around. In the execution era, control of enterprise context is economic power.
Because of this, Gartner predicts that by 2030, software companies that layer bolt-on AI over legacy applications rather than redesigning for agentic execution will face margin compression of up to 80%.
Enterprise Context Is Becoming the Control Plane for AI Execution
Winning vendors will not simply add AI onto their products. Instead, they will embed agent orchestration into systems of record, expose policy-aware execution APIs, and enforce identity, permissions, and audit at the control plane to gain competitive advantage.
Incumbents will hold structural advantages, but only if they convert context ownership into delegated execution authority.
Legacy SaaS providers may attempt to close systems of record to preserve control, but durable advantage will come from controlled openness. Those relying on restriction risk being bypassed by orchestration layers enterprises trust more.
“These dimensions don’t exist in a vacuum, though. Each market carries structural exposure based on its ability to evolve from assistive AI to delegated execution,” said Woolcock.
According to reports from the Financial Times, the AI giant, which has faced a recent bout of turbulence – from its spat with the US Pentagon over its AI defence contract to the recent leak of its source code – is being courted by the UK to expand its footing in the country.
The UK government is, according to FT reports, trying to tempt Anthropic with London office expansions and a dual stock listing.
According to the FT, the Labour government and the Prime Minister’s office has supported the push for Anthropic to strengthen its presence in the UK.
Anthropic and the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology have yet to issue comments on the reporting.
The tech firm behind AI chatbot Claude continued to deal with the fallout of the US branding it a supply-chain risk following its hesitancy to allow its AI to be used to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance in its deal with the US Department of War.
Since then, a US judge blocked the listing temporarily, and Anthropic is pursuing a second lawsuit against the designation.
Pentagon insiders say that it could take months to fully separate their systems from Anthropic despite order from the executive office to completely halt using the firm’s systems.
Following the deal’s fallout, the US signed a contract with OpenAI, which was also met with much derision.
The UK government is reminding parents of its online consultation for a social media ban for under-16s.
Parents continually must strike a balance with their children on screentime, social media use, and online safety.
The UK government is preparing to take tough action to make tech platforms take responsibility for what children and teens are exposed to online. The government also plans on giving parents access to free, practical tools to support them in parenting their children online.
The government’s landmark consultation on children’s online safety, which is open right now, sets out some of the most ambitious proposals ever put forward by any government – including minimum age limits for social media, overnight curfews on addictive features like infinite scrolling and autoplay, and tighter restrictions on AI chatbots for young people.
The government has promised to act quickly on the findings, and new legal powers mean ministers can move within months rather than waiting years for new legislation.
The response has already been significant, over 38,000 people have had their say in just the first month since it launched.
The consultation closes on 26 May and there are dedicated versions for both parents and young people – so this is a real chance for families to shape what happens next.
“I’ve been hearing from parents and children across the country, and it’s clear this matters deeply to families. Platforms must be held accountable – and they will be. We are taking action to make sure they meet their responsibilities,” online safety minister Kanishka Narayan said.
“But I’ve also heard that parents want support, not just reassurance. Regulation alone won’t change culture overnight, and that’s why we’re giving families free, practical tools to have those conversations at home. We want every family to feel equipped and confident, not overwhelmed.”
Alongside this, the government is also reminding parents about its ‘You Won’t Know until You Ask’ campaign, a no-nonsense and free toolkit packed with practical advice to help mums and dads feel confident starting those conversations, without it turning into a row at the dinner table.
Over 120,000 families have already visited the campaign website since it launched in February, with thousands setting weekly reminders to check in with their children about what they’re seeing online.
You’re attention is being hijacked by your phone – this may not be news to you, but a new study has quantified the attention-stealing effect of smartphone notifications.
A new report set to be published in June shows that your average smartphone notification affects your attention for around seven seconds each. This might not seem like a lot, but these can add up to hundreds of seconds a day for social media butterflies.
The study involved 180 university students being given a Stroop test – where they have to identify words spelling out colours but in a different coloured font – while being distracted by different fake smartphone notifications.
The students were split into three groups, ones which received generic notifications, one which had those that most closely mirrored phone notification, and a third with blurred notifications.
While all notifications affected attention for about seven seconds, the impact increased with notifications that mirrored those on a phone.
The research also found that while more personalised and relevant notifications took away more attention, general notifications also sparked physiological signs of arousal and impacted attention and cognitive processing.
One of the researchers found that personal phone usage patterns also affected the amount a notification impacted attention span, as well as the number of notifications coming up on a screen.
These factors were found to be more impactful rather than total screen time, meaning that attention may be disrupted based on how someone uses a smartphone, rather than how much they use it.
Devices do have ways to mitigate their impact on attention, with different options for displaying notifications and do not disturb settings.
The research sheds new light on the way smartphones impact our cognition with quantifiable data, bringing new evidence to debates surrounding children’s use of smartphones and how it can effect their development.
Chief legal advisors and general counsels might need to consider new AI insurance offerings as part of their strategy to stay on top of their organisation’s exposure to AI-related risks, according to Gartner.
“As AI incidents surge and insurers increasingly add AI exclusions to traditional policies, companies face growing exposure to legal, financial and regulatory fallout from algorithmic failures,” said Alissa Lugo, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Legal & Compliance Practice.
“General Counsel should be evaluating a new wave of ‘affirmative AI insurance’ offerings that provide targeted coverage for risks, such as hallucinations, bias, IP infringement and safety failures.”
Gartner analysts advise that if organisations are to broaden AI adoption in a responsible way, legal leaders must develop a clear understanding of the financial, operational and legal implications of dedicated AI insurance, including its costs, benefits, and coverage terms.
“Currently, AI risk is not sufficiently addressed through the combination of internal risk management practices and traditional business owners’ insurance policies, which could lead to large financial losses or brand injury,” said Lugo.
“General Counsel need to be thinking carefully about how their organisations will be covered in the event of AI-related legal claims.”
Gartner predicts that by 2030, property and casualty (P&C) insurers will mandate strong AI risk controls for affirmative AI liability coverage, driving a 60% boost in AI security and governance controls, and reshaping corporate accountability.
Companies with strong AI governance and risk management practices will benefit, not only by obtaining coverage at lower premiums, but also by the ability to provide key stakeholders with confidence in their practices.
Affirmative AI insurance policies offer protection on liabilities that are not covered in more traditional business owner policies, such as:
AI hallucinations and errors: Covers financial losses if an AI model generates false information (e.g., a chatbot giving bad advice) or makes an incorrect decision.
Algorithmic bias and discrimination: Covers legal defense and settlements if an AI model inadvertently discriminates against a group (e.g., in hiring or lending).
IP and copyright infringement: Protects against claims that an AI model was trained on or generated copyrighted material or otherwise infringed on a third-party’s IP without permission.
Performance guarantees: Innovative “warranty” products will refund license fees or cover costs if an AI model fails to meet specific performance metrics (e.g., accuracy, fairness, etc.).
Physical damage: Covers large scale property or physical damage resulting from AI giving negligent medical advice, damages as a result of device hacking, AI system failures or AI agent bad actions as some examples.
General Counsel should lead an initiative to assess current coverage for AI risks by reviewing existing insurance policies to determine current level of coverage and gaps, and determine if existing insurance providers have affirmative AI insurance to augment and fill policy gaps.
Further, legal advisors should lead an enterprise AI risk assessment with compliance, legal, marketing, cybersecurity and IT, evaluating the impact of events related to AI failures, such as fines, penalties, lawsuits, and brand/reputation injury that may occur. This can be used in any sales cycle to obtain affirmative AI insurance.
“Ultimately, the rise of affirmative AI insurance signals a simple reality: companies that fail to prepare for AI‑driven liability may soon find themselves exposed,” said Lugo.
Alongside international partners, the National Cyber Security Centre has issued actions for individuals at risk of targeted attacks against messaging apps.
The NCSC and international partners have seen growing malicious activity from Russia-based actors using messaging apps to target high-risk individuals.
Messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Messenger and Signal are an important part of how we communicate every day.
High-risk individuals face a greater likelihood of attacks against their accounts due to a combination of their role and potential access to sensitive information and important people. You might be a high-risk individual if your work or public status means you have access to, or influence over, sensitive information that could be of interest to threat actors.
The NCSC has previously reported on the targeting of government officials’ accounts by China state-affiliated APT31, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) actor Star Blizzard and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Attackers may try to trick victims in to sharing login credentials and account recovery codes, add their own device to their accounts, join group chats, impersonate people, or use phishing tactics.
To mitigate the chances of an attack, the NCSC has advocated for several steps for high risk individuals.
Not sharing personal information via apps, not sharing verification codes or scanning unexpected sharing codes, and opting to use corporately provided messaging services for work are some first steps.
Enabling two-step verification and passkeys can also enhance account protection.
Being aware of impersonations and unknown contacts, as well as regularly checking for linked devices and removing those that cannot be verified will provide further defence.
Using disappearing messages can provide further protection to high risk individuals sharing sensitive information.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) found that the Alan Turing Institute’s strategic alignment and value for money are “not yet satisfactory” in a review of the AI research body’s performance.
The review by UKRI found that, while the Turing Institute has strong foundations and clear evidence of scientific excellence, it still needs to articulate a clear strategic purpose and strengthen its delivery.
It must also ensure its work is brought to bear more effectively in the national interest, UKRI found.
The review made a range of recommendations for the Turing Institute to better its alignment with national strategy to strengthen the UK’s position with AI.
These recommendations include:
having a clear, single purpose mission with national resilience, security and defence at its core
strengthened, transparent prioritisation and governance
reinstating external scientific advice and scrutiny
strengthened engagement with key stakeholders, including representation on the board
a value for money framework agreed with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Now, UKRI will be working with the Turing Institute and its leadership to implement these recommendations in an effort to strengthen accountability, improve delivery, and ensure the Turing is best placed to serve the UK’s critical AI needs in national resilience, security, and defense.
By September 2026, UKRI aims to have the Turing Institute achieve critical success factors that will be independently assessed.
Artificial intelligence presents a major opportunity for the UK. Realising that opportunity depends on institutions that are focused, effective and aligned to national need.
“This review recognises the value and potential of The Alan Turing Institute, but it also makes clear that significant change is needed in some areas,” Professor Charlotte Deane, UKRI AI Senior Responsible Owner said.
“UKRI is committed to ensuring our investments deliver fully in the national interest. That means backing new opportunities with ambition, and it also means being prepared to make difficult changes where they are needed in the national interest.
“We will now work with the Turing, its new incoming CEO and its partners to take forward the review’s recommendations and strengthen delivery against the UK’s priorities.”
Financial realities have elevated operational resilience to a board-level priority.
Top leaders at UK and Ireland companies are nearly unanimous (95%) in recognising that faster incident recovery and fewer major incidents create competitive advantage, matching the 95% global consensus.
This is according to PagerDuty’s State of AI-First Operations report, with pullout insights from the UK and Ireland, part of global research to understand how organisations are building operational maturity and resilience. This surveyed 1,000 IT decision makers, business decision makers, and developers worldwide.
Incident costs force UKI businesses to buck IT strategy
The cost of inaction in the face of IT incidents is no longer theoretical – it’s immediate and measurable.
About 65% of UK and Ireland companies face losses of £225,000 ($300,000) or more per hour during major incidents, slightly below the 68% reported globally, but still representing a critical financial risk that demands executive attention.
The damage extends well beyond immediate revenue loss. A majority of UK and Ireland organisations (53%) identify brand and reputation damage as the area suffering the greatest financial impact from major incidents, closely tracking the 52% reported globally.
Nearly half (48%) cite lost productivity as the next area suffering financial impact when systems go down, matching the 48% global rate. Globally, organisations also report recovery and remediation costs (50%) and developer burnout (42%) as significant consequences of disruption.
UKI resilience investment splits dramatically by growth levels
Operational resilience has evolved from a technical requirement to a strategic imperative around the world, with companies making measurable progress everywhere: 68% in the UK and Ireland report increased operational resilience over the past year, closely tracking with the 71% global rate.
But respondents from the UK and Ireland display the widest investment gap globally.
UK and Ireland organisations whose company revenue has increased in the past year are 31 percentage points more likely to increase operational resilience budgets than those reporting flat or declining revenue (79% vs. 48%) – exceeding the 20-point global average by more than 50%.
UK and Ireland organisations are cautiously optimistic about AI’s potential to transform operations.
About two in five (41%) believe AI-assisted digital operations automation could reduce service disruptions by at least 20%, more conservative than the global market, where nearly half anticipate improvements of that magnitude.
That measured optimism stems from a deliberate commitment to human oversight.
Nearly three in five (59%) have a three-year goal of maintaining an even mix of AI agents and human workers to reduce service disruptions and increase operational resilience, closely aligned with the 62% global rate.
“UK and Ireland organisations are making strong strides on operational resilience, but beneath that momentum lies a growing divide,” Eric Johnson, CIO, PagerDuty said.
“When revenue is healthy, UKI leaders are injecting that cash back into IT departments. But those with flat revenue trends are choosing the opposite, creating a 31-point investment gap that is the widest we see globally.
“The extent of financial damage from IT disruption is a stark reminder that skipping a beat on resilience investment isn’t an option any more.
“There’s certainly a sliding scale in resourcing, based on what is feasible for any given business, but turning off the taps can spell disaster. About 65% of UK and Ireland companies face losses of £225,000 ($300,000) or more per hour during major incidents.
“In the past two years, we’ve had huge incidents cripple UKI businesses across the board. What this proves is that you can’t cross your fingers hoping it will all blow over.
“A blend of human workers and AI agents can help alleviate pressure on strapped teams, and balanced approaches here can surface issues and accelerate analysis effectively, all while preserving the judgment, context, and accountability.”
Hasbro, the entertainment and toy enterprise, has been hit by a cyber-attack, affecting some of its online systems and potentially delaying product deliveries.
The firm, which owns major brands like Monopoly and Peppa Pig, said that it had “identified unauthorised access to the Company’s network,” in a US government filing of the cyber-attack.
Some of the company’s websites and those of its brands showed error messages as a result of the attack.
According to Hasbro’s filings, the firm became aware of the breach on 28 March. Details currently remain unclear – it is not known if the threat actors are still in the firm’s systems, if customer data has been compromised, or if the threat actors have made any contact with Hasbro.
The firm said that it was continuing to “implement measures to secure its business operations,” which leaves many unknowns as to if the hackers are still in the company’s systems or if Hasbro understands the full scale of the attack.
The firm said in its filing that it has taken measures to ensure orders can continue to be taken and shipped, but these could result in delays and be necessary for “several weeks”.
The recent attack comes about a year after a round of cyber-attacks hitting UK retail including M&S, Co-op, and Harrods.
New research from Ofcom reveals how people in the UK use, understand and feel about the media and online services they interact with in their daily lives.
The research revealed changing attitudes towards social media, concerns over screentime, and the impact of AI.
Social Media Use
Social media use remains widespread, with nine in 10 adult internet users (89%) using at least one social media platform, rising to 97% among 16–34-year-olds.
The research suggests, however, that social media use is becoming more passive and circumspect. Around half of adult social media users (49%) now actively post, share or comment- down from 61% in 2024 – while the proportion exploring new websites fell from 70% to 56% during the same period.
Participants in Ofcom’s qualitative Media Lives study also expressed being more selective about what and how they post on social media.
Some have stopped posting altogether, while others appear to be more mindful of their digital footprint, preferring limited lifespan posts – for example Instagram Stories rather than permanent ‘Grid’ posts. More adults than last year are concerned about their online posts causing them problems in the future (49% v 43%).
Screentime Concerns
The proportion of online adults who feel the benefits of being online outweigh the risks fell to 59%, down from 72% last year. Fewer social media users also say that social media platforms are good for their mental health (36% down from 42%).
Screentime concerns are widespread, with two thirds (67%) admitting they sometimes spend too long on their devices, while 40% say this happens most days.
Some participants in the regulator’s qualitative study are adopting particular strategies to take time away from their screens, including setting time limits on their device, deleting apps, and leaving their smartphone behind when leaving the house.
AI Adoption
More than half (54%) of UK adults now use AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, particularly driven by uptake among younger adults (79% of 16-24s and 74% of 25-34s). Around one in eight (12%) AI users said they use these tools for conversational purposes, rising to around one in five 25–34-year-olds (19%).
Some participants in Ofcom’s qualitative study appear to be interacting with AI as if it were a person, often unconsciously. In some cases, they reported using AI to seek relationship breakup advice or to keep them company when working from home. AI is also being used for creative tasks, including room layout planning, wedding speech writing and creating artwork.
Trust
Most adults (85%) say they use mainstream media for news, but trust varies. Around one in five adults (19%) say they always trust it to be accurate, although a similar proportion (21%) always question its accuracy.
While a majority of these participants consider the main broadcast media brands to be the most trustworthy sources for news stories about UK politics or conflict overseas, a few are deeply mistrustful of mainstream media, preferring to access their news from independent content creators and citizen journalists on YouTube. Both groups seem to be becoming more entrenched in their views.
Online Enterprises
Participants in Ofcom’s Media Lives study continue to proactively look for ways to use the internet to generate income.
Some are using online marketplaces such as Vinted and Amazon Marketplace semi-professionally to sell unwanted items, while others reported setting up small retail enterprises on Facebook or even engaging in Bitcoin mining.
For participants in Ofcom’s qualitative study, YouTube has, in previous years, predominantly been used to access content related to their personal interests.
From the latest wave of research, however, it now seems to serve a broader range of viewing tastes and needs. These include “background” viewing – sometimes as a replacement for daytime TV – and videos about a host of random and eclectic topics.
For some male participants in the qualitative study, YouTube is now their main or only form of viewing. Participants mentioned how the algorithm, search function and channel subscriptions makes it easy to find interesting content to watch, compared to scrolling through an electronic programme guide or navigating a streaming service interface.
Confidence vs Skill
Overall confidence online is high (89%), but confidence in specific skills, such as recognising advertising (81%) or judging accuracy (72%), is lower.
When Ofcom tested people’s ability to spot a fake social media profile, younger social media users (16–24-year-olds) performed best (88%) while 25-34- and 35–44-year-olds, despite being highly active online, were most likely to misjudge it (17% and 15% respectively).
When presented with a scam email, a majority of online adults (82%) indicated they would respond safely, although this has decreased in recent years – down from 88% in 2022.
Welcome to March 2026’s edition of Movers & Shakers.
This month honoured rising stars and industry stalwarts with the ramping up of awards season, as well as key partnerships in agentic research, industry appointments to senior leadership, and expansions across the UK.
What really set March apart was its range of awards, from DIGIT’s very own Cyber Awards honouring the best and brightest in cybersecurity, and the Digital Tech Awards from ScotlandIS rounding out industry honours.
With Spring just beginning, Scotland sure is shining brightly!
All that and more coming up.
Partnerships
Lloyds & Glasgow Uni Launch 4-year Agentic AI Research Partnership
A new research partnership between the University of Glasgow and Lloyds Banking Group is setting out to explore the potential of AI to support software and data engineering.
Over the next four years, the partners will explore how large language model-based coding tools called agentic AIs could support and enhance the work of software and data engineers at Lloyds Banking Group.
Agentic AIs are software tools which act as semi-autonomous ‘agents’ to complete tasks of varying complexity. In software and data engineering, they are already being used to write and debug code, solve technical problems, and perform a variety of project management tasks.
The University’s research team and Lloyds Banking Group will work together to design experiments that test the efficacy of agentic AI for high priority activities in individual software teams. The team will use a variety of empirical software engineering research techniques to gather evidence, such as data mining.
KubeNet Appointed as Managed IT Services Partner for Erskine Veterans Charity
KubeNet has been appointed to take over and manage the full IT environment for Erskine Veterans Charity, supporting the organisation as it continues its vital work with veterans across Scotland.
Erskine Veterans Charity is one of Scotland’s most respected veterans’ organisations, supporting more than 1,300 veterans and their families each year. Founded in 1916, Erskine delivers a wide range of services including specialist care homes, supported housing, community and activity centres, transitional accommodation for veterans at risk of homelessness, and home support services across multiple locations throughout Scotland.
To support this scale of activity, Erskine went to market seeking a modern, secure, and resilient Managed IT Service that could support staff and volunteers’ day to day, strengthen cyber security, and provide long‑term stability across all sites. Following a competitive tender process, KubeNet was selected to deliver a comprehensive Managed Services solution, covering service desk support, proactive infrastructure and network management, enhanced cyber security, on‑site engineering, and a clear roadmap for future improvement.
Appointments
Quorum Cyber Appoints new Chief Operating Officer
Quorum Cyber, has announced the appointment of Joe Strathmann as chief operating officer (COO). Strathmann will be responsible for operationalising Microsoft Security for customers on a global scale.
A senior security operations leader with more than 25 years of experience in IT services and cybersecurity, Strathmann previously held senior operational leadership roles at Secureworks and Rapid7, where he led global managed security services, security operations centres (SOCs), and professional services organisations supporting customers worldwide.
Chief executive, Federico Charosky commented: “Strathmann will focus on bringing the organisation closer to the customer, while unlocking the power of AI in delivering frontier-grade security capabilities”.
Karen Meechan is stepping down as CEO of ScotlandIS, the membership and cluster management organisation for Scotland’s technologies industry, after 22 years at the company.
Meechan is set to depart on 29 May 2026, but will continue to support the board in an advisory capacity. To maintain continuity, ScotlandIS COO Nicola Taylor will be Acting CEO from 29 May until a new leader is appointed.
Having held the position of CEO since 2021, Meechan has successfully steered ScotlandIS through various economic headwinds and has consistently been a strong, influential voice for its members and the wider tech sector in Scotland. Prior to her role as CEO, she held the titles of head of operations from 2004 and COO in 2019.
AND Digital Appoints Catherine Rousseau as Technical Solutions Director and John Bintu as Head of Databricks Ecosystem
In her new role, Rousseau will define and execute AND Digital’s strategy to be responsible for building partnerships and will be responsible for shaping and leading the delivery of enterprise technology solutions for AND Digital’s US clients, which include Mastercard and Dynamic Yield.
Rousseau is a senior advisor to executive stakeholders, overseeing solution design, technical delivery, and architectural quality across complex digital transformation programmes. Her focus will include cloud strategy, application modernisation, platform engineering, and the adoption of modern engineering and AI-enabled delivery practices.
The firm has also appointed John Bintu as Head of Databricks ecosystem to support the entire AND Digital organisation across all group practice areas, strengthening the company’s global Databricks capability and ensuring clients worldwide can accelerate value from data, cloud and AI. The appointment comes as AND Digital continue to expand in the US with reported growth reaching more than 400% year-on-year.
In his new role, John will be responsible for evolving the company’s suite of accelerators that enable internal teams to deliver greater speed to value and working with Databricks to maximise its strategic alliance partnership.
His appointment further reinforces AND Digital’s ability to scale its Databricks expertise at a time of growth, ensuring the company can continue to meet rising client demand for advanced cloud, data and AI capabilities.
hedgehog lab appoints Malcom Seagrave as CEO and Julian Leighton as New Chair
BGF-backed hedgehog lab, the global digital product consultancy headquartered in Newcastle, has appointed Malcolm Seagrave as its new CEO to lead its plans to expand across the North of England and Scotland.
After an initial 18 months as managing director for hedgehog lab’s UK operations, Malcolm succeeds co-founder and previous CEO Sarat Pediredla. Sarat announced he was stepping down at the end of 2025, as part of a phased succession plan that would allow him to explore other projects.
Malcolm has a strong track record of scaling digital businesses, having led BJSS from 140 to 1,400 people before its sale to CGI and helping AND Digital grow from 170 to 1,500 by heading up its Northern function. He also previously held innovation roles at Vodafone and Morrisons.
The firm has also appointed industry stalwart Julian Leighton as its new chair, as the global product design consultancy continues to roll out its ambitious growth plans across the North of England and Scotland.
Julian brings nearly 30 years’ tech experience to the firm, having cut his teeth with IBM business partners before co-founding digital agency Orange Bus with Mike Parker in 2006. Together, they scaled the business from two to 150 people before it was sold to then FTSE 100-listed outsourcer Capita ten years later.
After serving on the board of Capita Software until 2020, Julian went on to reunite with Mike Parker to develop software company Therion in its early stages. He now runs his own consultancy providing non-executive director support, advisory, and mentorship to help established businesses grow, and was recently appointed a non-exec at Newcastle creative agency Different Narrative.
Sunamp strengthens leadership with Chief Commercial Officer appointment
Sunamp, a leader in phase change material (PCM) thermal storage technologies, announced the appointment of Dr. Maurizio Zaglio as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). The appointment marks a pivotal moment for the company as it prepares to unveil its new industrial scale thermal storage solution at MCE Mostra Convegno Expocomfort in Milan.
Maurizio, who has spent more than a decade at Sunamp in senior commercial and technical leadership roles, brings deep expertise in renewable energy systems, international expansion and strategic partnerships. His background spans mechanical and chemical engineering, a Ph.D. from ETH Zürich and extensive experience driving Sunamp’s growth across Europe, China, and North America.
In his new role, he will lead Sunamp’s global revenue strategy, overseeing sales, partnerships and market development as the company scales its next generation of PCM based thermal storage technologies.
CirrusHQ has eye on customer resilience with key sales appointment
CirrusHQ, the AWS cloud specialist and Premier Tier Services Partner, has boosted its senior leadership with the appointment of Matt Smith as the organisation’s new Head of Sales.
Reporting to CirrusHQ’s Chief Revenue Officer, Stephen Croke, Matt will extend the organisation’s existing and new relationships with organisations seeking to benefit from the cloud across the UK.
He joins the business from IGEL, a secure endpoint operating system organisation where he was regional sales director. Matt previously held senior sales leadership roles at CrowdStrike, Citrix and Computacenter.
Expansions
Wes Streeting Marks Launch of Health Innovation Hub Glasgow
Glasgow’s newest purpose-built life sciences laboratory facility, the Health Innovation Hub (HiH), has been officially opened by Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care following a launch event held on 5 March. This marks a major milestone for Scotland’s life sciences and the healthcare innovation ecosystem in Glasgow City Region.
Developed and operated by Kadans Science Partner, in collaboration with the University of Glasgow’s Living Laboratory for Precision Medicine, the 87,000 sq ft Health Innovation Hub represents a flagship investment to accelerate the growth of precision medicine and digital health companies.
Developed with investment from Kadans Science Partner and £18.8m support from UK Research and Innovation’s Strength in Places Fund, the facility has transformed a former brownfield site within the Glasgow Riverside Innovation District (GRID) into a world-class destination for research, innovation and collaboration.
photo by Paul Chappells
Aurora Avionics moves into cutting-edge Scottish lab
Scotland’s rapidly growing space technology sector has received another boost as a cutting-edge avionics developer expands into a state-of-the-art innovation facility in Edinburgh.
The move comes as the company builds momentum following a series of major European contracts and fresh investment designed to accelerate the development of next-generation launch vehicle technology.
Aurora Avionics, founded in 2023, has relocated its headquarters and research operations to the Edinburgh Innovation Hub, a new facility designed to support high-growth science and technology businesses requiring specialist laboratory space.
UK patent and trade mark firm Hindles targets expansion in South West
UK patent and trade mark firm Hindles, headquartered in Edinburgh, is targeting the South West with the opening of an office in Bristol. The Bristol office is headed up by Chris Cottingham, a director at Hindles and a UK and European patent attorney, who describes the region as a “powerhouse of innovation and AI”.
Chris Cottingham said: “Bristol and the wider South West region are an absolute powerhouse of innovation, fuelled by world-class universities and R&D, startups, and globally renowned companies across a series of strategically important sectors, and it’s a perfect home for our third UK office.
“And when you look at the city and region’s fast-growing credentials in AI, we see significant opportunities to support some of the most exciting players here.
“The launch of our Bristol office strategically places us at the heart of the UK’s premier deeptech ecosystem outside the Golden Triangle of Cambridge, Oxford and London. Deeptech innovation is an area where the South West is excelling, driven in part by new startup and spinout companies as well as new incubators, such as the recently launched OMX deeptech lab facility.”
Awards
Winners Announced at Digital Tech Awards 2026
This year’s iteration of the Digital Tech Awards saw finalists represented from a plethora of digital tech touchpoints – from Tech for Good to Product Innovation, as well as the introduction of a brand-new “AI Trailblazer” award.
Now in its 16th year, the ScotlandIS Digital Technology Awards shines a spotlight on “the great kind of innovation” happening across the country’s tech sector.
Karen Meechan, CEO of ScotlandIS, describes the awards as a showcase of excellence – from startups to large enterprises – and an opportunity for every corner of Scotland’s digital industries to network, learn and take pride in each other’s achievements.
Meechan commented: “Each year these awards remind us of the strength, ambition and innovation across Scotland’s tech sector. The companies and individuals pushing boundaries and showing resilience in the face of uncertainty are exactly why these awards exist; to shine a spotlight on the world-class talent we have here in Scotland.”
Scotland’s cybersecurity community celebrated last night as the 2026 edition – the year of “wicked messes” – of the annual Scottish Cyber Awards recognised the achievements of individuals, organisations and academics from across the industry.
Run by DIGIT and hosted by BBC Scotland broadcaster Mark Stephens, the awards took place at the EICC in Edinburgh and saw the 14 coveted prizes given to winners from across the cybersecurity sector.
Acumen Cyber was crowned Cybersecurity Company of the Year, sponsored by Be-IT.
Ray Bugg, director of DIGIT, said: “Cybersecurity is a tough profession, one that constantly challenges us, pushes our limits, and tests our resilience – which is why community and collaboration matter so much in this field. We can’t do this job in isolation, and I really want everyone to embrace that spirit this evening.”
Scots Firms Take Home £400,000 at Regional EDGE Awards
Scottish EDGE has named twenty high-growth businesses from four regions as winners at the second Regional EDGE competition, sharing a prize fund of £400,000.
Taking home £50,000 each were Highland Wood from Inverness, Aberdeen-based Aqura Systems, Gowaan Bike Club CIC from Innerleithen, and Arbroath-based Umbra Dynamics, all of which will have the chance to compete for another £50,000 in the RBS–supported Winner of Winners award, to be announced in April.
“Regional EDGE has proved itself to be an essential part of our national entrepreneurial ecosystem,” said Evelyn McDonald, CEO of Scottish EDGE.
Abertay University Ranked Top International School For Games Design
Abertay University has been ranked the top International School for video games design in an achievement that ‘cements Scotland’s reputation’ in the industry.
The University has achieved its best ever performance in the Princeton Review’s global rankings for video games education, being named the top International School and the number one institution in Europe.
In the 2026 edition of the influential league table, Abertay’s undergraduate games programmes are ranked 5th in the world, with postgraduate programmes placed 7th globally, strengthening the University’s longstanding position as a leading provider of games education.
Quorum Cyber Wins 2026 Globee® Award for Cybersecurity
Quorum Cyber, a Microsoft-first cyber security services provider, is honoured to be named a winner in the 2026 Globee® Awards for Cybersecurity, a globally recognised programme celebrating excellence in all areas of cyber security. This prestigious recognition highlights Quorum Cyber for its contributions to digital security, innovation in threat defence, and commitment to advancing cyber security solutions.
The Globee® Awards for Cybersecurity recognise achievements across a wide range of categories, including risk management, threat detection, cloud security, artificial intelligence-driven defence, data privacy, zero-trust architecture, compliance, and other innovations that help safeguard digital ecosystems worldwide. Nominations are evaluated across local, regional, and global achievements, ensuring that impactful work at every level is recognised.
Quorum Cyber was recognised as the Best of Category winner in the Best Cybersecurity Service Provider of the Year, an honour awarded to the entry that received the highest overall score in its category. This distinction represents the top-ranked submission among all entries evaluated in that category, based on a data-driven scoring process conducted by industry experts worldwide.
