While cybersecurity budgets surge with unprecedented growth, security leaders race ahead on AI transformation while falling behind on measurement, justification, and strategic alignment.
According to the study, 93% of organisations in the UKI are increasing cybersecurity budgets in 2026, with 68% seeing double-digit growth. However, AI simultaneously holds three contradictory positions in budget planning in the region: it’s the top driver of increases (51%), the first investment that would be cut if budgets tightened (43%), and the most challenging spend to justify to business stakeholders (28%).
“Security leaders are getting mandates to invest in AI, but nobody’s given them a way to prove it’s working. You can’t measure AI transformation with pre-AI metrics,” said Steve Wilson, Chief AI and Product Officer at Exabeam. “The problem isn’t that security teams lack data. They’re drowning in it. The issue is they’re tracking the wrong things and speaking a language the board doesn’t understand. Those are the budgets that get cut first. The window to fix this is closing fast.”
AI Transformation Drives Budget Growth
Cybersecurity investment trends in 2026 represent a significant shift for the UKI, with AI and automation emerging as the primary catalyst for budget expansion (51%), followed by cloud infrastructure growth (36%). This surge being channelled into technology, rather than the usual suspect of headcount, signals how the AI era is fundamentally shifting security operations.
The Value Demonstration Gap
While 93% of security leaders in the UKI express confidence that their investments are delivering business value, 26% cite a lack of board understanding of the link between cybersecurity investment and business resilience as their biggest challenge in defending spend.
The disconnect reveals a critical vulnerability: 62% in the region report using operational metrics and 58% use outcome metrics, yet boards and executives still don’t understand the connection between security investments and business risk.
The problem isn’t a lack of information, but a mismatch between security metrics and business-decision metrics. Security teams are relying on traditional security measurements that don’t translate into the business impact language boards need to evaluate investment decisions.
“In AI-assisted environments, traditional metrics like mean time to resolution (MTTR) becomes almost automatic, so speed alone doesn’t prove risk has been reduced,” said Kevin Kirkwood, CISO at Exabeam.
“We need new ways to measure security effectiveness that actually show business impact, because boards don’t fund faster ticket closure, they fund measurable risk reduction and business resilience. We have to show that we’re not just responding quickly but eliminating and improving the conditions that allow incidents to happen in the first place.”
Regional Variations Show Diverse AI Adoption Strategies
Regional differences in AI adoption are striking. The UKI reports that AI drives a higher percentage of budget increases compared to the global average. Saudi Arabia demonstrates the most aggressive position, with 75% reporting AI is already improving security operations, nearly double the UKI (43%). These variations reflect different organisational priorities. Saudi Arabia’s figures align with broader national digital transformation initiatives, while European and Asian organisations emphasise careful evaluation and workforce preservation before scaling deployment.
“Organisations in the UK and Ireland are shifting their priorities to make cybersecurity a critical business investment, but their approach to AI remains conflicted,” said Findlay Whitelaw, Cybersecurity Strategist & Researcher at Exabeam. “AI is critical for modern cybersecurity, yet its value is often questioned when in the face of budget cuts. The path ahead lies in better aligning AI investments with measurable business outcomes. Demonstrating clear ROI and integrating AI into broader security strategies will be key so stakeholders can see both the risk reduction and operational efficiencies it delivers.”
Closing the Justification Gap
The cybersecurity industry is experiencing a rare moment of budget abundance, yet this creates a sustainability challenge. Security leaders are investing heavily in AI transformation while simultaneously struggling to articulate its business value to boards and CFOs. This isn’t a sustainable dynamic — budget abundance creates expectations, and organisations that can’t demonstrate clear value from AI investments risk seeing those budgets retracted when economic conditions shift.
The organisations that will thrive are those that recognise deployment is only half the challenge. Success requires developing new frameworks for measuring AI impact, creating outcomes-based metrics that tie security performance directly to business resilience, and establishing executive-ready communication that translates technical improvements into business impact language.
Reddit is facing a £14.47 million fine for unlawfully processing children’s personal information, the UK’s data protection regulator found.
The Information Commissioner’s Office’s investigation into Reddit, the online forum, found that it failed to apply any robust age assurance mechanism and therefore did not have a lawful basis for processing the personal information of children under the age of 13.
It was also found to have failed to carry out a data protection impact assessment to assess and mitigate risks to children prior to January 2025.
These failures meant Reddit was using children’s data unlawfully, potentially exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content, the ICO said.
In July 2025, Reddit introduced age assurance measures that include age verification to access mature content and asking users to declare their age when opening an account. The ICO informed Reddit that relying on self-declaration presents risks to children as it is easy to bypass.
The regulator is keeping Reddit’s processing of children’s personal information under review as part of on-going work focusing on online platforms that primarily rely on self-declaration.
“It’s concerning that a company the size of Reddit failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of UK children,” John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner said.
“Children under 13 had their personal information collected and used in ways they could not understand, consent to or control. That left them potentially exposed to content they should not have seen. This is unacceptable and has resulted in today’s fine.
“Let me be clear. Companies operating online services likely to be accessed by children have a responsibility to protect those children by ensuring they’re not exposed to risks through the way their data is used. To do this, they need to be confident they know the age of their users and have appropriate, effective age assurance measures in place.
“Reddit failed to meet these expectations. They must do better and we are continuing to consider the age assurance controls now implemented by the platform.
“Relying on users to declare their age themselves is not enough when children may be at risk and we are focusing now on companies that are primarily using this method. I therefore strongly encourage industry to take note, reflect on their practices and urgently make any necessary improvements to their platforms.”
In setting the penatly amount, the ICO tookk into consideration the number of children affected by this infrigement, the degree of potential harm caused, and the duration of the failings, as well as Reddit’s global turnover.
Meta faced internal warnings and pushback prior to implementing end-to-end encryption on its messaging services for Facebook and Instagram, with leaders internally warning that the technology could hinder their ability to detect instances of child exploitation and provide evidence to law enforcement, new court documents reveal.
The previously unreported documents were filed in a court case brough up by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who brought the case against Meta, alleging the company made it easy for predators to reach underage users via their platforms, often leading to abuse offline and even cases of human traffiking.
In the newly released document, Meta’s head of content policy wrote on March 2019 shortly before CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the encryption plans publicly: “We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible.”
The court case will seek to determine whether Meta misrepresented the safety of its plan to implement default end-to-end encryption on its Facebook-connected Messenger service.
Documents, emails, and messages revealed in the filings shed new light on the internal awareness in Meta of the potentially detrimental effect its policies and design could have on child safety.
The revelations come as Meta continues to face lawsuits across the US alleging that the design of its social media platforms is harmful to children. Allegations include from these lawsuits posit that Meta purposefully targets teens and younger children, had addictive designs, and adversely affects the mental health of young people.
The New Mexico case, however, differs from these, as its scope centres on Meta’s implemetnation of end-to-end encryption on its direct messages on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta first announced its use of end-to-end encryption to Messenger in 2019, and later expanded the tech to direct messages on Instagram.
End-to-end encryption has long been a source of much debate in the tech world – while it undeniably offers more privacy to people as companies and law enforcement cannot access messages without permissions or personal ‘keys’ to encrypted data, they have also presented a security liability in another sense.
Law enforcement had routinely said that their investigations into child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, drug and weapons trades, and terrorist activity have been hampered by the technology.
In end-to-end encryption, a senders message can only be viewed by its reciepient and is coded in such a wya to protect it from being deciphered in transfer. The tool is commonplace now, with Apple, WhatsApp, and Google Messages offering the privacy setting by default.
The tech came into sharp focus as the Online Safety Act was being drafted, as policy makers in the UK toyed with the idea of mandating a ‘backdoor’ to encryption which would enable law enforcement to preemptively scan messaged for illegal or harmful material prior to it being encrypted and sent, a proposal that privacy experts assessed harshly, saying that such technology did not exist and negated the idea and importance of encryption.
While the Online Safety Act did not stipulate an encryption ‘backdoor’ in its final form, the Home Office did allegeldy issue Apple a secret order to create a ‘backdoor’ to its encryption tool used in its cloud backups, Advanced Data Protection (ADP). Apple appealed the order, and instead of complying, removed the service completely from UK-based users.
CodeBase has announced a strategic leadership transition aimed at strengthening the tech ecosystem builder’s position as a powerhouse for founder support, with co-founder and CEO Stephen Coleman OBE, who has been in the role for a decade, moving to Group Chair of CodeBase and Chief Strategy Officer Jon Hope stepping up to support as Interim CEO.
Also, former Skyscanner leader and Current Health executive Richard Lennox has joined the CodeBase Board and steps in as Interim COO to support the transition.
Stephen Coleman took up the CEO role in 2016, overseeing and guiding CodeBase’s growth and evolution over the last ten years, from an Edinburgh startup hub to a global tech ecosystem platform. CodeBase now operates across Scotland, the UK, and internationally, delivering programmes for the Scottish Government, UK Government, European Union, and other strategic partners.
This work includes Techscaler, the Scottish Government’s programme that supports over 1,500 startups and scaleups, and CodeClan, the digital skills programme that focuses on software engineering and agentic AI. In his new role, Coleman will work closely with fellow co-founder and Executive Vice Chair Steven Drost on strategic growth opportunities.
Jon Hope joined CodeBase from Barclays in 2022, having spent almost twenty years with the global bank. At Barclays, he co-founded Barclays Eagle Labs, the innovation and entrepreneurship network designed to support startups, scaleups, and entrepreneurs, establishing over 30 locations across the UK.
Richard Lennox joins CodeBase following stints at two of Scotland’s most successful tech companies, creating over $2 billion in exit valuations. As a senior director at Skyscanner, Lennox helped to scale the company, while accelerating growth from under 50 people to over 900 across 11 offices worldwide.
Skyscanner was acquired by Ctrip for £1.4 billion in 2016. Joining Current Health as COO in 2019, Lennox guided the growth of the enterprise care-at-home platform in the lead-up to the acquisition by Best Buy for $400 million in 2021, one of the largest ever European healthtech exits.
Stephen Coleman, Co-founder and Group Chair of CodeBase, said: “We’re at an inflection point for CodeBase, and these leadership changes are part of our overall evolution into a powerhouse for founder support across every growth stage.
“With Jon’s ecosystem-building expertise and Richard’s proven scaleup track record leading our fantastic team, and with the support of Gillian Docherty and the CodeBase Board, we’re supercharging our ability to help founders navigate from early stage to global scale. This next phase of CodeBase is about impact, focused support for founders, creating more success stories, and becoming a true launchpad for world-changing companies.”
Gillian Docherty, CodeBase’s Non-executive Chair, said: “Stephen has been a big part of CodeBase’s DNA and has led the business over a ten-year span that included the challenging times of COVID-19 pandemic, and we’re extremely pleased that he will remain integral to CodeBase’s leadership going forward.”
“Jon’s track record and commitment to CodeBase since joining has been stellar, and is a perfect fit for the interim CEO role to support this organisation-wide evolution. And in Richard Lennox, at a juncture where CodeBase intensifies its focus on helping our brightest startups to scale across the globe, we have an incredible appointee to the Board and Interim COO role. Jon and Richard will lead CodeBase through this transitional period, guiding the business into its next phase of evolution.”
CodeBase will now embark on a search for a new CEO for the post-transition phase, with further related announcements expected later in the year. Gillian Docherty added: “We have a strong leadership team in place who know the business inside out and are locked in on strategic priorities, and the view of the Board is that it is important to take the necessary time to ensure the right appointment for CodeBase’s long-term success.”
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Ofgem, the UK’s energy regulator, has launched a new review of the electricity grid and energy demand as plans for data centres continue to crop up across the nation.
The regulator’s Call for Input on Demand Connections Report attempts to address the surging demand for energy in the UK, which skyrocketed from 41GW in November 2024 to 125GW in June 2025.
In this interconnection queue, about 50GW is connected to data centre projects, which are only set to grow as the UK attempts to cement itself as an AI powerhouse, and the nation tries to achieve more data sovereignty.
The surge in energy demand has exposed weaknesses in the grid’s energy collection, Ofgem has found. These weaknesses include an increasingly lengthening queue of prospective projects with little viability, delays for progressing projects, and a lack of structure in the prioritisation of developments.
The potential reforms would take place in two phases, the first of which would see data centres needing to adhere to more stringent readiness tests and financial requirements in an effort to narrow down the influx of speculative data centre projects being proposed across the UK.
Options to address these concerns include the introduction of refundable deposits tied to delivery targets, fees tied to the development lifecycle, the demonstration of secure financing, and the potential of non-refundable deposits for projects upfront.
Phase two would see these proposed changes rolled out beyond data centres, and would see the re-prioritisiation of data centre projects to favour those in AI Growth Zones or those that can strategically align themselves with the UK’s energy plans.
The call for input will also seek ways to make capacity delivery more efficient.
This may mean companies could construct their own high-voltage equipment to increase grid capacity.
Ofgem is also considering the creation of a new Independent Transmission Owner licence which would allow mixed grid or flexible grid designs. It will also consider increasing the use of flexible connection agreements which would allow data centre operators to power their facilities in stages instead of waiting for a full grid development.
The consultation, which is aimed at customers connecting to networks, data centre developers, and network companies, is open until 13 March.
Talent shortages in UK tech are coming under further pressure as the number of skilled tech workers choosing to work in the UK declines, putting growth and innovation at risk, warns RSM UK.
RSM’s freedom of information request to UK Visas and Immigration shows the number of international workers applying for a visa to work in UK tech dropped 11% from 8,739 in Q2 2025 to 7,768 in Q3 2025 and was down 6% year-on-year from 8,233 in Q3 2024.
At the same time, the technology industry is facing various other workforce pressures. RSM’s Technology Outlook found nearly a fifth (22%) of tech leaders said maintaining employee engagement was their biggest workforce challenge, followed by the cost of UK-based talent (19%) and upskilling non-technical staff (17%).
“Tech businesses are being hit with both a decline in skilled immigration and existing talent shortages,” James Bull, tech industry senior analyst RSM UK, said. “Workforce is likely to be one of the biggest challenges for the UK tech industry in the year ahead. Tech businesses are facing a lack of future-proof skills, which risks hindering growth and innovation, and puts the country further behind in the global tech race.
“The war on talent is a real issue in the tech industry. Individuals with the “right” specialist skills are few and far between, and businesses are struggling to upskill their existing staff fast enough. Some will need to look overseas, but that requires a straightforward and painless visa application process, as well as ensuring the UK is an attractive place to live and work.
“Employers are having to grapple with AI – adopt it too quickly and there’s a risk of damaging employee engagement, but adopt it too slowly, and businesses could lose out on increased productivity and growth opportunities. Tech leaders need to respond by bringing their workforce onboard with the technology, and upskilling experienced workers to help successfully deploy AI and drive growth.”
Ofcom has fined porn company 8579 LLC £1.35 million for not having age checks in place, plus £50,000 for failing to respond to an information request.
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, sites that allow pornographic material must use highly effective age assurance to prevent children from readily accessing that content.
When these new rules came into force in July 2025, Ofcom immediately opened investigations into dozens of adult sites, including 8579 LLC.
Following its investigation, Ofcom has fined the adult site £1.35 million for failing to comply with these age check requirements. The company must immediately implement highly effective age assurance or face a daily penalty of £1,000.
The porn provider has also been fined a further £50,000 for failing to abide by requirements to comply with information requests made by Ofcom to aid in their investigations and assessments of age check compliance.
“We’ve been clear that adult sites must deploy robust age checks to protect children in the UK from seeing porn. Those that fail to do this – or ignore legally binding requests from us – should expect to face fines,” George Lusty, director of enforcement at Ofcom, said.
Ofcom has been on a tear recently as it continues to conclude investigations it began in July into porn sites’ compliance with age verification requirements.
Ava Group was fined £1M for its age check failures, while Kick Online Entertainment SA was fined £800,000 for infringements.
The crackdown has seen the rise of VPN usage in the UK, which allows users to circumvent regional age verification requirements to access certain websites.
Debates surrounding the potential security fallouts of age verification – and its associated data gathering – have seen many cyber professionals question if these adult websites are able to ensure the data security necessary to safeguard the photo IDs and credit card information commonly used to verify user age.
Following the implementation of age verification requirements under the Online Safety Act, the world’s most popular porn site, PornHub, has announced that it will no longer allow new UK users that have yet to register their age with the company, in an odd pull out from the market as age check fines continue to be rolled out.
The UK government is releasing a fleet of drones to help stop waste tippers and unauthorised rubbish dumpers across the UK.
The Environmental Agency announced a new package of surveillance and investigative measures to detect and stop waste criminals before they can litter or pollute the land.
The 33-strong drone squad will track down the waste tippers from the air, with some of the drones carrying upgraded laser mapping technology, LIDAR, to capture evidence to help secure successful prosecutions.
LIDAR technology fires millions of laser points per second towards the ground below to create highly detailed maps of illegal waste sites.
Currently flown from a dedicated aircraft mainly to capture flood information, moving LIDAR onto drones will allow even more precise mapping, pinpointing exactly where waste has been dumped. These maps can be used as evidence in court to help bring waste criminals to justice.
The Environment Agency has also developed a new screening tool that enables EA officers to scan and cross-check lorry licence applications against waste permit records – with suspect operators flagged before they have a chance to move waste illegally.
The new capabilities are backed by a reinforced Joint Unit for Waste Crime – now a 20-strong group of specialists working closely with law enforcement partners to dismantle organised criminal networks. This builds on a record year for waste enforcement, with 751 illegal waste sites shut down.
The programme will also introduce new screening scans to detect and target potential waste offenders before they begin operating.
New software will check new applicants for Heavy Goods Vehicle operator licences against the Environmental Agency’s public register to identify operators already holding waste permits and licences.
The new tool has already been trialled successfully in East Anglia, where it helped the agency uncover a waste company that had secretly relocated its HGV operations to evade enforcement. The software flagged the new operating centre within a week, allowing EA officers to intervene before a licence was approved.
“By increasing the Environment Agency’s enforcement budget by over 50% to £15.6 million, we’re investing in cutting-edge technology that allows us to shut down illegal operators faster and more effectively,” Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds said.
“From advanced laser-mapping to drone surveillance and new vehicle-scanning tools, this technology is helping us track, expose and stop waste crime, ensuring those who blight our communities are held to account.”
Distributed-denial of services (DDoS) attacks escalated dramatically in 2025, which saw an overall increaase in cyber-attack activity across both network and application layers, according to Radware’s Global Threat Analysis Report.
The new report, based on comprehensive analysis of data from Radware’s cloud and managed security services and threat intelligence research teams, highlights the increasing sophistication, speed and scale of threats facing organisations worldwide.
Network DDoS
Network-layer DDoS attacks, targeting layer 3 and 4 of the OSI model, increased 168.2% year over year, with peak attack volumes reaching almost 30 Tbps, signaling a resurgence of brute-force volumetric attacks.
In the second half of 2025, the average Radware customer experienced more than 25,351 network-layer DDoS attacks, an average of 139 attacks per day, driving the sharp year-over-year increase.
In the same time span, the average Radware customer experienced more than 25,351 network-layer DDoS attacks, an average of 139 attacks per day, driving the sharp year-over-year increase.
Technology, telecommunications and financial services were the most targeted sectors, together accounting for the majority of large-scale network DDoS campaigns. The technology sector alone represented 45% of all network-layer DDoS attacks, up sharply from 8.77% in 2024.
North America accounted for 63.1% of all network-layer DDoS attacks globally, followed by the Middle East (16.1%) and Europe (13.7%).
Web DDoS
Web DDoS attacks, targeting layer 7 of the OSI model, climbed 101.4% compared to 2024, reflecting a dramatic rise in application-layer disruption campaigns. Most high-impact Web DDoS attacks now last less than 60 seconds, making manual mitigation and human-in-the-loop defenses increasingly ineffective.
When it comes to attack volume, 94.4% of web DDoS attacks measured under 100,000 requests per second, highlighting a shift toward smaller, more frequent and persistent attacks designed to evade traditional detection thresholds.
Online services, financial services and retail organisations experienced the highest volumes of Web DDoS activity, reflecting attackers’ focus on revenue-generating digital platforms and customer-facing services.
Globally, EMEA remained the most targeted region, accounting for 57% of all Web DDoS attacks globally, while APAC experienced the fastest growth, with Web DDoS attacks in the region surging 485% year over year.
Appliction and API Attacks
Beyond DDoS, malicious web application and API transactions rose 128% year over year, confirming the application layer as the primary battleground for modern cyber-attacks.
Vulnerability exploitation accounted for 41.8% of observed application-layer attacks, rising to nearly 58% in Q4 2025, as attackers shifted away from commoditised techniques toward vulnerability exploitation, business logic and API abuse.
Technology-driven organisations with extensive API ecosystems — including SaaS providers, cloud platforms and fintech firms — faced the highest levels of application-layer exploitation.
North America and EMEA together accounted for the majority of malicious application and API traffic, reflecting dense concentrations of exposed digital services.
Bad bot activity increased 91.8%, fueled by generative AI tools that have lowered the barrier to entry for attackers and enabled large-scale credential stuffing, scraping and account takeover campaigns.
In just the first six months of 2025, bad bot activity reached 89.2% of the total volume observed across all of 2024, underscoring the explosive growth of automated threats.
North America accounted for 40.7% of malicious bot transactions, followed by APAC (25%), EMEA (19.1%) and Central and Latin America (15.2%).
Hacktivism
Beyond the technical evolution of attacks, a primary driver of DDoS activity remains geopolitical and ideological conflict. In 2025, hacktivist targeting remained sustained and evolved into a persistent, high-volume threat.
Europe bore the brunt, accounting for 48.4% of all claimed attacks, significantly outpacing the Middle East (17.7%) and Asia (17.5%).
The highest volumes of claimed attacks were directed at Israel (12.2%), the United States (9.4%), and Ukraine (8.9%) with government services the primary target at 38.8% of all claimed attacks.
The group NoName057 (16) set yet another historical record by claiming 4,693 attacks, solidifying its position as the most active hacktivist entity in history.
“The threat landscape continues to evolve with unprecedented speed and complexity,” said Pascal Geenans, vice president of threat intelligence at Radware. “Our 2026 Global Threat Analysis Report underscores how attackers are leveraging automation, AI and multi-vector strategies to disrupt operations at scale. Organisations must adopt resilient, automated defenses capable of responding in seconds — not minutes — to stay ahead in this environment.”
Meta and the UK National Crime Agency are sharing more details of a suspected scam centre in Nigeria that targeted British residents and American people based in the UK that was disrupted following signals and insight provided by Meta.
According to preliminary findings from the Nigerian Police Force, the syndicate operated a sophisticated online fraud network based in Agbor, Delta State.
The group used fake social media accounts impersonating cryptocurrency traders, along with fraudulent Facebook groups featuring fabricated testimonials, to target individuals engaging with legitimate investment platforms. Meta says it is working closely with law enforcement to identify and remove all accounts found to be in violation as part of the operations.
During the takedown, the Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Center arrested seven suspects and also reported recovering twenty-six (26) mobile phones, forty-two (42) SIM cards, and one (1) laptop, all suspected to have been used in the commission of the crime.
“We welcome the partnership with the UK National Crime Agency and the Nigerian Police Force National Cybercrime Centre to identify and disrupt this alleged scam centre, based on insight and signals shared by Meta,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Global Head of Counter Fraud for Meta said.
“Scams are driven by persistent criminals and sophisticated, organised crime syndicates constantly evolving their operations to evade detection. We are focused on rooting them out, working with law enforcement, governments, and peers to protect people from these schemes. This takedown demonstrates the real impact that this cooperation can have and the importance of a ‘whole-of-society’ approach.”
Nick Sharp, Deputy Director of Fraud at the National Crime Agency, said: “These arrests were made possible thanks to our close partnership working with Meta and our law enforcement partners in Nigeria.
“This action marks a significant step in our collective fight against fraudsters operating overseas, and will help in our mission to protect the public in the UK from serious and organised criminals. Fraudsters can operate from anywhere and will target victims both domestically and globally. The NCA will continue to work with international and private sector partners to tackle fraudsters working upstream, overseas and online.”
Scotland’s public sector is facing a monumental moment, defined by the struggle to maintain quality of services amid constrained resources and shifting demographics.
Amid these struggles is a growing debate on the implementation of AI and how this emerging technology can be used to enhance efficiency and producvitiy across industries.
But public services in Scotland have special considerations, ranging from ethical implementation, the need to retain and create jobs rather than replace them, and looming digital exclusion and outdated tech uptake.
Storm ID’s research assessed 50 high-volume public sector services acrorss Scotland with the strongest potential to save staff time through credible AI use cases, including NHS Scotland, Education, local authorities, Police Scotland, and other public bodies.
Acorss these industires, Storm ID estimated baseline savings of about 178 million staff hours per year, with the largest amount of savings going to the NHS (80m hours).
But how does Storm ID think Scotland’s public services can achieve these time savings?
Through purposeful automation, rather than job replacement. Enhancing the ability to complete common tasks quickly, rather than trying to auotmate entire jobs, would save time and allow workers to focus on more important, specialised tasks.
This would require workforce engagement from the very start of designing AI systems to public services, as well as ongoing monitoring to ensure continuous imporvement.
Within these systems though, Storm ID discovered that based on the senstitivity and risk of the data invovled, around half of the top 50 services assessed would require a private deployment AI model to ensure security.
To mitigate risk to jobs and security, Storm ID is calling on Scotland to prioritise high-volume, lower-risk services first, which can help demonstrate value quickly and demonstrate institutional capability.
Outages facing Amazon’s cloud units in December last year were routed in errors of its own AI tools, reportage from the Financial Times found.
Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour disruption to one of its systems in December 2025; new reporting from the FT says that this was caused by the use of Kiro AI, a coding tool that was used by engineers and allowed to make certain changes to the system environment.
The FT report said that Kiro AI is an agentic tool able to act autonomously, which made the decision to “delete and recreate the environment.”
However, in a statement to Reuters, an AWS spokesperson told Reuters that the disruption was instead caused by a user error – namely misconfigured access controls – and described the incident as “brief.”
“This brief event was the result of user error-specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI,” the spokesperson told Reuters in an email.
The incident was limited in scope, according to AWS, and did not impact AWS’s services, including storage, database, AI technologies, or compute. The “extremely limited event” occurred when a region in mainland China suffered a service interruption, the spokesperson said.
While the spokesperson points to individual error rather than a flawed infrastructure, the quandary has raised eyebrows concerning the speedy implementation of AI agents in critical systems.
Despite the December incidents causing little widespread disruption, Amazon’s stock lowered slightly amid the new reports around the outages supposed cause.
The incident highlights the complexity of AI deployments in competitive markets, as AWS competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the cloud market. As data centres become increasingly important and conversations around data sovereignty boil over into policy and investment changes, missteps and seeds of doubt can be detrimental to a company’s competition on the global scale.
EE, TalkTalk, and Vodafone generated the most broadband complaints, according to the latest figures from Ofcom, the communicaions regulator, covering the third quarter of 2025.
EE’s complaints figures remained the same as in the previous quarter, while TalkTalk and Vodafone saw an increase in complaints.
Plusnet was the least complained about broadband provider in the quarter, which spanned from July to September last year.
When it came to landlines, TalkTalk had the most complaints, which rose on the previous quarter. The Utility Warehouse generated the fewest landline complaints.
The most complained about mobile providers were O2, Sky Mobile, and Three. Customers mainly compained about how their complaints were handled and issues with faults, services, and getting connected.
When it came to pay-TV complaints, EE gained the most, while Sky and TalkTalk generated the fewest complaints.
EE, Tesco Mobile, Vodafone, and iD Mobile generated the fewest pay-monthly mobile complaints.
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Enterprise executives are finding little to no noticeable impact from AI on employment or on productivity, a new survey of nearly 6,000 execs found.
The survey of executives in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 80% of execs are yet to see impact from AI.
About seven in ten (69%) say they currently use AI in some way or another, with 75% expecting to use the tech within the next three years.
While executives employ AI for a number of reasons – from generating text to content creation and data processing – AI’s impact is so far limited.
When it comes to employment, 90% say that AI has yet to have an impact on their organisation in the past three years.
About nine in ten (89%) said they saw no impact on productivity from AI tool adoption.
Despite reporting limited impact of AI so far, executives expect dramatic shifts in the next three years, according to the survey.
These changes could include mass redundancy, which the research suggests could hit 1.75 million jobs by 2028 across the countries in the study.
While they have yet to see much improvement in the area so far, executives also expect to see their businesses be 1.4% more productive due to AI in the next three years.
Workers, however, expect AI to increase job availability, though their productivity expectations are not as high.
The new study matches a range of research showing businesses struggling to achieve a return on their AI investments in the form of increased productivity or revenue, whilst threats of mass redundancies linger and materialise.
In the UK, redundancies due to AI have hit hard, without the balancing other nations like the US has seen in the job market.
Meanwhile, organisations are being pushed to continue implementing AI – Gartner released a report showing that AI transformation in customer service is a default expectation rather than an add on.
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The UK’s largest public research funder UKRI has set out its first-ever plan to put AI to work for the nation’s world-leading innovators.
In the recent Spending Review settlement, UKRI committed a record £1.6 billion of funding directly targeted at the AI sector over the next 4 years, its biggest single investment area for 2026 to 2030.
This includes funding for specific activity that UKRI will deliver on behalf of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – which is subject to change as delivery plans are finalised. It also sits alongside significant additional AI investment woven through the broader UKRI budget.
The new strategy signals UKRI’s intention to make major investments in mathematics, computer science and engineering research which underpin AI expertise.
World-class researchers and businesses across the UK will also benefit from better access to the right tools, training and infrastructure to unlock new growth across the UK. This will help bring to life innovations that make people’s lives better – a key theme of the India AI Impact Summit which continues this week.
“The UK is backing its pioneering AI leadership with more than £1.6 billion in investment to make sure the best of British expertise develops the next wave of AI innovations,” deputy prime minister David Lammy said.
“Together we are turning potential into progress and that’s the ambition I am bringing to the AI Summit in India this week.
“From spotting cancers earlier to cutting backlogs in public services, new research into AI will be a game-changer, bringing the promise of tomorrow’s technologies to the UK today.”
The strategy also commits to expanding doctoral and fellowship routes co-designed with businesses. It will also support recognised career frameworks for research software engineers, data scientists and ethics specialists – supporting the high-paying jobs of the future.
“The potential of combining our AI expertise with our peerless R&D community is a game-changer. This plan will harness AI to accelerate both the pace and possibility of scientific endeavour,” UK AI minsiter Kanishka Narayan said.
“We are already seeing AI change the game for what’s possible in fields from health, to energy, and beyond. Boldly backing this technology is how we push our Great British innovators to further success, and build a path to breakthroughs that boost our health, wealth, and wellbeing.”
The new strategic framework will see investment focused on six priority areas: advancing technology development; transforming research through AI; developing AI skills and talent; accelerating innovation for economic growth and societal benefit; championing responsible and trustworthy AI; building world-class AI data infrastructure.
Central to UKRI’s plan is building a strong research and innovation community which will support them with the skills they need to become the AI leaders of the future.
Under the new strategy UKRI will help deliver up to £137 million as part of DSIT’s AI for Science Strategy to back AI-enabled scientific discovery starting with drug disovery and new treatments.
It will also deliver £36 million to upgrade the University of Cambridge’s “DAWN” supercomputer supporting breakthroughs in areas like healthcare and environmental modelling.
Fourteen startups with potential to change lives and create economic impact have benefitted from a venture-building programme in Glasgow.
A raft of young companies developing technology from wearable diagnostic brain sensors to medtech implants completed the University of Glasgow’s 13-week Infinity G accelerator programme that took place at thebeyond workspace in Finnieston.
The intensive programme – in only its second year – mixed tutoring and brand-building with expert mentorship, funding and resources to empower ventures across multiple disciplines to make a global impact.
The cohort included three student projects and reflects the increasing levels of entrepreneurial activity coming from across all parts of the University – in areas from medical and quantum technologies to AI and virtual reality.
Kelvin Quantum is a University of Glasgow spin-out company that has developed specialised, high-performance electronics and integrated circuits designed to operate at cryogenic temperatures in quantum computing systems.
Robert Graham, CEO at Kelvin Quantum, said: “The programme helped us turn a highly technical, academic-focused story into something clear, direct, and accessible – so we can explain it easily to anyone, from investors to the general public.”
Rooted in world leading science from the University of Glasgow and Cancer Research UK, health tech startup TileBio is using artificial intelligence to revolutionise cancer diagnostics and digital pathology, by creating an “AI-learned visual language of tissue” through millions of medical images that enables automated systems to understand and interpret complex pathological data with unprecedented accuracy.
Chris Walsh, co-founder, CEO and CTO at TileBio, said: “The Infinity G programme helped us refine our brand, sharpen our value proposition, and develop strong pitch decks and a clearer website.
“As a computing scientist with no business background, I found the programme exceptionally well-structured and eye-opening, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking to commercialise their ideas or research.”
Ventures were selected for the quality of their propositions, the drive and ambition of the entrepreneurial leads and the potential impact of the innovative technology across sectors.
Infinity G is funded by the University of Glasgow and the UK Government Shared Prosperity Funding, administered by Glasgow City Council, and is part of a suite of innovation and enterprise initiatives led by the University to accelerate value from innovation emerging from the University and its regional partners.
The University’s programme is delivered in collaboration with the advanced technology accelerator STAC at its hub within Skypark and the Glasgow Riverside Innovation District.
Sessions included workshops on the importance of building a brand, strategic hiring, creating core IP and attracting investment or industrial interest, with presentations by outside speakers who offered a behind-the-scenes look at how venture capital funds operate and what investors look for.
Regular pitching and feedback sessions, both with the STAC team and external stakeholders, helped founders strengthen their narratives and accelerate the transition from research to sales.
The programme culminated in a final demo day and product showcase, when the ventures presented their businesses to active investors and industry and successfully demonstrated their transformation over the course of the programme.
Uzma Khan, Vice Principal, Economic Development and Innovation, University of Glasgow, said: “The Infinity G cohorts are a powerful demonstration of the depth, diversity and ambition of entrepreneurial talent emerging from across the University of Glasgow.
“From student-led ideas to spin-outs rooted in world-leading research, this cohort shows how innovation can translate into real-world impact – improving lives, creating economic value and addressing global challenges.
“Infinity G is designed to give founders the confidence, skills and networks they need to accelerate that journey and it has been inspiring to see how each venture has evolved over just 13 weeks.”
Paul Wilson, CEO, STAC, said: “Infinity G’s foundational mission has always been to translate rich scientific breakthroughs from the University into global impact. Glasgow is rapidly building momentum in commercialising highly-competitive technologies with the potential to improve lives and protect the planet.
“It is a genuine honour to collaborate with such brilliant minds. STAC is dedicated to accelerating these ventures, urging everyone involved to adopt an ambitious, fast-paced and globally-minded perspective, grounded in the belief that making a worldwide impact is achievable.”
The full cohort were: Brain Dynamics; FlashSens; HELM; TileBio; Museums in the Metaverse; Kelvin Quantum; Bina Networks; AI Stat; Authrive; Lotus DX; Quantatrac; Radana; Theo Health; and VascuX.
A landmark trial surrounding social media addiction brought Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to the stand in the first instance of the founder addressing concerns of child online safety in front of a jury.
Zuckerberg’s court appearance follows on from several other social media leaders facing the heat as lawyers test out the validity of claims that social media is addictive and harmful by design.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri recently took the stand to defend the social media site, saying that users could not get “clinically addicted” to social media in the traditional sense.
The trial against Meta surrounds a 20-year-old woman, known as KGM, who says that social media – and her alleged compulsion to use it – worsened her suicidal ideation and depression.
The lawsuit brought charges against Meta, Google’s Youtube, TikTok, and Snapchat, though the latter two settled out of court shortly before the trial began.
While other aspects of the claim focussed on the design of social media algorithms and pages to encourage compulsive and addictive behaviour, Zuckerberg’s testimony centered on if the social media giant was doing enough to keep young children from accessing the firm’s platforms.
Lawyers representing KGM presented Zuckerberg with internal documents which showed Zuckerberg and other Meta employees discussing Instagram and Facebook usage by teens and younger children.
Meta’s terms and conditions say that Instagram and Facebook can only be used by those 13 and over.
In documents from 2015 and 2017, Zuckerberg was discussing how to increase teenage usage, pushing for a 12% increase in time spent in 2015. In 2017, an executive said that “Mark [Zuckerberg] has decided the top priority for the company is teens.”
Zuckerberg said that this is no longer how Meta operates or how it prioritises its strategies, saying the emails and comments reflect an earlier time at the firm.
In his defence, Zuckerberg pointed to recent tools teens can elect to use to minimise their usage of the app, such as alerts on time spent and the silencing of notifications at night. However, court proceedings showed that these tools were not very popular, with only 1.1% of teen users electing to use daily use limits.
Documents from 2018 showed that Meta employees discussing their platforms’ retention of “tweens”, which typically includes the ages of 9-12.
Zuckerberg said that he regretted that the firm did not make faster progress on preventing users under 13 from accessing its platforms, but contended that the company had found “the right place over time.”
KGM started using social media when she was nine years old, which would be considered in breach of Meta’s policies.
The lawsuit represents just one of hundreds making their way through courts in the US as people take aim at social media giants for allegations of purposefully addictive design and the targeting of children.
DIGIT’s ITSX Summit returns to Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh in just two weeks – register now!
Taking place on 5 March, the conference will contextualise the evolution of the service desk and the future of customer experience and IT support.
The programme will consider how the service function has advanced in the age of digital transformation, omni-channel engagement, and personalisation, while examining the increasing role of automation, analytics and AI, and the rise of Chatbots and self-service systems.
The conference will explore how tech leaders can maximise the business impact of their service function, with presentations looking at actionable ways to improve process, operations, observability, and customer experience.
Speakers at this year’s summit include:
Bola Rabiu, Mid-market Solutions Consultant, ServiceNow
Donovan Munitich, ServiceNow Practice Director, Kaptius
Alex Cosma, Director: Enterprise Service Strategy, Square Enix
Kenny Anderson, CGI Business Consulting
Ann-Marie Gallacher, Chief Information Officer, NHS 24 Scotland
Karen Brusch, Head of Service Management and Design, Arqiva
Ian Chisholm, Exec Director: Security, Charles River Labs
Ali Law, CIO, The Exeter
Simon Townsend, SVP Marketing & The Office of CTO, ControlUp
Akshaya, Technical Evangelist, ManageEngine
Jan Skrabanek, GTM & Alliances Lead, ALVAO
Paul Bornhutter, Account Technology Strategist, Ivanti
Diane Rennie, Digital Director, Kingdom Housing Association
A University of Glasgow-led research project is releasing a free tool to help organisations, policymakers, and the public maximise the benefits of AI applications while identifying their potential harms.
The tool, developed as part of the Participatory Harm Auditing Workbenches and Methodologies (PHAWM) project, aims to help address the urgent need for rigorous assessments of AI risks caused by the rapid expansion and adoption of the technology across a wide range of sectors.
It is designed to help support the aims of regulations like the European Union’s AI Act, introduced in 2024, which seek to balance AI innovation with protections against unintended negative consequences.
PHAWM’s new open-source workbench tool will help empower users without extensive backgrounds in AI to conduct an in-depth audit of the strengths and weaknesses of any AI-driven application.
It also helps to actively involve audiences who are usually excluded from the audit process, including those who will be affected by the decisions made by the AI application, in order to produce better outcomes for end-users of the applications.
The tool is the first public outcome from PHAWM, which was launched in May 2024 and supported by £3.5m in funding from Responsible AI UK (RAi UK).
It brings together more than 30 researchers from seven leading UK universities with 28 partner organisations to tackle the challenge of developing trustworthy and safe AI systems.
The tool and its accompanying framework, which guides organisations and communities to use the tool effectively, are both publicly available and free to download from the project’s website.
Professor Simone Stumpf, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, leads the PHAWM project. She said: “Generative and predictive AI applications have the potential to give organisations valuable new ways to deliver improved services for end users. They are already influencing decisions in areas including housing, employment, finance, policing, education, and healthcare.
“However, they can be afflicted by flaws like bias and inaccuracies. In order to avoid building AI applications which enforce unfair outcomes in critical services, they must be carefully monitored and regularly audited by humans.
“Until now, those audits are usually conducted by people with a deep understanding of the processes which drive AI, but who may lack insight into the social or cultural impacts those systems may create. There is rarely an opportunity for people who will regularly use or will be affected by AI decision-making to help guide their development.
“Our new workbench tool is designed to help organisations create better, fairer, more transparent AI systems by providing diverse perspectives on AI applications which might otherwise go unexamined.”
The tool and accompanying guiding framework has been developed through extensive co-design workshops with the project’s partners and other stakeholders in the health and cultural heritage sectors. These sectors are two of the four areas that the PHAWM project was established to investigate, alongside media content and collaborative content generation.
The PHAWM tool works by systematically gathering diverse perspectives on an organisation’s current or prospective AI application through a four-stage auditing process.
First, the audit instigator is guided to provide information about the AI system in accessible, non-technical language.
Secondly, they invite relevant stakeholders, including users of the system and the people the systems’ decisions will affect such as the public or patients for health AI applicatons to participate in the auditing process.
Next, the audit participants are guided to align the audit with their concerns and lived experience of the AI application’s impact in their daily lives or profession. The tool and framework then help participants identify potential positive and negative impacts, create metrics to measure them, and assess whether the AI application under audit is capable of meeting their criteria. The AI application will receive a pass or fail grade based on the audit criteria set by each participant.
Finally, the audit instigator collects the data and insights from the audit participants, identifying areas of concern raised during the process. They can use the diverse perspectives gathered to develop action plans which will inform their decisions about how the AI application is developed or integrated into practice.
Professor Stumpf added: “The tools and processes we’ve developed offer a practical, community‑centred approach to evaluating the real‑world impacts of artificial intelligence. The workbench is a flexible tool which can be used to run in-depth audits of AI applications an organisation has developed in-house,as well as being used to investigate whether off-the-shelf AI applications will meet organisations’ needs before they are purchased.
“Being able to look in such depth and from so many different angles will help organisations make properly informed decisions which assess the balance of risk and reward which comes from adopting new technologies. Our hope is that organisations will be encouraged to use the tool and framework we’ve developed with our partners and stakeholders will enable them to reap the benefits of AI while avoiding any potential for harms.”
UK entrepreneurs are enthusiastically embracing AI as a driver of growth, efficiency, and competitiveness, according to research from e-Residency.
Many founders now see AI as essential to staying ahead, with 70% warning that companies which do not adopt AI risk being outcompeted within five years.
The findings show founders are rapidly building AI into the core of their products and operations and are now calling for stronger digital trust, clearer rules and better access to AI safety and cybersecurity expertise to help them deliver this transformation responsibly.
While the Government has pledged to give 30 million people access to AI skills training, startup leaders warn that these broad initiatives are not yet translating into the specialised technical capabilities they need on the ground to build and scale AI‑first businesses.
Trust Economy
As AI becomes embedded into everyday products and decision‑making, digital trust is fast becoming the passport for global business, increasingly shaping where UK founders feel confident scaling. They’re gravitating towards markets that combine strong reputation with the reliable, AI-ready digital infrastructure that lets them show up for customers every time.
Nearly nine in ten (88%) UK founders say digital trust will decide which startups succeed globally, and 85% view reliable digital infrastructure as vital as physical infrastructure for business continuity. More than four in five (84%) add that digital trust rivals product quality or price in customer decisions.
That belief is grounded in lived experience. In the past year, 73% of founders faced at least one challenge linked to online risk or misinformation. More than a quarter (26%) say AI-generated fakes or profiles have already damaged trust in their sector.
To protect their reputation and compliance in a world where 75% of UK entrepreneurs say most new startups will be AI‑first by 2030, businesses now spend an average of 16% of operational costs on digital trust and security.
For UK entrepreneurs, trust is a survival metric. More than four in five (84%) want governments to take a stronger role in digital resilience, and 78% warn companies ignoring trust risk being excluded from key markets.
New Growth Barriers
For UK startups, operating in a trust-led digital economy is creating new demands on small teams. While founders remain ambitious, shortages in AI, data and cybersecurity skills are making it harder to execute securely, comply with rules and scale with confidence.
About nine in ten (89%) UK founders say skills shortages at home have limited growth, with 29% reporting a critical impact over the past year.
Cybersecurity (80%) emerges as the sharpest skills gap, a critical capability for keeping the UK competitive in its digital transition.
About four in ten (37%) cite financial insecurity linked to business survival as a key challenge, while 34% struggle to balance family or personal life with founder responsibilities.
Nearly one in five (18%) say isolation and lack of mentorship are ongoing obstacles to growth.
“UK founders are asking for the right foundations to realise their AI potential. Without that, the UK risks seeing its most ambitious startups build and base their companies elsewhere,” Liina Vahtras, Managing Director at e-Residency said.
“The starting point for those foundations is secure digital identity. e‑Residency shows how this future can work in practice: digital trust starts with giving every founder a digital identity they can rely on, so they can create and run companies remotely with seamless compliance and access to wider talent, spending more time innovating with AI and less time battling bureaucracy.
“For UK founders, AI creates the opportunity, but trusted digital first systems will determine who can truly go global.”
Which?, the consumer watchdog, is applying to withdraw its lawsuit against Qualcomm, the chipmaker, which claimed it had broken competition laws leading to higher prices for smartphone buyers.
The lawsuit was brought on behalf of 29 million UK Apple and Samsung smartphone users at the Comepetition Appeal Tribunal, alleging that Qualcomm had coerced the two phone manufacturers into signing licensing agreements that would favour the chipmaker in the market.
The claim alleged that Qualcomm took advantage of its dominant market position when it comes to chipmaking and patents, which would force smartphone manufacuters into higher prices for licensing agreements. These price hikes, Which? claimed, would fall unfairly onto the consumer.
Which? sought damanges for Apple and Samsung smartphone customers who made their purchases between October 1 2015 and January 9 2029, saying that consumers could be owed around £17 per phone if Qualcomm was found at fault.
However, Which? appears to be backtracking on the claims, saying that the evidence presented thus far in the tribunal suggests that Qualcomm would be found to have not coerced the two smartphone manufacturers into signing any such licensing terms that would infringe competition laws or bring up consumer prices.
On Tuesday the consumer advocate said that it would apply for permission to withdraw its claim in the tirbunal entirely, meaning that Qualcomm would not face any payment requirements.
“After more than six years of litigation, including a lengthy trial, the class representative (Which?) has agreed to withdraw its lawsuit against Qualcomm in its entirety, pending approval from the Tribunal,” Qualcomm said in a statement.
“If approved, this would conclude the class representative’s lawsuit, with no payment by Qualcomm.
“The class representative has issued a statement acknowledging, based on the evidence and arguments at trial, the tribunal will find that Qualcomm’s licensing and chipset practices neither infringe competition laws nor result in UK consumers paying higher prices for their smartphones.
“This recognition by the class representative, following a trial on the merits, reaffirms what the courts in the United States have repeatedly held: Qualcomm’s licensing practices are lawful and do not harm competition.”
AI is shrinking attack timelines, identity is now a primary attack vector, and extortion is moving beyond encryption – these are just some of the headline findings from Unit 42’s Global Incident Response Report.
The Palo Alto Network researchers analysed over 750 major cyber incidents across 50 countries in every major industry in their report, which found a striking shift in the speed and methods used by threat actors.
Attackers needed only 72 minutes to move from initial access to data exfiltration in the fastest cases observed by Unit 42, which is four times faster than last year. AI is being employed across various cyber-attack methods, from phishing and reconnaissance, to scripting and operational execution.
The research’s findings on identity attacks coincides with recent patterns showing it’s a growing vulnerability, with identity weaknesses playing a part in about 90% of all of Unit 42’s investigations. Attackers are exploiting stolen credentials to infiltrate systems laterally without triggering security alerts.
Attackers are still exploiting the supply chain; 23% of incidents saw third-party vendors leveraged by attackers.
Complexity is increasing, with 87% of intrusions analysed by Unit 42 showing activity across more than one attack surface, with coordinated activity across different vectors and networks.
Modern attacks are coinciding with everyday workflows more and more, with nearly 48% of cyber incidents including some form of browser-based activity, from email, SaaS use, and web access.
Intriguingly, attackers are abandoning encryption, with a 15% decrease in encryption-based extortion. Attackers instead go straight for disruption and data theft to create immediate pressure on victims, whilst avoiding traditional detection.
Though attacks are getting more sophisticated and complex, over exposure of systems seems to be the real death nail in defense.
Tool sprawl and a myriad of vendors creates overcomplicated defence spectrums, leaving gaps of exposure and making consistency difficult.
These disconnected surfaces mean that attack signals can be missed – even if a detection system blares the alarms, security teams can miss this if they look at the wrong source.
With these expansive defence controls, one identity compromise can allow attackers to penetrate deeper into a system, escalating their privileges and the damage of their attack.
2025 saw a rise in data-theft-driven extortion, sustained pressure from ransomware groups, and a significant increase in attacks that leverage remote access tools rather than technical exploits, Arctic Wolf found in its 2026 Threat Report.
The report analyses hundreds of real-world incident response engagements and threat intelligence findings from the past year, discovering 11-fold growth in data extortion incidents amid the continued dominance of ransomware.
In 2025, ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), and data incidents once again dominated Arctic Wolf’s caseload, accounting for 92% of all incident response engagements. While ransomware remained the most common category, data‑only extortion incidents surged 11x year over year, signalling a strategic shift as threat actors adapt to improved organisational recovery capabilities.
The report also finds that 65% of non‑BEC intrusions stemmed from abuse of remote access technologies like RDP, VPN, and RMM tools; which is a dramatic rise that underscores attackers’ preference for low‑friction entry points.
“Attackers continue to rely on operational efficiency – logging in instead of breaking in, stealing data instead of encrypting it, and exploiting trusted tools rather than complex vulnerabilities,” said Ismael Valenzuela, vice president, Labs, Threat Research & Intelligence, Arctic Wolf.
“Organisations that invested in visibility, identity security, and disciplined remote access controls were far more resilient throughout the year.”
The report found that data incidents increased from 2% to 22% as attackers increasingly focussed on data theft and extortion.
Pre-ransomware activity accounted for 5% of cases, showing that earlier detection and faster response frequently stopped attacks before encryption.
In 77% of ransomware cases, organisations did not pay. When they did, professional negotiation reduced demands by an average of 67%. About two thirds (65%) of non-BEC intrusions stemmed from abuse of RDP, VPN, and PMM tools – up sharply from two years ago – as attackers favoured easy remote access over exploits.
Phishing drove 85% of BEC incidents, rising significantly as AI made fraudulent messages more convincing and scalable.
All top‑exploited CVEs were from 2024 or earlier, emphasising the importance of patching and credential rotation after vulnerability exposure.
“We continue to see that early detection completely changes the outcome of an attack,” said Kerri Shafer‑Page, Vice President of Incident Response at Arctic Wolf. “When defenders identify malicious activity before an adversary can detonate ransomware or escalate privileges, the difference in cost, downtime, and business disruption is dramatic. Preparedness allows us to be decisive.”
Enterprises deploying AI systems with excessive permissions are experiencing 4.5x more security incidents than those that enforce least-privilege controls according to a new research report from Teleport. The report warns that most enterprises are dramatically underprepared for the security consequences.
Based on interviews with 205 CISOs, security architects, and platform leaders, The 2026 State of AI in Enterprise Infra finds that AI is rapidly shifting into production infrastructure without identity controls keeping pace, creating a growing and measurable security gap.
The widening gap between AI adoption and AI readiness threatens to undermine the very efficiency gains organisations are chasing.
“AI has broken the camel’s back. The rapidly increasing complexity of computing infrastructure has been putting immense pressure on identity management in recent years. Most organisations have more groups and roles than employees, for example,” said Ev Kontsevoy, CEO at Teleport. “And deploying non-deterministically behaving agents on top of this mess comes with unpleasant consequences.”
The report reveals that AI adoption is already ubiquitous, but governance and identity controls have not kept pace.
While 92% of organisations have near-term AI intiatives in production infrastructure, 85% of security leaders are concerned about AI-related infrastructure risk.
With about six in ten (59%) of those surveyed already having experienced, or strongly suspecting, an AI-related security incident, security risks are already prevelant.
Seven in ten (70%) say that AI systems already have more access than a human in the same role, with 69% agreeing that identity management must fundamentally change to support AI safely.
Strikingly, access scope — not AI sophistication or organizational maturity — was the strongest predictor of security outcomes. Organizations with over-privileged AI systems reported a 76% incident rate, compared to just 17% among those that limited AI to only the privileges needed for the task at hand.
This gap reflects a deeper, potentially systemic, identity risk. Over-privileged AI systems are typically deployed on fragmented identity architectures built on static credentials and duplicated service accounts. As AI operates continuously across tools and environments, this identity fragmentation and secrets sprawl dramatically amplify the blast radius of any misconfiguration or compromise.
“The data is clear,” said Kontsevoy. “It’s not the AI that’s unsafe. It’s the access we’re giving it.”
Overconfidence Could Be Making Things Worse
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the study found that organizations most confident in their AI deployments experienced more than twice the incident rate of less confident peers.
Meanwhile, visibility remains dangerously low, with 43% saying AI makes infrastructure changes without human oversight at least monthly. Nearly one in ten (7%) don’t know how often AI is making autonomous changes at all.
As AI systems move toward agentic behavior — planning, executing, and chaining actions independently — these gaps are expected to widen. About four in five (79%) organisations are already evaluating or deploying agentic AI, yet only 13% feel highly prepared for it.
The research points to a clear conclusion: identity is the control plane for AI security. When organiations deploy AI on top of infrastructure that relies upon static credentials and fragmented identity systems, the risk grows exponentially.
A prerequisite is deploying a unified identity layer that removes identity fragmentation and secrets sprawl.
The need to make this transition is evident in the data which shows that two thrids (67%) of organisations still rely on static credentials for AI systems.
Static credentials have been shown to correlate with a 20-point increase in incident rates. Further, only 3% have automated, machine-speed controls governing AI behaviour.
Without unified identity, AI systems inherit broad, persistent permissions — amplifying the blast radius of any failure or compromise.
The British Transport Police (BTP) is trialling the use of live facial recognition (LFR) at railway stations at selected transport hubs in London.
The transport authrity say the pilot will run for six months to evaluate the effectiveness of LFR on railways, its impact on public safety, and the public’s response to the technology.
The technology is already in use, and was first deployed on 11 February at London Bridge railway station, though BTP says that all future operations using the technology will be announced prior to its rollout.
The transport authority says that the LFR deployent will be “inelligence led,” and only those on identified to match a predetermined watchlist will trigger an alert. An officer is meant to analyse the ‘match’ generated by the system’s algorithm before an indiviual is approached.
The Police will use the NEC Neoface M40 algorithm which was indepentently tested by the National Physical Laboratory which recommended settings of the algorithm that “minimises the likelihood of any false positive indication and adverse impact on equitability.”
The Police also said that they will produce “highly visible signage” where LFR is used as well as detailed plans to the pubic is aware of the tech’s operations. The public will also be provided altenrative routes if they do not want to enter the “recognition zone,” the Police said.
People not on the predetermined watchlist will not be identified by the LFR, and their images and biometric data will be deleted immediately, the Police said.
The trialling of LFR across different transport hubs in the UK was decided before the Home Office’s consultation on the controversial technology ended, which asked the public to share their views on how the technology should be rolled out and regulated.
The current government is planning a major police overhaul, putting new technologies like LFR and AI into primary focus as the government seeks to shore up the police force with innovative technologies.
The rollout is particularly controversial as there is a lack of concrete laws regulating the police force’s use of the technology – instead a “patchwork lof common law, data protection, and human rights legislation” exists to establish the legal basis of the technology, and guide its deployment by authorities, the Home Office said in its consultation.
While the BTP will abide by all legal standards when it comes to ethics and privacy, the lack of formal, specific legal basis leaves much to interpretation, which is the concern of human rights groups questioning the legality, safety, and ethics of the technology.
This leaves police forces unsure on how to rollout the technology – in 2020, for instance, the South Wales Police was found to have been using LFR unlawfully due to a lack of indescretion, according to the Court of Appeal.
But the appropriate level of descretion has yet to be laid out in laws or regulation, which brings to question why the rollout is going ahead before findings from the consultation have been published.
Business owners are being urged to “lock the door” on cyber-crminals as the UK government launches a new campaign to provide practical ways for organisations to protect themselves from common online threats.
Appearing across social media, podcasts, radio and business networks, the campaign aims to reach busy small and medium sized businesses where they are. It will encourage them to engage with the government’s Cyber Essentials scheme which sets out clear practical steps they can take to protect themselves from the most common cyber-attacks.
This includes keeping software up to date and controlling who has access to accounts and data to immediately boost their cyber resilience. Many cyber incidents exploit these basic weaknesses, which Cyber Essentials is designed to protect against.
It comes as new figures show the scale of threat facing businesses. Significant cyber incidents cost an average of £195,000 and half of all small businesses have suffered a cyber breach or attack in the last 12 months.
Last year, 92% fewer insurance claims were made by organisations with Cyber Essentials in place – proving it works. Certification can also help businesses win government contracts, and eligible firms can access free cyber insurance, including a 24/7 emergency helpline, provided by the Cyber Essentials delivery partner.
“No business is out of reach from cyber-criminals. SMEs play a vital role in our economy, and business owners work incredibly hard to build something valuable, but too many still assume cyber criminals only go after big brands,” cyber security minister Baroness Lloyd said.
“The reality is criminals look for easy opportunities, and without basic protections in place, any business of any size can become a target.
“I know smaller firms don’t have large IT teams, and that is exactly why Cyber Essentials matters. It provides a straightforward checklist to lock the door on cyber criminals, without needing specialist expertise. Cyber risk is business risk, just like fire or theft, and the protections are just as essential. I urge businesses to take action and adopt Cyber Essentials now.”
The Cyber Essentials focuses on five key protections: firewalls; secure configuration; software updates; user access control; and malware protection.
New research published today also reveals the scale of the cyber threat facing UK businesses more broadly. The Cyber Security Longitudinal Survey shows 82% of medium and large businesses suffered a cyber incident in the past year – meaning no business, regardless of size, is out of reach from cyber criminals.
More organisations are recognising the benefits of taking action. Adoption of Cyber Essentials among larger companies has risen from 23% to 30%, reflecting a growing understanding of the need for basic cyber protections.
With uptake improving among larger firms, there is clear momentum but more still needs to be done. This campaign is targeted at smaller businesses, encouraging them to adopt baseline protections like Cyber Essentials, strengthening supply‑chain security while supporting SME resilience, continuity, and long‑term growth.
Some of Scotland’s leading start-up tech companies will have the chance to secure orders and build contacts in New York and New Jersey under an expansion of the Techscaler International programme.
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes announced that the Programme’s first visit to the east coast of the United States will take place this year, alongside trips to Asia and California’s Silicon Valley.
Each will involve a small number of growth-stage companies which are best placed to secure contracts, investment and commercial traction.
The Deputy First Minister announced the programme during a visit to the Edinburgh offices of Codebase, which manages the Techscaler initiative, to meet business founders who have benefitted from previous international trips.
They included Tiny Air co-founder Cris Helson, who secured orders for his company’s pioneering surgical cleaning technology following a visit to Singapore as part of the 2025 programme.
“Techscaler International is about helping open doors for the enormous business talent we have in this country,” Forbes said.
“It is always inspiring to hear how those that have taken part in the programme have seized the opportunity to capture new business and take advantage of new international connections.
“Building on the success of the first pilot programme in Silicon Valley in 2024, the initiative has been continually refined to serve the needs of our entrepreneurs and respond to their feedback. This expanded programme reflects the value it is bringing to some of the country’s most innovative companies.”
A full calendar of events has been developed to help business founders plan their approach to international engagement. They include:
Japan (April 2026)
New York and New Jersey (June 2026)
Silicon Valley (October 2026)
Singapore (November 2026)
Hong Kong and China (December 2026)
“Techscaler supports tech founders at every stage of their journey, with an increasing focus on scaleups and providing Scotland’s most ambitious founders with a launchpad for global success, and so it’s encouraging to see the expansion of the international programmes this year,” co-founder and executive vice chair at CodeBase Steven Drost said.
The UK is set to champion the transformative potential of artificial intelligence to drive economic growth, create high-quality jobs and modernise public services as global leaders gather for the AI Impact Summit in India this week.
Led by Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy and AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, the UK delegation will work with international partners to accelerate practical uses of AI that improve everyday life, from faster medical diagnoses and more personalised education to more efficient local services and new high-quality employment opportunities.
The UK will highlight its commitment to turning innovation into impact through collaboration between government, academia and industry, with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology playing a central role in advancing responsible adoption and investment.
The summit builds on momentum from previous global AI gatherings and reflects a shared shift toward delivery, ensuring AI boosts productivity, supports sustainable development and expands opportunity beyond advanced economies
“The UK is leading the way on AI innovations and expertise. We are rightly a magnet for investment and talent from across the globe,” UK deputy prime minister David Lammy said.
“This Summit is an important moment in determining how we can work together with our international partners to unlock the full benefits and potential of AI, while baking in robust and fair safety standards that protect us all.
“We are turning ambition into action to deliver UK jobs, growth and prosperity. The business leaders joining us in India will build concrete partnerships and secure investment that delivers opportunity for working people in the UK, India and across the globe.”
This week, Lammy is expected to speak on a panel discussing unlocking oportunity through global languages where he will announce new UK support for an African Language Hub, enabling AI to work in 40 African languages, making the tech accessible to millions.
This is one of three new initatives being announced as part of the £58 million AI for Development programme, which includes funding for responsible AI innovation across South and Southeast Asia, and a compute hub at the University of Cape Town.
“AI is the defining technology of our generation – and we’re determined to make sure it delivers for everyone,” UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said.
“It can cut waiting times, transform public services, create new jobs and give hard working communities a fresh start – and that’s exactly the message we’re taking to the summit.
“It is central to our plans for delivering national renewal but its benefits can’t and shouldn’t be reserved by the few.
“That’s why the UK is leading from front, pushing a global vision for AI that helps people everywhere to learn more, earn more, and shape the future on their terms.”
The rapid expansion of renewable energy is being used to meet rising electricity demands rather than displacing fossil fuels, according to new research by the University of Sussex.
Energy-hungry artificial intelligence data centres and greater use of air conditioning in a fast-heating world are among several factors threatening to undermine the climate gains made by renewables, according to the paper published in Nature Reviews Clean Technology.
Researchers from Sussex and Vienna’s Central European University found record growth in solar power in the first three quarters of 2025. For the first time this rise in clean electricity outpaced global growth in electricity demand, yet the researchers warn this fragile balance is now starting to tip back the other way.
Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global temperature rises, global wind and solar power generation has grown rapidly, yet emissions from the power sector have continued to rise as electricity demand has grown even faster. Analysis of global energy demand in 2025 found artificial-intelligence data centres as a major driver, alongside increased use of air conditioning as people struggle to cope with hotter temperatures.
Electrification of transport and consumer trends such as bigger cars were also highlighted as culprits. The report found these pressures are eroding efficiency gains made by individual countries. Projections to 2030 warn that increases in electricity use could consume most new renewable supply unless proactive measures are taken to limit demand.
“Renewables are scaling at record speed, but demand growth from data centres, cooling and transport is running just as fast,” said Professor Felix Creutzig, Bennett Institute Chair at the University of Sussex. “We need policies that curb unnecessary energy use and shape demand so that clean electricity can have the intended effect of cutting emissions from fossil fuels.”
The report cites evidence from the European Union and major cities showing that demand reduction isn’t necessarily a matter of human hardship, and can coincide with economic growth and wellbeing for citizens through efficiency measures and urban planning that reduces dependence on cars. The authors conclude that aligning renewables with demand-side strategies is now central to meaningful decarbonisation.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer says his government will take “immediate action” to make the online world safer for children following calls from MPs and the public that the government is not moving fast enough to protect children online.
Speaking to parents and young people, the Prime Minister said that this government will act at pace to keep kids safe online as they navigate a digital world that did not exist a generation ago, and one that is shaped by powerful platforms, addictive design and fast-moving technologies.
Included in the proposals is the closure of a legal loophole to force all AI chatbot providers to abide by illegal content duties in the Online Safety Act.
Starmer also said that the government is taking new legal powers to lay the groundwork for immediate action following its consultation – set to launch next month – on children’s wellbeing online. This means the government can create new legal powers to take action, rather than wait for parliamentary legislation to introduce new regulations or protections.
The consultation will query on such topics as setting a minimum age limit for social media, and restricting features like infinite scrolling that can be harmful to children, as noted in the consultation.
The government is looking to consult with tech companies to find ways to safeguard children from sending or receiving illegal and illicit images.
The consultation will also confront the full range of risks children face online. This includes examining restrictions on children’s use of AI chatbots, as well as options to age restrict or limit children’s VPN use where it undermines safety protections and changing the age of digital consent. It also plans on strengthening the protection of online data following a child’s death to better aid in investigations.
“As a dad of two teenagers, I know the challenges and the worries that parents face making sure their kids are safe online,” prime minister Keir Starmer said.
“Technology is moving really fast, and the law has got to keep up. With my government, Britain will be a leader not a follower when it comes to online safety.
“The action we took on Grok sent a clear message that no platform gets a free pass.
“Today we are closing loopholes that put children at risk, and laying the groundwork for further action.
“We are acting to protect children’s wellbeing and help parents to navigate the minefield of social media.”
Nearly all (97%) young people in the UK, aged 8 to 17, are using AI tools, with the majority (58%) saying the technology makes their lives better.
However, three in five (60%) worry that AI may be used to make inappropriate pictures of them, showing the disturbing awareness young people have around malicious AI risks, as well as their juxtaposing views on the technology’s impact on their lives.
This is based on research carried out by Nominet and the UK Safer Internet Centre, which polled 2000 young people and 2000 parents and carers in the UK concerning their feelings surrounding AI.
The research revealed that young people are turning to AI for a range of reasons. About two thirds (64%) say that AI is the best way they can get advice quickly. About two in five (41%) say that their peers are increasingly relying on AI for emotional support and to discuss emotional issues.
Nearly one in seven (14%) turn to AI as a confidant, saying they turn to AI to discuss topics they are not comfortable talking about with anyone else.
Seven in ten (71%) say that AI saves them time, a more practical reason explaining the appeal of AI.
About three quarters (73%) of children say that AI is useful for their studies, with about half (54%) using AI to aid them in their homework or revision. About half (50%) of young people have said that they have seen their peers use AI to complete their school work for them, rather than to help them.
Parents, it seems, are largely unaware of this issue, as only 31% thing that their children are using AI for schoolwork.
Still, parents and young people are quick to realise potential cons to using AI: a third of parents are worried about AI’s effect on their children’s critical thinking. Young people are concerned that AI is making their friends less creative (49%), with 35% fearing the same about themselves.
“Young people wanted us to focus on the safe and responsible use of AI this year, because its adoption into our everyday lives is moving quickly,” Will Gardner, OBE, UK Safer Internet Centre Director, said. ”
“Our research shows how young people are excited by this incredible technology and are using it more than ever across many online services, but they still have concerns, questions and want to learn more to equip themselves to use AI safely and responsibly.
Four out of five councils across the UK say digital connectivity is now a top local priority, with a strong shift toward digital inclusion and an emphasis on practical issues affecting residents, including reliable 4G, digital skills, affordability and device access.
However, there remains a limited understanding of the economic benefits of these measures.
That’s according to the UK Local Government Connectivity Survey 2026 from FarrPoint, which surveyed councils from Scotland, England, and Wales.
The report also reveals that councils are calling for clearer national coordination and earlier engagement from network operators, saying better data and more open communication would help them accelerate rollout and tackle persistent coverage and resilience issues.
Depsite connectivity being a top priority, 15% report a lack of understanding when it comes to the scale of connectivity issues.
Only 5% thought that their region was connected enough, with little remaining to do. None of the respondents, however, thought the rollout of digital infrastructure was fully complete.
This reveals glaring gaps in councils’ understanding of their own connectivity capabilities, with confusion over what needs to be invested and the scale of the issue.
The report also reveals that councils are calling for clearer national coordination and earlier engagement from network operators, saying better data and more open communication would help them accelerate rollout and tackle persistent coverage and resilience issues.
“What’s striking this year is that councils are increasingly moving towards inclusion and day‑to‑day reliability. The conversation is shifting from infrastructure to determining whether people can participate in modern life,” Dr Andrew Muir, CEO of Farrpoint said.
“Connectivity is still a strategic enabler of economic growth, public service reform and regional resilience, but councils say they need clearer signals and stronger partnership from industry and central government if they’re to turn ambition into delivery.”
Gigabit and other priorities
For the fourth year in a row, gigabit broadband has topped local digital priorities, with every council surveyed reporting remaining gaps in coverage. Councils remain particularly focused on tackling inequalities in rural and scattered communities, where physical access continues to lag.
Measuring Impact
Alongside these infrastructure challenges, nine in 10 councils have not yet been able to measure the economic or social impact of improved connectivity. While 70% of councils would like to undertake formal impact assessments, many lack the internal capacity and usable frameworks needed to do so.
Digital Inclusion
Dr Muir added: “Councils are thinking more about digital inclusion, resilience and the wider ecosystem around connectivity. But there is also a gap between ambition and measurement. If we are to make the case for sustained investment, we must become much better at quantifying the impact interventions make.”
Barriers to inclusion remain. Councils identified low digital skills and confidence (31%), affordability (26%) and lack of access to devices (19%) as the biggest challenges to unlocking connectivity benefits. These findings underline that simply building infrastructure does not guarantee progress without parallel investment in capability and uptake.
Mobile
While the prominence of 5G in local strategies remains low, councils are still grappling with mobile coverage frustrations. One in three say that poor mobile reception is the single most common complaint, especially in rural areas. Moreover, many report a disconnect between operator-stated coverage maps and the reality experienced by residents.
Three quarters of respondents also flagged growing concerns around network resilience, particularly in the wake of weather-related outages. However, many were uncertain over where responsibility lies for telecoms infrastructure recovery and contingency planning.
Data centre development remains a relatively low priority for most councils, despite the sector’s recent designation as Critical National Infrastructure. That said, more than a third (35%) of authorities said they are actively trying to attract data centre investment, while a further 25% are working directly with developers. Only 15% of councils reported having conducted formal economic appraisals on the potential benefits of data centre siting.
AI
AI, as alwasys, is an area of evolving interest. While 75% of councils believe artificial intelligence could help improve connectivity delivery and uptake, none reported using AI tools to shape or optimise interventions.
Councils consistently called for earlier engagement from telecoms operators, greater clarity on national policy and rollout plans, and a stronger focus on aligning central government ambitions with local delivery realities.
“Data centres and AI are part of that evolving landscape. Local authorities are engaging with both, but pragmatically,” Dr Muir added.
“They are asking hard questions about infrastructure readiness, energy, resilience and community benefit. That level of scrutiny reflects a sector that understands connectivity is critical national infrastructure and must be planned accordingly.”
Ofcom has fined a pornography company £800,000 for failing to put in place robust age checks as required under the Online Safety Act.
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, sites that allow pornographic material must use highly effective age assurance to prevent children from readily accessing that content.
Within days of this duty coming into force in July 2025, Ofcom launched investigations into the providers of dozens of adult sites, including Kick Online Entertainment SA.
Following investigation, Ofcom has fined Kick Online Entertainment SA £800,000 for failing to comply with these age check requirements between 25 July and 29 December 2025.
In response to Ofcom’s enforcement action, the company has since implemented a method of age assurance that is capable of being highly effective.
Ofcom is imposing a further fine of £30,000 on the platform for failing to provide information when requested by Ofcom, which is also mandated by the Online Safety Act. The regulator will fine Kick Online Entertainment SA a further £200 a day until the company responds, or over a period of 60 days, whichever is sooner.
“Having highly effective age checks on adult sites to protect children from pornographic content is non-negotiable. Any company that fails to meet this duty – or engage with us – can expect to face robust enforcement action, including significant fines,” Suzanne Cater, director of enforcement at Ofcom, said.
“We continue to investigate other sites under the UK’s age check rules and will take further action where necessary.”
This is not the first time an adult content platform has been fined for ill equipped age verification methods under the Online Safety Act.
AVA Group Ltd was fined £1m by the regulator over poor age checks across its 18 different adult sites, for not having adequate age verfication tools, and a further £50,000 for not providing required information to Ofcom.
There has, however, been recent pushback from porn providers amid the controversial rollout of age verification requirements on adult content.
The world’s most popular adult content site, Pornhub has said that it is pulling out of the UK following age checks. Current users who have made accounts with the porn site will still be able to access the site from the UK, but it will no longer take new users from the UK, the porn site said.
Pornhub called the UK’s age verifcation mandate a “failed system” upon announcing its exit from the UK.
Threat actors are increasinly relying on large language models (LLMs) to plan and execute cyber-attacks, new search from Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has found.
The group’s most recent AI Threat Tracker found that state-backed cyber gangs are already emloying AI for cyber espionage and attacks, often turning to Google’s own Gemini models.
Threat groups typically use LLMs to research potentil targets, investigation vulnerabilities, and create and edit code and scripts.
Google’s researchers said that LLMs have “become essential tools” for government-backed threat actors, who use them for “technical reserch, targeting, and the rapid generation of nuanced phishing lures.”
The research found an array of breaches of Google Gemini’s terms of serive by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups using the AI model for cyber-attacks.
Researchers observed mode extraction attacks, which are also known as distillation attacks, on Google’s AI models, where threat actors aimed to gain insights into a model’s underlying reasoning and algorithmic processes.
These insights cn be used to accelerate AI model development, essentially relying on the theft of itnellectual property to create similar AI models that threat actors can manipulate for malicious purposes.
Further, while Google has seen threat actors use Gemini, and other AI models, to power their attacks, GTIG has improved its understanding of how this is done in direct and indirect links between activity in the real world and the misuse of Gemini for malicious purposes.
LLMs were used throughout the attack lifestyle; a China-based threat actor misued AI tools to generate detailed individuals on potnetial targets, while an Iranian-backed actor leveraged several AI tools to augment reconnaissance and social engineering tactics.
Another Chinese-based theat actor use Gemini to investigate vulnerabilities and generate automated testing plans to gather defensive weaknesses. A different threat actor group used Gemini throughout its entire lifecycle, troubleshooting their code, conducting reserch, and creating technical capabilities for their attack.
While threat actors continue to use AI to enhance their cyber-attacks, GTIG is still only seeing experiemntation when it comes to AI-generated malware.
“While we have not encountered experimental AI-enabled techniques resulting in revolutionary paradigm shifts in the threat landscape, these proof-of-concept malware families are early indicators of how threat actors can implement AI techniques as part of future operations,” the researchers said.
There have been advancements in this arena, however, with HONESTCUE malware being found to call on Gemini to generate code for its second stage of attack. While this has yet to be seen in the wild, GTIG believes that a threat actor group is continually testing these capabilities for future attacks.
However, researchers did identify COINBAIT, an AI-generated phishing kit, in November 2025, which GTIG researchers say has signs to being generated using Loveable AI, a vibe coding platform.
The AI Threat Report shows that threat actors continue to find novel ways of using AI to enhance their capabilities and attack efficicacy. While certain tactics, like AI-generated malware, are still in the testing phase, this could soon change as models are continually manipulated for malicious activities.
AI scribes may be saving social workers time on cumbersome paperwork and painstaking admin, but AI bias and prejudice could be permeating across use cases unchecked.
This is according to research from the Ada Lovelace Institute, which found that the rapid roll-out of AI transcription tools in social work is being met with enthusiasm by social workers, with many already reporting benefits from the time saved.
However, the research also finds that these tools are introducing new risks to people and society, such as bias and ‘hallucinations’, that aren’t being fully assessed or mitigated, leaving frontline workers to navigate these challenges on their own.
Researchers at the Institute interviewed 39 social workers with experience of using AI transcription tools, from across 17 local authorities, as well as senior staff members involved in procuring and evaluating them.
The report found that resource constraints in social care are driving widespread piloting, adoption, and evaluation of AI transcription tools.
The institute also found a sad reality: local authorities focus their evaluations on efficiency rather than impact on people who draw on their care.
Almost all of the social workers who reported that using AI transcription tools brings meaningful benefits to their work, but they do not experience these benefits uniformly.
While social workers assume full responsibility for AI transcription tools, perceptions of reliability, accuracy, and the need for oversight (‘human in the loop’) vary significantly.
Further, the Institute found that there is currently no consensus on when it is appropriate to use AI transcription tools in social care.
To mitigate risk amid growing use of AI transcription tools, the report set out a series of recommendations to improve the governance and regulations of these AI innovations.
These include recording the use of AI transcription tools, extending pilots of these tools to include various locations and contexts, and creating context-specific evidence for the benefits of the tools.
Further, the Institute calls on the UK government to create a What Works Centre for AI in Public Services, and calls on a coalition of researchers and policymakers to generate research into the impacts of AI transcription tools.
Social care regulators and local authorities should also work together to produce guidance for the use of these tools, as well as specifying the outcomes and expected impact of procuring these tools so staff can better understand their proper use.
“AI may be able to help make aspects of public services more efficient, and so policymakers should absolutely be looking at how technology can help public sector workers,” Lara Groves, Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute and co-author of the research, said.
“However, delivering time savings is not necessarily the same thing as delivering public benefit, especially if these come at the cost of inaccuracy or unaccountability. In the rush to adopt AI in the public sector, it is essential that policymakers don’t lose sight of the wider risks to people and society and the need for responsible governance.”
CFOs and finance leaders are making decisive shifts in 2026 budget priorities, prioritizing growth-driving functions, technology and artificial intelligence (AI), according to Gartner.
“Sales and IT are expected to see the largest budget increases in 2026, with over half of CFOs planning higher spending, and 28% anticipating double-digit growth in both areas, with marketing close behind,” said Nauman Abbasi, vice president analyst in the Gartner Finance practice.
“The emphasis on sales and marketing reflects their role as growth drivers, while IT budget increases reflect structural needs like rising SaaS costs, digital process expansion and AI-related expenses.”
Conversely, Gartner’s latest 2026 budget benchmarks, based on an October 2025 survey of more than 300 CFOs and finance leaders, show that HR faces the sharpest pullback, with only 29% of CFOs planning increases and 22% expecting cuts, reducing average budget growth from 2.4% in 2025 to 0.7% in 2026 due to reduced hiring and AI efficiency gains.
Enterprises Bet on Technology Over Headcount
Technology budgets are set to rise for 75% of CFOs, and nearly half (48%) plan increases of 10% or more, underscoring the strategic importance of digital transformation, AI adoption and cybersecurity.
“Across industries, technology consistently emerges as the area with the highest budget increase, underscoring its role as the backbone of digital transformation and operational resilience,” said Abbasi. “The average increase across all industries is around 10%, but this ranges from around 15% in the financial services sector to 6% in manufacturing.”
At the same time, after years of compensation-led budget growth, the tide is turning. Pay increases have slowed for three consecutive cycles, dropping from 6.1% in 2024 to 5.4% in 2025, and the moderation will deepen to 4.5% in 2026.
“The real story, however, lies in collapsing headcount growth expectations, from 6% in 2025 to just 2% in 2026 with just 21% of CFOs planning staff increases of 4% to 9%, down from 31% last year,” said Abbasi.
“This marks a structural pivot from labor expansion to optimization driven by automation and AI that deliver productivity gains without proportional increases in headcount.”
Nearly 60% of CFOs plan to increase finance function AI investments by 10% or more in 2026, while another 24% expect gains of 4% to 9%.
Efficiency is the top driver, with 88% of CFOs ranking finance staff productivity among their top three priorities, reflecting the need to automate, shorten cycles and control costs.
AI spending remains in early stages for most, with 47% allocating just 1% to 5% of finance technology spend to AI, but confidence is growing as organizations report early wins in automation and forecasting.
“CFOs recognise that AI is no longer just an experiment—it’s fast becoming a core enterprise capability,” Abbasi added.
“The shift from cautious pilots to committed scale is driven by tangible gains in productivity and decision-making. As AI literacy grows and legacy systems are modernized, we expect to see accelerated investment and deeper integration across finance and the enterprise.”
By 2028, misconfigured AI in cyber physical systems (CPS) will shut down critical national infrastructure in a G20 country, Gartner predicts.
The business and tech insights company defines CPS as engineered systems that orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics to interact with the physical world (including humans).
CPS is the umbrella term to encompass operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS), industrial automation and control systems (IACS), industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robots, drones, or Industrie 4.0.
“The next great infrastructure failure may not be caused by hackers or natural disasters but rather by a well-intentioned engineer, a flawed update script, or a misplaced decimal,” said Wam Voster, VP Analyst at Gartner. “A secure ‘kill-switch’ or override mode accessible only to authorised operators is essential for safeguarding national infrastructure from unintended shutdowns caused by an AI misconfiguration.”
Misconfigured AI can autonomously shut down vital services, misinterpret sensor data or trigger unsafe actions. This can result in physical damage or large-scale service disruption, posing direct threats to public safety and economic stability by compromising control of key systems like power grids or manufacturing plants.
For example, modern power networks rely on AI for real-time balancing of generation and consumption. A misconfigured predictive model could misinterpret demand as instability, triggering unnecessary grid isolation or load shedding across entire regions or even countries.
“Modern AI models are so complex they often resemble ‘black boxes,’” said Voster. “Even developers cannot always predict how small configuration changes will impact the emergent behavior of the model. The more opaque these systems become, the greater the risk posed by misconfiguration. Hence, it is even more important that humans can intervene when needed.”
To mitigate risks, Gartner recommends that chief information security officers (CISOs) must implement Safe Override Modes.
For all critical infrastructure CPS, include a secure “kill-switch” or other override mechanisms accessible only to authorised operators, so humans retain ultimate control even during full autonomy.
Further, CISOs should develop a full-scale digital twin of the systems supporting critical infrastructure for realistic testing of updates and changes to configurations before deployment.
Finally, real-time monitoring should be mandated, with rollback mechanisms for changes made to AI in CPS. Gartner also insists on the creation of national AI incident response teams.
While enterprises are ramping up investment in AI and automation, trust and data challenges continue to slow adoption, according to Alteryx, Inc.
The firm’s research finds a growing disconnect between AI ambition and real-world impact.
Despite heavy investment in AI, most organisations are failing to move AI beyond pilot programs, held back by low trust in AI outputs, poor data quality, and legacy technology that can’t support scale. Fewer than one in four AI pilots successfully operationalise into production.
While nearly half of respondents say they trust AI to automate repetitive tasks, draft content, and monitor systems, fewer trust it for strategic decisions.
Only 28% trust AI to support decision-making, and just 27% trust it to facilitate forecasting or planning, highlighting a significant gap in confidence for high-impact applications.
Nearly half (49%) of leaders cite high-quality, accessible, and well-governed data as the top factor for agentic AI to achieve its full potential.
Business and IT leaders expect responsibility for AI workflows to move away from centralised teams to individual lines of business by 11% over the next three years.
About half (48%) of leaders plan to boost AI spending on AI infrastructure and tools, with 89% maintaining or increasing budgets in 2026. AI platforms now make up a larger portion of data stacks, projected to grow from 33% in 2024 to 51% in three years.
Together, the findings point to a deeper issue behind stalled AI initiatives: trust breaks down when AI is deployed without the business context and logic required to produce consistent and explainable results.
Many organisations are layering generative AI directly on top of raw data sources, leading to hallucinations, inconsistent outputs, and responses that change from one query to the next, undermining confidence in AI for real business decisions.
As a result, organisations should double down on the foundations needed to make AI trustworthy at scale. This includes governed data, defined metrics and workflows that combine the creativity of generative AI with deterministic rules – and the ability for the business to quickly adapt them as needs change. In fact, 28% of leaders plan to prioritise data governance improvements.
“AI adoption is accelerating fast,” said Andy MacMillan, CEO of Alteryx. “Our research shows that compared to a year ago, two-thirds of business and IT leaders are using AI more in their roles. We’re also seeing AI move closer to individual departments.
“Over the next three years, leaders expect responsibility for AI workflows to shift to specific lines of business, rising from 22% today to 33% by 2028. The most advanced organisations are doubling down on improving data quality and integrating AI across their operations.”
A National Cyber Security Centre director is urgening critical national infrastructure (CNI) providers to protect against severe emerging cyber threats in the wake of recent attacks on other government’s CNI.
Director for national resilience at the NCSC, Jonathan Ellison, took to LinkedIn to warn CNI providers to shore up their cyber defences following a malware attack that targeted the energy infrastructure in Poland.
Ellison said that this type of disruptive cyber-attack “may sound far-feteched, but we know it’s not.”
“Incidents like this speak to the severity of the cyber threat and highlight the necessity of strong cyber defences and resilience. Operators of UK critical national infrastructure must not only take note but, as we have said before, act now.”
In the UK, critical national infrastructure includes energy, water, defense, data centres, health, transportation, and telecommunications.
These are especially lucrative targets for cyber threat actors as they are integral to the functioning of a nation and need to be continually operating; disruptions can be dangerous and disasterous, which means that CNI providers may be more tempted to pay off a ransom in order to regain control or access to their services and assets. They can also be targeted to intentially bring these services down in an effort to hurt the economic security and safety of a nation state.
Ellison urged CNI providers to take heed of the NCSC’s advice, guidance, and frameworks in order to mitigate the chances of a cyber-attack as well as any adverse effects.
He pointed to the NCSC’s Cyber Assessment Framework which aimed to help operators and regulators implement cyber resilience, with principles that can help mitigate a severely disruptive attack.
“Risk management, identity and access controls, and threat hunting are all key components of meeting the objectives of the latest iteration,” he said.
Much of the NCSC’s advice centres around increasingly common calls for cyber hygeine, such as patching known vulnerabilites, issuing multi-factor authentication, and adopting secure-by-design principles.
“Risk management, identity and access controls, and threat hunting are all key components of meeting the objectives of the latest iteration,” were also cited as integral cyber protocols by Ellison.
“Although attacks can still happen, strong resilience and recovery plans reduce both the chances of an attack succeeding and the impact if one does,” Ellison said.
The Europen Commission has revealed it is investigating a potential data breach into its central mobile device managing infrastrcuture, which could have exposed thousands of users’ personal details.
The incident occurred on 30 January but was concainted within nine hours, according to the Commission.
“The Commission takes seriously the security and resilience of its internal systems and data and will continue to monitor the situation. It will take all necessary measures to ensure the security of its systems,” it said.
“The incident will be thoroughly reviewed and will inform the Commission’s ongoing efforts to enhance its cybersecurity capabilities.”
The Commission also said that mobile device compromise was not detected in its review of the breach.
The Commission first released a statement on the breach on 6 February, which coincided with notificications from two Dutch authorities that had experienced a similar incident.
These incidents took place on 29 January, affecting the Dutch Council for the Judiciary and the Dutch Data Protection Authority. The 6 February notification said that the Dutch cybersecurity authority was told by Ivanti, the IT service management company, about vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) service.
Further, the Finnish government’s information technology centre said that it discovered a breach targeting its “mobile device management service” on 30 January. As many as 50,000 government workers may have had their data exposed in this breach, the Finnish authority said.
So far, only the Dutch authorities have referenced Ivanti in relation to the breaches.
On 29 January, Ivanti released two zero-day bug patches in EPMM, saying: “We are aware of a very limited number of customers whose solution has been exploited at the time of disclosure.”
The notice warned that successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities “coudl lead to unathenticated remote code execution.”
“While the European Commission haven’t reported any substantial impacts from this breach, it does beg a number of worrying questions surrounding current EPMM deployments,” David Neeson, Deputy SOC Team Lead at Barrier Networks:
“Ivanti have not released a full set of fixes for the EPMM flaws, instead issuing patches while they work on a comprehensive fix in the coming months. It’s not clear whether these had been applied to the EC’s EPMM deployments, and it’s worrying if not, given the patches wouldn’t have required downtime to apply.
“However, the security patches issued by Ivanti will revert when updating to different versions of the software, and customers also require different patches in order to target different versions of EPMM. This may be technically required and a necessary expedient, but it’s a fragmented approach to fixing such severe flaws and arguably leaves customers at substantial risk, much more than a comprehensive update would. Ivanti says that it’s working on such an update, but fixes for these issues alone should warrant something more immediate.
“This form of attack ultimately relies on speed, and on catching targets off-guard. It may be the case that patching was in progress on the EC’s systems, but not applied across all the organisation’s devices, in which case attackers would have been able to access at least some systems.
“The attack also appears highly targeted, affecting only a small number of Ivanti’s customers; the targeting of bodies like the EC could indicate the threat actors are working for political ends. The attackers are no doubt highly motivated, and any other government agencies currently using EPMM, both in the EU and abroad, should ensure their deployments are patched immediately.
“Ivanti have also issued an RPM tool designed to aid in the detection of EPMM breaches, which the company recommends customers run alongside normal security protocols. While this isn’t a preventative, it should at least give a firm indication of specific signals related to the exploitation of these flaws, and customers should make use of this if they suspect a breach has occurred.”
Britain’s tech industry should adopt a pragmatic approach to Sovereign AI that actively backs British AI businesses, giving them clearer routes to scale, win contracts and compete internationally, while retaining control over critical capabilities and continuing to work with global technology partners, according to the head of the UK’s AI trade body.
Speaking after a parliamentary roundtable at the House of Lords, Tim Flagg, Chief Executive of UKAI, said the UK’s competitive advantage lies in pairing strong domestic capability with openness: ensuring UK firms are not locked out of their own market, while remaining deeply integrated into global AI supply chains.
The roundtable, hosted by Lord Clement-Jones, brought together policymakers, industry leaders, academics and investors to examine what “sovereign AI” should mean in practice, from data and compute infrastructure to procurement, skills and governance.
Rather than trying to compete on scale, or build self-sufficiency, participants agreed that sovereignty should be defined by control and resilience: ensuring that critical AI systems, data and services cannot simply be switched off, compromised or made inaccessible due to external dependencies.
The discussion highlighted the UK’s opportunity to chart a distinctive path on AI, one that avoids replicating the hyperscale model or overly rigid regulatory approaches, and instead builds on British strengths in research, trusted institutions, open innovation, regulation, standards and ethical governance.
However, the group also warned of a growing gap between ambition and delivery. In particular, risk-averse procurement practices and default reliance on overseas providers were seen as unintentionally sidelining UK capability, limiting scale-up opportunities for British AI companies and weakening long-term national resilience.
Participants emphasised the need for pragmatism: focusing on smart technical and policy choices, including efficient and open models, secure and low-carbon compute, trusted data access, and governance frameworks that embed privacy and safety by design.
Above all, there was consensus that sovereign AI will only succeed if the fundamentals are addressed: investment, skills embedded in decision-making, credible pathways for UK companies to scale, and sustained attention to data, infrastructure and power.
Tim Flagg, Chief Executive of UKAI, said: “Sovereign AI is no longer an abstract idea about owning everything end to end, it’s about whether the UK retains real control over the AI systems it depends on, ensuring they are both resilient and secure.
What came through clearly was the opportunity to support British businesses to build and scale homegrown solutions, not competing on scale, but delivering innovation.
The UK can lead in building a more responsible AI, collaborating with global partners who share our principles to build services that consumers can trust.”
The roundtable forms part of UKAI’s ongoing work to develop recommendations for the Government on responsible and competitive British AI, positioning the UK as a global benchmark for responsible AI sovereignty that combines innovation, trust and democratic accountability.
“The insatiable demand for AI adoption brings with it huge opportunities, but also substantial cyber risks,” Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at Check Point Software.
“That’s why it’s vital that the UK’s Sovereign AI strategy must have security protocols built in by design rather than as an afterthought. There’s no doubt that AI will be key to unlocking economic growth, but this can only happen with the right guardrails in place to prevent data leakage and hackers from comprising systems.”
Dmitry Tikhomirov, VP, Technology Solutions at EPAM said: “The race for widespread AI adoption is underway, yet many businesses still lack a cohesive plan for effective implementation of this crucial technology.
“Becoming AI-native is about much more than one-off projects, it’s about developing clear goals for improving every aspect of the organisation, from the back office to front facing customer services. It also requires business leaders to work with technology experts, so that deployments are aligned with key goals, including driving efficiencies and improving operations for the long term.”
Raj Abrol, CEO, Galytix said: “Britain is home to some of the world’s finest AI talent, with the next generation of UK scale-ups set to dominate global market. Home-grown AI is also crucial for turbocharging the country’s economy, creating jobs and opportunities for businesses to thrive by harnessing agentic AI capabilities to compete with larger global players.
“In an increasingly complex world, with rising risk and ever-changing regulations, the technology is also crucial for empowering smarter decision-making, supporting strategic risk-management in the banking sector.”
Apple and Google have agreed to certain changes to make their app stores more fair to developers to appease the UK’s markets regulator.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced that the two tech firms have agreed to make suggested changes to how their app stores operate to impove their transparency and fairness to businesses and developers.
This marks the first commitment from the two tech giants the CMA has secured since designating them as having “strategic market status” in smartphone and apps late last year.
This status allocation allows the CMA to have specific conditions for the tech giants’ behaviours and policies to enhance faireness in the market.
The commitments will see Apple and Google review apps in a fair, objective, and transparent way, ensuring that they do not discriminate against apps which directly compete with their own. The tech giants also committed to ranking apps in a fair, objective, and transparent way, and to not favour their own apps.
They must also ensure they safeguard data they gather from developers, and ensure that develoerps can more easily request interoperable access to features and functionality when it comes to Apple’s mobile operating systems.
The CMA will now closely monitor Apple and Google’s rollout of these changes and will report publicly on its findings.
“Following designation of Apple and Google’s mobile platforms in October last year, the CMA has moved swiftly to secure a package of commitments from Apple and Google that will boost the UK’s app economy, giving developers the opportunity and confidence they need to invest and innovate.
“The ability to secure immediate commitments from Apple and Google reflects the unique flexibility of the UK digital markets competition regime and offers a practical route to swiftly address the concerns we’ve identified.
“These are important first steps while we continue to work on a broad range of additional measures to improve Apple and Google’s app store services in the UK, for example by enabling more choice and innovation in digital wallets, boosting the UK’s fintech sector and potentially supporting the roll out of digital IDs.”
Further, the CMA is seeking views on the proposed commitments to be submitted by 3 March.
Discord will start to require age verification globally from all users who wish to access adult content in a controversial move from the online forum.
While UK users are already required to provide age verification to access adult content on Discord in the form of face scans or uploading a form of ID, Discord is moving to take the rules global.
The platform will make “teen-by-default” settings global, meaning that users must prove with facial recognition or ID uploads that they are over 18 to access certain content and services.
Otherwise, users will be able to use Discord as if they are underage, which would prohibit them from seeing direct messages from people they don’t know, view adult content, or unblur sensitive material.
“Nowhere is our safety work more important than when it comes to teen users,” said Discord policy head Savannah Badalich.
“Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s existing safety architecture, giving teens strong protections while allowing verified adults flexibility.”
The move may come as the UK laments the many loopholes in its Online Safety Act’s age requirements, which can be avoided by people who download VPNs and access websites seemingly from countries with less strict regulations to access adult content.
The new rule also faces controversy when it comes to security and privacy – Discord previously admitted that around 70,000 user photo IDs were potentially leaked because a third-party firm used for age verification had been hacked.
The security breach raised alarm bells from privacy experts who had long questioned how age verification methods would keep people’s data secure.
Now, Discord has said that images used to verify user age would be deleted after verification is complete, and would not be stored by them or a third-party. It has also cut ties with the third-party service it used, which suffered the data breach in October last year.
AI will be employed to verifiy user age, through photo ID or through an uploaded video. However, users may have to upload many different forms of ID if the system struggles to assign them an appropriate age category, and users that are incorrectly assigned an age will have to go through an appeals process with Discord.
The idea of “teen-by-default” restrictions and the uploading of personal information has riled up the already sceptical Discord user base.
The platform has around 200 million monthly users, some of which are expressing their disdain for the new requirements on Reddit.
Many are calling out Discord’s recent ID breach fiasco, while one user went so far as to say on Reddit “This is how Discord dies.”
Even if Discord explains the difference in its security measures to mitigate the chances of another data leak, this may not be enough to persuade users to trust the platform.
As online safety measures continue to require more personal information from users, the public is continually questioning where this data is ending up, if it is being sold, and how this data is being kept secure.
While age verification across social media platforms may be becoming the new norm, continuous questioning and loophole-finding by the public means that online safety measures have yet to strike a balance with public trust and privacy concerns.
The UK government is calling on parents to discuss online safety with their children in a new initiative providing parents with practical support to talk to their children with confidence.
Backed by behavioural research and academic insights, new guidance has been made available to parents on safety settings, conversation prompts, and age-appropriate advice for tackling misinformation and harmful content – including ragebait and misogynistic content.
It comes as a response to parents who have been calling out for support on how to navigate their children’s use of social media.
New government-commissioned research released in conjunction with the initiative shows that half of British parents admit having never spoken to their children about harmful online content, despite 90% of 11-year-olds now owning a smartphone.
In a poll of over one thousand UK parents, most said they feel confident they understand online platforms – yet a quarter felt they don’t know what their child is seeing.
Over half of British parents also said they haven’t come across any resources to help them navigate these conversations. Nearly three quarters of parents have said they would feel comfortable correcting misinformation if properly equipped.
The campaign is launching alongside a National Converstion and consultation on children’s digitial wellbeing, with the government engaging directly with parents and children across the country to shape longer-term measures.
“I know many parents are worried about what their children see and do online – often out of sight, and at times beyond their control,” tech secretary Liz Kendall said.
“We’re launching a new campaign to support parents and give them practical tools to have regular, open conversations with their children about what they see and how they interact online.
“We are determined to give children the childhood they deserve and prepare them for the future. That is why we are supporting parents with this campaign and launching a consultation on how young people can live and thrive in the age of social media.”
The hub encourages parents to explore the internet together with their children and ask open questions, such as “How does this post make you feel?”, “Who shared this content?” and “Why do you think they posted it?”.
Evidence shows boys are particularly at risk of being algorithmically served misogynistic and harmful content, often without seeking it out. The campaign’s emphasis on building critical thinking skills is designed to help parents talk openly about this kind of material before harmful attitudes take root.
Scam adverts are making a huge profit for social media platforms, which gained £430 million off fraudulent ads targeting users in the UK in 2025.
Investigations from Juniper Research commssioned by challenger bank Revolut, found that UK social media users saw on average 185 scam adverts a month, which lost them a collective £44 million.
The UK was found to lead Europe when it comes to victims of fraudulent ads, with nearly 11% of the total European revenue from the practice coming from adverts targeted to a UK audience.
In Europe, social media firms profited around £4.4 billion a year from scam ads targeting their user base, with fraudulant ads running rampant across Facebook, Instagram, and X.
The issue is pervasive, with around 10% of all social media advertising profit in Europe stemming from fraudulent ads.
The revenue raised by social media firms from these scam ads is also on the rise, with the £430 million raised in the UK in 2025 represented a 56% increase on the profit gained in 2022.
According to Juniper Research, the problem is so insidious because of the way socail media platforms review ads; verification on an ad usually only takes place once the ad is paid for and published, leaving a window for fraudsters to target real users before their ad is taken down, if this happens at all.
If the system does not change, Juniper Reserch claims that social media platforms could gain nearly £9bn from scam adverts by 2030.
It is no wonder that Revolut would commission a study into the problem – the prolific fintech has long put pressure on social media companies to take responsibility for the rise of online scams.
Other banks have also called out social media firms for dropping the ball and passing the buck onto financial services firms. In the case of certain types of scams, like push payment fraud, victims are often reimbused by their payment account provider, meaning that banks are footing the bill for these scams while organisations like Meta and X rake in ad revenue.
Welcome to January 2026’s edition of Movers & Shakers.
Scottish tech hit the ground running in the new year, with an array of C-suite appointments in top finance roles, lucrative partnerships strengthening the ecosystem, and expansions set to make Scotland a force to be reckoned with in 2026.
While the year may just be starting, Scotland’s businesses have already set high expectations for the rest of the year by attracting a range of expansions into the nation, with top talent set to lead transformation and evolution in the sector.
The days are just starting to get a bit longer, and Scottish tech’s 2026 is starting off bright!
All that and more coming up.
Partnerships
Johnston Carmichael Partners With STAC to Back Scots Startups
Johnston Carmichael, the Scottish-founded accountancy and advisory firm, has announced a strategic partnership with Glasgow’s Smart Things Accelerator Centre (STAC) to support the next generation of tech entrepreneurs in building viable businesses.
STAC, an industry‑led accelerator for product‑driven startups, runs an 18‑month programme that blends mentorship, investment readiness, and access to specialist facilities to help founders launch and scale competitive companies.
Under the new partnership, Johnston Carmichael will work with all thirty-five startups enrolled in STAC’s current programme, delivering hands‑on support across core business essentials, including guidance on finance, tax, and fundraising.
Edinburgh’s brass neck and KMA Marketing Ink Strategic Partnership
Tech content and communications consultancy brass neck has signed a new strategic partnership with common-sense marketing consultancy KMA Marketing to boost the capabilities and drive the growth of each business.
Operating out of Edinburgh, but with clients spread across the UK, brass neck and KMA Marketing will support organisations across the full content, marketing and PR spectrum, including owned and earned media content creation and placement, thought leadership campaigns and strategy.
The two organisations will initially provide Droplet NeverTrust™, the secure vault company, with marketing and PR support.
A Scottish hospitality tech firm has signed a trans-Atlantic partnership which will help hotels win lost room sales back from third-party booking sites.
Hop Software, co-founded by Highland hoteliers, has penned a partnership which will see its award-winning Property Management System teamed with the metasearch expertise of leading Utah GCommerce firm, Metadesk.
The partnership will enable hotels and resorts to increase direct room bookings by giving them an optimised presence on key platforms such as Google Hotel Ads, TripAdvisor and Trivago.
Google Hotel ads, integrated into Google apps like Maps and Travel account for between 65% and 85% of all hotel search traffic, globally, and online booking sites spend billions to maintain a dominant presence.
Appointments
Scottish National Investment Bank Appoints New CEO
The Scottish National Investment Bank has appointed David Ritchie as its new Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Al Denholm, who has retired after serving in the role since early 2023.
Serving as the Bank’s chief strategy officer since October 2024, Ritchie helped design and launch the organisation five years ago as one of the national investment bank’s first employees.
Originally an economist by training, before joining the Bank, Ritchie was employed by the Scottish Government and advised ministers in several roles, including as head of the energy industries and hydrocarbons divisions.
Bank of Scotland Appoints New Glasgow & West Area Lead
Bank of Scotland has announced the appointment of Alison Scott as Area Director for Glasgow and the West of Scotland, underscoring its commitment to driving business growth and prosperity across the region.
Scott will lead a team of experienced Relationship Directors and Relationship Managers and will support a diverse range of sectors including professional services, hospitality, manufacturing, retail and technology.
With more than 20 years of experience in commercial banking, Scott joins Bank of Scotland from Barclays, where she held the role of Relationship Director for Glasgow.
The Scotland team of growth capital investor BGF, has promoted several members of its senior Edinburgh-based team, underpinning Scotland’s centrality to its wider strategy.
Patrick Graham, regional partner, who has grown and led the Scotland team by overseeing £400m of investment across 60 companies, will extend his regional investment partner responsibilities beyond Scotland and Ireland to include South West England and Wales.
With over 10 years of experience in BGF’s investment and portfolio teams across Scotland and Ireland, working directly with over 20 company boards, Graham Clarke will step up to regional portfolio partner and oversee BGF’s portfolio across Scotland, Ireland, South West England and Wales. He will also join BGF’s Investment Committee and Leadership Team.
Kick ICT Group Appoints New Chief Executive Officer
Kick ICT Group has announced the appointment of Steven Brown as its new Chief Executive Officer.
Steven brings extensive senior leadership experience from across the technology sector, having held leadership roles at both UK and international organisations, including Telefónica Tech, Incremental Group and Redspire Ltd. Across these organisations, he has built and led high-performing teams, supported customer-led growth strategies, and delivered sustained growth in complex, fast-moving technology environments.
He brings 15 years of expertise across the Microsoft ecosystem, alongside a broad and well-rounded background spanning technology delivery, strategy, operations, customer service and sales.
Angel Capital Scotland Unveils New Board and Chair
Angel Capital Scotland (ACS) has unveiled a refreshed board lineup and announced the appointment of Archangels’ joint managing director Niki McKenzie as its new chair.
Coming on the heels of Margaret Morton’s appointment as ACS’s first CEO last September, the new board brings together figures from angel investment, entrepreneurship, and economic research, who ACS said will help deliver the organisation’s strategy over the coming years.
Acting as chair, McKenzie brings over fourteen years of experience with Archangels, as well as sixteen years in banking and structured finance with KPMG and Lloyds Banking Group, and as a chartered accountant, has overseen investments across Scotland’s technology and life sciences sectors, guiding portfolio companies.
Perth Fintech Miconex Appoints New Chief Digital Officer
Fintech Miconex has announced the appointment of Idong Usoro as chief digital and operations officer as it continues its global scale up journey.
An experienced technology and business leader and on the back of recent tenures at the helm of Revenue Scotland, Abbeyfield, and global awarding organisation, NEBOSH, Idong will lead on driving digital maturity, investment and operational transformation at the Perth based fintech, following 7 years of supporting Miconex in a strategic advisory capacity.
Idong brings decades of business and technology experience to Miconex, having worked internationally with private, public and third sectors, enterprise technology providers and research institutes in overseeing the execution of commercial strategies, the delivery of corporate and technology transformations and the deployment of scientific and research innovation to businesses and communities.
Glasgow’s Nami Surgical Names New CEO Amid £1.9m Funding Round
Glasgow-based ultrasonic surgery specialist Nami Surgical has appointed Nikki Palfrey as CEO while completing its latest investment round.
The company is targeting the global robotic-assisted surgery market with its ultrasonic technology, with the funding supporting the company’s transition from advanced development to commercialisation.
Nami develops high-performance miniaturised ultrasonic scalpels; its platform has been engineered for integration into articulated, wristed surgical robotic instruments, addressing growing demand for compatibility with next-generation robotic systems.
KPMG strengthens North-east audit team with director promotion
KPMG UK has promoted Chris Brown to the role of audit director in its Aberdeen office, as the firm continues to invest in strengthening its audit practice in the North-east of Scotland.
Chris will play a key role in supporting audit clients across the region, working closely with businesses operating in sectors including energy, infrastructure and the wider local economy.
His promotion forms part of a series of recent investments in KPMG’s Aberdeen audit team, reflecting the firm’s long-term commitment to the region. KPMG has also promoted Chris Stout to audit senior manager, as well as Akosua Asomaning-Agyei, Mona Trofin and Yusuf Madi to audit manager roles within the Aberdeen office.
New NHS Lanarkshire innovation leadership team will ‘help forge dynamic future’ for the region
The third largest health board in Scotland recently announced that it would be joined by Professor W Gordon Mackay as new Director of Research, Innovation and Academic Partnerships, and Stacey Rooney as Head of Research and Innovation.
The additions are expected to help lead the development of new treatments and policies which improve patient outcomes across Lanarkshire’s 655,000 population.
Professor ‘Gordie’ Mackay took up his post – the first of its kind for NHS Lanarkshire – on 5 January while Stacey joined in the latter part of last year.
Innovation Commercialisation Manager at InnoScot Health, Frances Ramsay said: “We are in no doubt that Gordie and Stacey will help forge a dynamic, forward-looking future for the region’s patients while also inspiring staff.”
Bank of Scotland owner Lloyds Banking Group appoints new Group Ambassador for Scotland
Lloyds Banking Group, owner of Bank of Scotland and Scottish Widows, has appointed Emma Noble as Chair of its Scottish Executive Committee and new Group Ambassador for Scotland.
In her new role, Noble will focus on supporting Scotland’s sustainable economic growth and on improving investment in the housing sector.
Noble will lead a team of senior colleagues and work closely with local policymakers, businesses, charities and community organisations to help address some of Scotland’s key opportunities and challenges. The Ambassador role is part of the Group’s mission to help Scotland and the rest of the UK thrive and to support development across the nations and regions.
Expansions
Zinc Group announces major UK expansion across Glasgow
Zinc Group, a leading UK Credit Management, debt recovery and customer engagement specialist, has announced a significant expansion across both its operational centres in Scotland and England, representing a major investment in its people, clients, and service capability for 2026 and beyond.
Beginning early 2026, Zinc will expand its Glasgow offices by taking over all remaining space within its existing building—six floors in total, including a lower ground level.
The company is currently upgrading facilities, introducing modern workspaces and new furniture, and creating improved colleague environments including an on-site canteen and breakout area. Two floors will be developed as a dedicated white-label operational hub for two of Zinc’s major UK utility clients, providing increased capacity and tailored brand support.
Glasgow’s Space Sector Grows as Simera Sense Brings High-Tech Manufacturing to Clyde Gateway
Simera Sense, which has a global footprint with premises in South Africa, Belgium and France, will open a high-value electronics assembly lab and office at EastWorks in Dalmarnock – a flagship location within Clyde Gateway’s growing innovation ecosystem.
This move reinforces EastWorks as a Deep Tech Hub at the heart of Clyde Gateway Innovation, where a cluster of pioneering businesses is already thriving. Companies such as Utopi, HyImpulse, Acumen Cyber, BRE and Verdant Energy have chosen Clyde Gateway for its cutting-edge facilities and collaborative environment, making the area one of Scotland’s most exciting destinations for technology and advanced manufacturing.
Worldwide sovereign cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) spending is forecast to total $80 billion in 2026, a 35.6% increase from 2025, according to Gartner, Inc. a business and technology insights company.
“As geopolitical tensions rise, organisations outside the U.S. and China are investing more in sovereign cloud IaaS to gain digital and technological independence,” said Rene Buest, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner. “The goal is to keep wealth generation within their own borders to strengthen the local economy.”
“Governments will remain the main buyers to meet digital sovereignty needs, followed by regulated industries and critical infrastructure organisations, such as energy and utilities and telecommunications,” said Buest.
Regionally, Middle East and Africa (89%), Mature Asia/Pacific (87%) and Europe (83%) are projected to record the highest growth in sovereign cloud IaaS spending in 2026.
While China and North America are forecast to be No 1 and No 2. in spending in 2026 at $47 billion and $16 billion respectively, growth for both will be in the 20 percent range. Europe is forecast to surpass North America in sovereign cloud IaaS spending in 2027.
Geopatriation to Provoke Cloud Provider Shift
Geopatriation is becoming a reality. Gartner estimates that due to an increased desire for geopatriation projects, sovereign cloud IaaS spending will shift 20% of current workloads from global to local cloud providers.
In addition, 80% of the sovereign cloud IaaS spend will come from net new digital solutions or legacy workloads waiting to be migrated to a cloud environment.
Hyperscalers face mounting pressure as local cloud providers gain share and governments demand greater platform regionalisation to meet regulatory and national security requirements.
“To compete for local customers’ cloud business, large cloud providers must seriously acknowledge the sovereignty concerns and requirements per country, and act accordingly. Solely treating digital sovereignty as a pure security, regulatory and compliance topic is not enough,” said Buest.
Debate surrounding the cost and benefits of hyperscale data centres continues to heat up as Edinburgh councillors reject plans to build a data centre in the capital city.
City of Edinburgh Council unanimously rejected plans to build a data centre in the South Gyle site which formally hosted Royal Bank of Scotland offices over concerns that the planning application did not adequately address issues surrounding carbon emissions or environmental impact.
The plans, submitted by Shelborn Drummond Ltd, detailed a 210 megawatt-capable data centre that promised to be “green” and powered with renewable energy, with “modern cooling technology” allowing it to use less energy than typical data centres.
However, the council did not request an environmental impact assessment, as is typical with most data centre applications.
This sparked controversy and disappointment from environmental groups, which were not only concerned about the data centre’s impact on the climate, but its ecological impact on the local land.
Action to Protect Rural Scotland, an environmental charity, warned that the diesel-powered backup generators that would be used in the event of a power failure, would have a detrimental impact on Scotland’s net zero goals.
Overall, the charity said that the site could use the energy of about 100,000 idling diesel powered cars every hour.
Councillors said that they were not given exact figures on how the data centres would be using energy or mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, with questions lingering on how “green data centres” can actually be defined.
In the proposal issued to the Council, the City of Edinburgh’s chief planning officer did recommend that the permission be granted as the “merits of the proposal outweigh the infringements.”
The Council, however, found that the data centre plan did not meet the requirements laid out on the National Planning Framework One and Two, and did not meet the City Plan Place initiative which set out a vision for the Edinburgh Park area.
While data centres have been listed as critical national infrastructure by the UK government, local authorities are still grappling with how to regulate planning proposals to mitigate environmental and energy impact whilst understanding the importance of data centre investment.
The Digital Education Awards Scotland (DEAS) scheme aims to highlight the outstanding work of educators who champion digital skills in classrooms and beyond, encouraging best practice, career development and better outcomes for learners.
The national programme also supports Scotland’s commitment to developing a digitally capable workforce and closing digital skills gaps in schools. Enhancing teacher capacity and ensuring students develop digital skills are a key focus of the National Improvement Framework (NIF) for Scottish education.
The awards programme was unveiled at Newbattle High School in Dalkeith.
Research shows digital skills are critical in today’s labour market. Skills Development Scotland reports that 77% of jobs in Scotland now require digital skills as part of the normal application and work process.
DEAS hopes that by promoting and celebrating educators who go above and beyond to support children, it can help improve educational outcomes and life chances for all.
The initiative is open to teachers as well as other professionals involved within the education of young people including colleges, support staff and early year practitioners. Three awards are available through the programme: Digital Educator, Digital Influencer and Digital Leader.
Applications open in February, with awards to be announced at a ceremony in June 2026.
“These awards reflect the strength of Scotland’s existing digital framework and will ensure those taking proactive steps to promote the country’s digital skills agenda are appropriately recognised. The three-tiered approach provides a pathway for schools and professionals to raise standards and inspire others to embed digital teaching across the curriculum,” Anna Doody, Director of Programmes, DEAS, said.
“This partnership which includes businesses, local authorities, the teaching profession and Scottish Government is a globally leading programme design to ensure collaboration and learnings are shared, promoted and celebrated.”
Luigi Pessina, Director of Global Education, Intel, said: “Intel is delighted to partner on the Digital Education Awards Scotland, recognising educators who are leading the way in digital learning. Through programmes like Skills for Innovation, we are committed to supporting Scotland’s ambition to build a digitally confident workforce and ensuring every learner gains the skills required to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving economy.”
Paula McKellar, Public Sector Lead, HP Scotland added: “At HP, we’re proud to champion the new Digital Educator Award and continue our support for Scotland’s growing community of digital schools. Together, we’re helping educators unlock the full potential of technology in the classroom.”
Educators interested in entering the Digital Education Awards Scotland can find entry criteria, categories and application details here.
Catalyst, Techscaler’s flagship accelerator is seeking Scotland’s most promising tech founders for its latest cohort which begins on 3rd March, a 10-week accelerator for early stage founders led by industry experts and supported by visiting entrepreneurs.
Techscaler is the Scottish Government’s programme for creating, developing, and scaling tech startups delivered by CodeBase. Now in its fourth year, Techscaler supports over 1,500 startups across Scotland, increasingly working with founders of startups with high-growth and scaleup potential.
Natalie Hotchkiss, Head of Early Growth Acceleration Programmes at CodeBase, said: “Catalyst is designed to meet founders’ needs on their startup journey, with dedicated support that evolves as founders progress. With visiting entrepreneurs helping to guide them throughout the process, they’ve got that invaluable input from founders who have ‘been there, done that’”.
All founders on Catalyst begin with ‘Build’, a core programme of sessions that focuses on understanding customers and markets, which Hotchkiss says gives participants, “a clear vision and validated direction of travel.”
Founders then either advance to the ‘Grow’ sessions, building minimum viable product (MVP), focusing on customer acquisition strategies, business model development, and tackling real world challenges, or to ‘Refine’, where founders exit the accelerator to receive more ideation-focused support from the Techscaler team.
For founders aiming to raise early stage capital, a further track, ‘Raise’, offers advanced workshops and tailored support to align the business model and funding strategy. Here, visiting entrepreneurs provide guidance on strengthening investment propositions and preparing for funder engagement.
Andrew McGinley, Entrepreneur in Residence at CodeBase, said: “Raising your first investment as a founder is rarely a straightforward process. Pairing Catalyst founders with entrepreneurs who have raised investment before gives founders access to real, lived experience and a trusted sounding board to help them navigate the highs and lows and maintain momentum throughout the journey.”
Georgina Hollis, Catalyst Visiting Entrepreneur, said: ”It’s hard being a founder at the early stages, navigating the world of not knowing what you don’t know yet. The Visiting Entrepreneur role in Catalyst provides quick access to ad-hoc mentorship and support throughout the 10 weeks of intense activity. We’re here to unblock blockers, provide a sounding board with a founder who’s been there before, and general cheerleading support during these key early stages.”
Worldwide spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure reached a record $86 billion in Q3 2025, marking a sustained investment cycle as platform providers scale capacity for training and inference workloads, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Tracker.
The record performance in Q3 2025 signals a shift from initial pilot phases into a multi-year expansion, with full-year 2025 spending projected to reach $334 billion and more than $902 billion by 2029. Growth is expected to remain above 30% annually through 2027, before moderating into the mid-20% range in the latter years of the forecast.
The results highlight the central role of accelerated compute as enterprises and cloud providers move to support increasingly complex AI workloads.
Why AI Infrastructure Grew in Q3 2025
Growth in Q3 was driven by massive capital investment from AI platform providers and hyperscalers, with hardware categories expanding to meet the rigorous data demands of large language models (LLMs).
The research found that servers dominated the AI infrastructure market, accounting for $84.0 billion (nearly 98%) of total AI-centric spending.
Cloud and shared deployments represented over 86% of the market, reflecting the industry’s reliance on scalable infrastructure.
AI-centric storage reached $1.76 billion, driven by the need for high-performance repositories for model training and inference checkpoints.
Accelerated Compute and GPU Demand Accelerate Growth
Accelerated servers remain the foundation of AI infrastructure. While YoY growth moderated from earlier peaks in 2025, spending levels remained elevated, signaling sustained demand rather than a pullback in investment. Both x86 and non-x86 systems saw strong adoption as AI platforms scaled infrastructure to meet rising training and inference requirements.
Regional Growth Led by the United States and China
Geography played a major role in the Q3 surge, with two regions leading the global investment landscape:
The United States is expected to remain the largest AI infrastructure market in 2025, accounting for approximately 76% of global spending with investment projected to grow from $254 billion in 2025 to nearly $708 billion by 2029. Growth is driven by hyperscalers and AI platform leaders expanding large-scale data center capacity.
China (PRC) is expected to be the second fastest-growing major region over the forecast period, with spending projected to increase from $39.1 billion in 2025 to more than $139 billion by 2029, supported by continued investment in domestic AI platforms and sovereign AI initiatives.
“The AI infrastructure market has clearly moved beyond an initial deployment phase into a sustained expansion cycle,” said Lidice Fernandez, group vice president, Worldwide Enterprise Infrastructure Trackers at IDC.
“Public investment signals from leading AI platform providers point to multi-year commitments to infrastructure expansion, particularly around accelerated compute. These investments reflect long-term confidence in the growth of AI workloads across consumer, enterprise, and research use cases.”
If more of Britain’s smallest businesses could be persuaded to adopt digital financial tools, their growth could add £25.3bn to the economy and help close our productivity gap with countries such as France and Germany, according to new research from Starling Bank.
SMEs, which account for 99% of businesses in this country, spend an average of £63,000 a year managing their finances, Starling’s study of 1,000 business owners shows. If more were to use digital solutions for routine tasks such as bookkeeping, invoicing and tax returns, they could use the time and money saved to innovate and to seek new customers.
“Small businesses are the backbone of the British economy, but they are being held back by a ‘hidden tax’ on their time,” Adeel Hyder, Managing Director of SME Banking at Starling Bank, said.
“Our research shows that a large number of SMEs believe digital tax software alone costs nearly £12,000 a year, when in reality, that’s fifteen times the price of some high-end solutions. For our part, Starling’s Making Tax Digital for Income Tax tool will be free from launch in March, so we can help entrepreneurs swap admin hassle for productivity gains.”
While 84% of SMEs already use digital tools for some financial tasks, nearly half (48%) do not expect to increase their usage, often feeling stuck due to entrenched processes and concerns over cost. Where digital tools are used for financial tasks, SMEs report an average time saving of 41% over manual processes.
An economic gain of £25.3bn is nearly double the economic contribution of the UK’s agriculture sector, showing how important it is that we help small businesses thrive. This could help accelerate the closing of the productivity gap between our nation and other G7 countries.
Greater economic growth would also mean a significant boost to the Government’s coffers, reducing pressure on HM Treasury. With the Office for Budget Responsibility estimating a tax-to-GDP ratio of 41.2% for the coming fiscal year, reaching £25.3bn in additional Gross Value Added (GVA) through increased SME adoption of digital tools could generate £10.4bn in new tax receipts – exceeding revenue that would be raised by adding 1p to the basic, higher, and additional rates of income tax combined.
This is why Starling is presenting five key recommendations to the Government:
Dismantle the Affordability Perception Gap: Create a new online ‘Financial Tool Cost Calculator’ within the Government’s Business Growth Service to show SMEs the true, lower cost of digital financial tools.
Target Support: Prioritise microbusinesses and female-led companies, (27% of female-led companies say they have good opportunities to learn from other SMEs in their sector. This is 41% for male-led businesses), in all Government digital adoption pilots.
Collaborate on Support Ecosystems: Co-develop all new advisory tools and communications with industry bodies and accountants, the intermediaries SMEs trust most.
Embed in Government Digital Adoption Initiatives: Prioritise the uptake of effective core digital financial tools, especially those which save SMEs the most time and money.
Integrate into National Mentoring Programmes: The new Business Mentoring Council should make digital adoption a main focus of mentoring support for microbusinesses.
“The digital gap is not just about technology; it is about trust and community,” Michelle Ovens CBE, CEO and Founder of Small Business Britain, said.
“We know that small businesses are keen to adopt AI, but can be held back by barriers like lack of support, which can be particularly challenging for under-represented entrepreneurial groups. This report’s recommendation to build a ‘trusted support ecosystem’ is vital for all small businesses.
“There is huge opportunity for digital technology to boost UK growth, innovation and resilience, as well as levelling up opportunity for all. To do this effectively we need to meet business owners where they are, through their accountants, mentors, and local and peer networks, to give them the confidence to take that next digital step.”
With 12 months remaining until the PSTN switch-off, Openreach is issuing a stark warning to British businesses to unchain their network from legacy copper infrastructure or face rising costs and connectivity issues.
The humble copper wire has been the backbone of our telecommunications here in the UK and around the world for over a century, keeping our hospitals, schools, and emergency services connected and powering everything from card machines on our high streets to vending machines, smart meters, CCTV, and even sluice gates.
During this time, most phone calls in the UK have been handled by BT’s copper -based public switched telephone network (PSTN), an analogue system which connects people using specific phone numbers.
But being around for as long as it has, the PSTN’s become outdated and difficult to maintain. Skills and parts are increasingly difficult to come by and new digital services like Voice over IP (VoIP) – where voice calls are transmitted the same way your broadband works are becoming the norm.
Openreach’s parent, BT Group will retire the PSTN network by 31st January 2027 – and Openreach has been working to withdraw any Openreach products that work over it – which come under the umbrella term of Wholesale Line Rental (WLR).
As the January 2027 deadline enters its final countdown, Openreach has made clear that all technical barriers to migration – including protections for vulnerable telecare users – have been resolved. Consequently, the deadline is locked, and the focus has shifted to the urgent withdrawal of legacy copper products.
There are currently still roughly 2.8m lines on the PSTN network that need to migrate – with more than half a million of those serving business premises. CPs and businesses that fail to migrate will face these higher charges before losing service altogether as the network is phased out.
“There’s no time left to stall,” James Lilley, Director of All-IP at Openreach, said.
“We’ve spent the last year ensuring telecare customers can be migrated safely through our ‘Prove Telecare’ service, removing the final barrier to the switch-off.
“Now, the reality is simple. The PSTN analogue network is obsolete, becoming harder to maintain and significantly more expensive to run. We are passing those costs on to providers who continue to sell legacy products.
“If your business is still on this copper service, you will start to pay a premium for a service that will be switched off in 12 months. Most major Communications Providers moved their customers to digital long ago. If your provider hasn’t contacted you, you need to ask why.”
While many Communication Providers (CPs) have already migrated much of their customer base, a number of smaller or specialist providers have been slower to act. Openreach warns that businesses remaining with these providers face unique risks tied to equipment failure. Beyond phones, critical hardware including fire alarms, burglar alarms and payment terminals, will need to be migrated: the latest data reveals more than 12k lift lines and around 500 lines serving CCTV networks need to be upgraded.
Openreach suggests that businesses that have yet to make the switch to review their assets, test their equipment can be done for free at Openreach’s test labs, and finally, switch to a digital solution as soon as possible.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined MediaLab.AI, Inc. (MediaLab), owner of image sharing and hosting platform Imgur, £247,590 for failing to use children’s personal information lawfully.
The penalty follows an investigation that found MediaLab allowed children to use Imgur without putting in place the basic safeguards required under UK data protection law.
The ICO’s investigation found that between September 2021 and September 2025, MediaLab processed the personal information of children using Imgur in ways that breached the UK GDPR.
UK law says that online services using the personal information of children under 13 can only rely on the lawful basis of consent if consent is given by the child’s parent or carer.
The ICO found that MediaLab failed to implement any measures to check the age of users, proceeded to process the personal information of children under 13 without parental cosent or any other lawful basis, and failed to carry out a data protection impact assessment to identify and mitigate privacy risks to children.
Personal information often drives the content children see online. MediaLab had no way of knowing the age of Imgur users, meaning that children were at risk of being exposed to harmful content on the platform, including content related to eating disorders, homophobia, antisemitism and images of a sexual or violent nature.
“MediaLab failed in its legal duties to protect children, putting them at unnecessary risk. For years, it allowed children to use Imgur without any effective age checks, while collecting and processing their data, which in turn exposed them to harmful and inappropriate content,” John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, said.
“Age checks help organisations keep children’s personal information safe and not used in ways that may harm them, such as by recommending age-inappropriate content.
“This fine is part of our wider work to drive improvements in how digital platforms use children’s personal data. Ignoring the fact that children use these services, while processing their data unlawfully, is not acceptable. Companies that choose to ignore this can expect to face similar enforcement action.”
For many organisations, cybersecurity no longer feels like a source of protection. It feels like a wall of jargon, frameworks, and conflicting advice that’s difficult to question and even harder to act on.
According to experienced Chief Information Security Officer Amy Lemberger, who is the founder of The CISO Hub, this isn’t a failure of businesses, it’s a failure of the security industry itself.
Cybersecurity, she argues, has become over-engineered and performative. In trying to prove its sophistication, the industry has made itself inaccessible to the very people who are expected to make decisions.
“The industry has massively overcomplicated security,” Lemberger says. “We’ve turned something that should support decision-making into something people feel excluded from.”
She points to a growing gap between compliance and actual protection. Frameworks, certifications, and audits are often treated as proof of security, when in reality they are only indicators of process.
“Compliance and security are not the same thing,” she says. “But they’re constantly conflated. You can be compliant and still exposed in all the ways that matter.”
This confusion leaves many business leaders feeling stuck. They know something isn’t right, but they don’t know how to challenge what they’re being told. Over time, that uncertainty turns into silence.
“I regularly speak to senior leaders who tell me they feel too stupid to ask the right questions,” Lemberger says. “That’s not their failure. That’s ours as an industry.”
Instead of clarity, businesses are often met with dense language, vendor-driven narratives, and technical detail that obscures rather than informs. Security discussions become abstract, detached from real priorities like growth, delivery, and resilience.
The result is a strange contradiction. Organisations invest heavily in security yet remain unsure about what they are actually protected against. Risk is documented but not properly understood. Decisions are deferred because the conversation feels too complex to engage with.
Lemberger believes this is why so many cybersecurity programmes stall. Not because leaders don’t care, but because the industry has made meaningful engagement unnecessarily difficult.
“When people don’t understand something, they disengage,” she says. “Security then becomes something that happens around the business, not something that’s part of how the business operates.”
She argues that effective security leadership is less about adding more layers and more about stripping things back. Plain language. Honest trade-offs. Clear explanations of what matters now and what can wait.
Cybersecurity, she says, should help leaders make better decisions, not make them feel inadequate for not being technical specialists.
Until the industry confronts its own role in creating confusion, the gap between effort and outcome will remain. Businesses will continue to spend, comply, and report, while still feeling uncertain about their true level of protection.
Security needs to be simpler because clarity is what makes action possible.
The UK is working with Microsoft, tech experts, and academics to devise a system to stop the proliferation of deepfake material across the internet.
Spurred by the recent torrent of deepfake images generated by AI on the internet, the UK is looking to tackle the spread of the deceptive and potentially illegal material.
While the UK has recently made the creation of non-consensual intimate images illegal, it is working to put a stop to these images being generated and spread altogether by pursuing a technological solution with Microsoft.
The pair will embark on creating an evaluation framework for deepfake detection, that will explore how technology can be used to detect deepfake materials no matter its source.
The government said that these deepfake detection technologies will be tested in the real-world, against threats like impersonation, fraud, and sexual abuse, which are all being superpowered by AI.
The framework aims to improve detection capabilities of law enforcement, identify gaps in current tools, as well as set transparent regulations and expectations for industries on deepfake detection.
The proliferation of deepfakes due to the rise of AI is staggering; 2025 saw about eight million shared, up from 500,000 in 2023.
The framework builds on the work of the Accelerated Capability Environment, which held a Deepfake Detection Challenge in 2024 with industry, academics, and other experts to produce better technology and solutions. These tools are now undergoing trials and benchmark testing under the supervision of the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology.
“For the first time, this framework will take the injustice faced by millions to seek out the tactics of vile criminals, and close loopholes to stop them in their tracks so they have nowhere to hide,” Jess Phillips, minister for safeguarding, said of the framework.
The news of the framework follows announcements from Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office to investigate X over the proliferation of deepfake images across its platform that were generated using Grok, the xAI chatbot.
These images were often non-consensual and included sexualised images of women and children.
“Deepfakes are being weaponised by criminals to defraud the public, exploit women and girls, and undermine trust in what we see and hear,” technology secretary Liz Kendall said.
The chaotic rise of AI, geopolitical tensions, regulatory volatility and an accelerating threat landscape are the driving forces behind the top cybersecurity trends for 2026, according to Gartner, Inc.
“Cybersecurity leaders are navigating uncharted territory this year as these forces converge, testing the limits of their teams in an environment defined by constant change,” said Alex Michaels, Director Analyst at Gartner. “This demands new approaches to cyber risk management, resilience and resource allocation.”
The following six trends will have broad impact across transforming governance, securing new frontiers and normalising AI adoption.
Trend 1: Agentic AI Demands Cybersecurity Oversight
Agentic AI is rapidly being used by employees and developers, creating new attack surfaces. No-code/low-code platforms and vibe coding expand this further, driving unmanaged AI agent proliferation, unsecured code and potential regulatory compliance violations.
“While AI agents and automation tools are becoming increasingly accessible and practical for organisations to adopt, strong governance remains essential,” said Michaels. “Cybersecurity leaders must identify both sanctioned and unsanctioned AI agents, enforce robust controls for each and develop incident response playbooks to address potential risks.”
Trend 2: Global Regulatory Volatility Drives Cyber Resilience Efforts
Shifting geopolitical landscapes and evolving global mandates have made cybersecurity a critical business risk with direct implications for organisational resilience. With regulators increasingly holding boards and executives liable for compliance failures, inaction can result in substantial penalties, lost business and irreversible reputational damage.
Gartner advises cybersecurity leaders to formalise collaboration across legal, business and procurement teams to establish clear accountability for cyber risk. Aligning control frameworks to recognised standards and addressing data sovereignty concerns will help reduce compliance gaps.
Trend 3: Postquantum Computing Moves into Action Plans
Gartner predicts advances in quantum computing will render the asymmetric cryptography organisations rely on to secure data and systems unsafe by 2030. Postquantum cryptography alternatives must be adopted now to avoid potential data breaches, legal liability and financial loss from “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks targeting long-term sensitive data.
“Postquantum cryptography is reshaping cybersecurity strategies by prompting organisations to identify, manage and replace traditional encryption methods, while prioritising cryptographic agility,” said Michaels. “By investing in these capabilities and prioritising migration now, assets will be secured when quantum threats become a reality.”
Trend 4: Identity and Access Management Adapts to AI Agents
The rise of AI agents is introducing new challenges to traditional identity and access management (IAM) strategies, especially in identity registration and governance, credential automation and policy-driven authorisation for machine actors. Failure to address these issues will lead to greater risk of access-related cybersecurity incidents as autonomous agents become more prevalent.
Gartner recommends taking a targeted, risk-based approach, by investing where gaps and risks are greatest while leveraging automation where possible. This is essential for enabling innovation, ensuring compliance and securing critical assets in AI-centric environments.
Driven by cost optimisation practices and increasing interest in AI, the emergence of AI-enabled security operations centers (SOCs) is introducing new complexity. This is contributing to staffing pressures, increased upskilling demands and evolving cost considerations for AI tools, even as these technologies enhance alert triage and investigation workflows.
“To realise the full potential of AI in security operations, cybersecurity leaders must prioritise people as much as technology,” said Michaels. “Strengthening workforce capabilities, implementing human-in-the-loop frameworks into AI-supported processes and aligning adoption with clear strategic objectives will be critical to maintaining resilience as SOCs evolve.”
Trend 6: GenAI Breaks Traditional Cybersecurity Awareness Tactics
Existing security awareness efforts continue to fail to reduce cybersecurity risks as GenAI adoption accelerates. A Gartner survey of 175 employees conducted between May and November 2025 indicates over 57% use personal GenAI accounts for work purposes and 33% admit inputting sensitive information into unapproved tools.
Gartner recommends shifting from general awareness training to adaptive behavioral and training programs that include AI-specific tasks. Strengthening governance, embedding secure practices and establishing policies for authorised use will reduce exposure to privacy breaches and intellectual property loss.
UK businesses may be putting more faith in AI than foreign tech, according to new research from VivaTech, which investigated tech issues ranging from sovereignty, AI adoption, cybersecurity, and 2026 budgetary priorities.
The research revealed a paradox in trust, with geopolitical uncertainty and regional regulatory burdens driving the push for data sovereignty, while businesses increasingly deploy AI in expanding functions.
“This 2026 barometer paints a new picture of technological confidence: American and British executives consider the nationality of their tech supplier to be essential, while most Europeans consider it a ‘plus’,” François Bitouzet, CEO of VivaTech, explained.
“This divergence is not anecdotal; it reveals two visions of sovereignty, one “de facto” and the other “contradictory.” In response to this, we are seeing a real acceleration in Europe on tech issues, with investments in AI and cybersecurity becoming a priority.
“But we must be wary of a new paradox that we are observing: while 9 out of 10 executives trust AI, 4 out of 10 admit to having shared confidential data with tools they did not fully trust.”
Tech Sovereignty
When adopting a new technological tool, 92% of executives would favour a future partner who shares their nationality, and nearly half of them (47%) would make this commonality a decisive factor.
This essential aspect is particularly emphasised by the English-speaking countries surveyed (57% in the United States and the United Kingdom), while the majority of EU members consider it a “plus” rather than an obligation, with the exception of the Netherlands, which places equal importance on both concepts.
Furthermore, 63% of executives say they are concerned about the loss of sovereignty that may accompany technological progress.
Companies consistently have to contend with some form of foreign tech dependence, be it for data analytics, cloud providers, system service providers, or AI. This can bring regulatory burdens and privacy concerns for companies that need to rely on these services which are increasingly concentrated in certain regions.
The Geography of Trust
The geographical origin of tech solutions has a significant influence on the level of trust placed in them (86%).
Nearly one in two executives (47%) cite their own country as one of the regions they trust the most, but the boundaries of trust extend far beyond that.
In the US, about half (51%) of Americans trust their own country, while they trust the whole North American continent even more (62%).
In Europe, executives typically favour their own solutions (43%), with France placing the most trust in European solutions (63%).
In the UK, opinion is more split, with UK executives trusting their own capabilities (56%) only slightly more than they trust Europe (53%). Just 39% trust US tech, while 34% trust Asian tech.
For executives, trust is primarily linked to security issues (57%). It is then associated with qualitative innovation issues (50%) alongside more positive performance issues (49%).
AI Paradox
Artificial intelligence has convinced executives of its reliability, with 89% trusting AI to guide their company’s decisions, regardless of their sector of activity. AI inspires confidence in them in terms of technology and decision-making, as well as job security over the next 12 months, despite its sometimes uncontrolled use.
83% of executives are confident in the sustainable and controlled development of financial investments in artificial intelligence.
Only 17% fear a speculative bubble. It should be noted that the French are more pessimistic than other countries surveyed, with 30% expressing concern.
The integration of AI is not intended to lead to layoffs in the short term, as 92% are confident (including 48% who are very confident) in their ability to maintain employment levels over the next 12 months.
Four out of ten executives have already shared information about their company with an AI tool they did not fully trust.
This proportion remains consistent regardless of country, payroll size, or industry. AI has been widely adopted in companies, but the framework for its use and raising awareness among teams is taking more time: AI could potentially generate data security and confidentiality issues.
Investments
When it comes to tech investment, cybersecurity leads the way, with 82% of executives saying they have already invested in this area. This is followed by investments in artificial intelligence (76%), 5G (73%), cloud computing (72%) and, after a second drop, the Internet of Things (54%).
The ranking remains broadly similar in France, with 81% of executives having invested in cybersecurity and 71% in 5G, while investment levels appear to be lower for artificial intelligence (65%), cloud computing (49%) and the Internet of Things (40%).
Among these technologies, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity also stand out in terms of the intensity of future investment: 87% say they will increase their investment (including 53% significantly) and 77% (including 42% significantly) over the next 12 months.
In France, this trend is clearly evident, with 82% of executives planning to increase their investments in AI and 74% in cybersecurity.
Two other technologies are particularly popular with current investors: robotic process automation (80%, including 36% strongly) and quantum computing (76%, including 45% strongly) to support AI ambitions.
87% of executives consider that companies in their country are internationally competitive in tech (and the figure rises to 94% among medium-sized companies).
While the United States remains the most enthusiastic (92%, including 61% who are “very enthusiastic,” up 19 points vs. 2024), the European countries in the survey are experiencing a marked acceleration in confidence, thereby reducing the gap with the leader.
With a score of 90% in the UK, the country appears to be holding its own against the US.
This is compared to 81% in France (up 12 points in 2024) and Spain (up 11 points in 2025).
Societal Challenges
The tech executives surveyed believe in the ability of major technological innovations to solve the great challenges of our time: 94% confirm this, and 50% of them do so without a moment’s hesitation.
Diversity, inclusion, and the environment remain values strongly upheld by leaders in the national tech ecosystem (85%). However, they show a certain pragmatism, since paradoxically, the revision of priorities by certain tech giants in early 2025 is welcomed by nearly half of them (48%), while a quarter are disappointed. It should be noted that in Spain, the “business first” vision is more clearly evident, with fewer people indifferent and 60% satisfied.
The European data centre market has moved beyond the era of hub-centric development, and is evolving into a distributed, energy-integrated, and AI-driven digital ecosystem, according to a new industry report.
The European Data Centre Association (EUDCA) has published its new 2026 State of European Data Centre Report, showing that Europe’s data centre sector is entering a period of exceptional expansion, structural diversification, and rapid technological transformation, driven by AI hyper-expansion.
However, its ability to fully exploit potential growth is thretened by energy availability and access.
The new EUDCA report finds European market growth not only within traditional centres, such as the Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin (FLAP-D), but also rapidly decentralising across Southern Europe, the Nordics, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and selected Tier-2 metros.
Moving from cloud-led growth to AI demand, data centres are now recognised as critical infrastructure underpinning Europe’s competitiveness and security.
The good news – growth and investment in Europe’s data centres
Europe’s IT power capacity grew from 10,539 MW (2023) to 14,784 MW (2025), exceeding forecasts. Furthermore, €176 bn in cumulative investment is expected from 2026–2031.
Within this growth and investment, scale colocation campuses and AI-optimised facilities dominate new builds. A CAGR exceeding 25% through to 2031 is expected for scale colocation, reflecting rising demand for high-density cloud and AI clusters. Traditional retail and wholesale sites continue to expand, but their relative share of new capacity is declining as customers increasingly require multi-building, AI-ready environments with long-term scalability.
Hyperscale data centre expansion is accelerating into regions with improving access to renewable energy and favourable operating conditions, as training workloads tend to favour regions with abundant power availability such as the Nordics and parts of Southern Europe.
A notable driver of growth is the rise of neocloud — providers of ultra-high-density compute with rapid deployment capability and large power tranches aligned with the needs of AI developers, global model providers and emerging cloud-adjacent platforms.
The challenge – energy and infrastructure constraints A significant factor affecting the industry is energy availability and access. Power availability is reported as the top challenge for more than two thirds (67%) of operators. Grid congestion and long connection timelines in many geographies are slowing deployment.
Within these developments, AI clusters are pushing extreme rack densities beyond 100kW, calling for changes in data centre design, deployment and operation, as well as driving a rapid shift toward liquid and hybrid cooling architectures.
Socioeconomic Impact The report finds a €53bn GDP contribution in 2025, rising to an expected €137.5bn by 2031, with more than 300,000 direct high-skilled jobs supported across the ecosystem.
The facilities and campuses also bring local benefits, such as supporting district heating, providing energy grid-flexibility services, renewable power purchase agreements (PPA) that support renewable energy development, and community infrastructure.
Sustainability progress and regulatory alignment The report found that the vast majority (90%) of energy consumed by European data centres is now generated from renewable energy sources.
At the same time there has been strong progress on water usage effectiveness (WUE), renewable procurement and heat-reuse integration, addressing many of the concerns of the citizenry with regard to data centre facilities. There are outstanding examples of biodiversity, heat-reuse and community-benefit projects across Europe.
“The exceptional growth of Europe’s data centre market is welcome news at a time when international volatility has focused many geographies on digital sovereignty and security,” said EUDCA Secretary General, Michael Winterson. “Once the issues of power availability and access are addressed, Europe has the opportunity to lead globally in AI-ready infrastructure while maintaining the highest standards of sustainability and responsible stewardship.”
Next phase To move to the next phase of establishing data centre infrastructure, the report empasises need for industry, policymakers and partners to come together on bold steps to accelerate grid investment and permitting reform. This will require deeper and improved cross-border coordination to achieve greater collaboration on energy system integration.
The report states that if these challenges are met, Europe will be positioned not only to accommodate growth in cloud and AI infrastructure, but to lead in the development of a secure, sustainable and strategically independent digital economy.
Billions of pounds of economic growth are at risk due to digital vacancies in the financial and professional services and technology sectors, which could be filled by reskilling mid-career women who are currently overlooked by rigid hiring processes.
This is according to new research published by the City of London Corporation’s Women Pivoting to Digital Taskforce, which evaluated the impact of digital talent shortages on UK economic growth.
Due to difficulty in hiring talent, more than 12,000 digital vacancies went unfilled in the financial and professional services and technology sectors in 2024. These vacancies cost the UK economy nearly £1 billion in lost productivity while wiping nearly £300 million from firms’ bottom line.
Firms have tried to address shortages through raising wages far above the national average. The Taskforce warns that increasing pay alone won’t solve the problem, with shortages expected to persist until at least 2035. In this scenario, the UK economy would miss out on a total of £10.8 billion of economic growth, with firms missing out on £3.3 billion in profits.
To buck the trend, the City Corporation says that employers should focus on reskilling mid-career women, who are currently being sidelined by rigid hiring practices, who are underrepresented in these sectors, and whose jobs, overall, are more likely to be under threat by automation and AI. Additionally, employers should make use of women who are completing publicly funded digital bootcamps.
Digital roles require constant upskilling, and the Taskforce argues that this provides an opportunity for employers to focus more on a candidate’s potential, rather than past technical experience. Reskilling could also see firms avoid up to £757 million in severance payments.
Some employers have already begun to evidence the success in assessing for potential rather than prior technical experience, and are subsequently investing in targeted training that take the risk out of hiring from alternative pathways like bootcamps or short courses. These employers are starting to fill digital roles faster and with stronger long-term outcomes.
“The City of London is one of the world’s most exciting places to build a career where innovation, ambition and talent come together, and where people from all backgrounds can thrive,” The Lady Mayor of the City of London, Dame Susan Langley, said. “Women are already making a powerful contribution to the digital economy, bringing fresh perspectives, skills and creativity that help businesses grow and compete globally.
“By investing in people and supporting the development of digital skills within the workforce, employers can unlock enormous potential and build stronger, more resilient teams. Focusing on talent, adaptability and opportunity will ensure the UK continues to lead on innovation and remains a global hub for digital excellence.”
Sarah Underhill, People Director, Group Chief Operating Office, Lloyds Banking Group: “The skills landscape is changing so rapidly that ensuring a future-ready talent supply will continue to be a challenge for businesses and the wider UK economy.
“At Lloyds Banking Group, we recognise that demand for advanced digital, data and technology skills is accelerating, and we actively look to a wide range of pathways to attract, grow and develop the talent required to drive transformation and growth for our customers.
“Reports like this help to shine a light on the scale of the challenge and the importance of building a sustainable, diverse technology talent pipeline for the future.”
The first STEM Starts Centre in Moray has officially opened its doors in Elgin, marking a major milestone for the £4.8 million Early Years STEM (EY STEM) project, part of the Moray Growth Deal.
The new centre, based at Elgin Library, Cooper Park, was formally launched at a special event attended by children from local Early Learning and Childcare settings alongside Scottish Government Business and Employment Minister Richard Lochhead, representatives from Moray Council and partner organisations.
The centre is the first of three STEM Starts facilities planned across Moray, designed to give children aged 3-8 years old early, hands on experiences in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The launch also marked the official introduction of the EY STEM outreach service, which will work with educators, childcare providers and communities across Moray to extend access to high quality STEM learning beyond the centre itself. The outreach programme will support early years practitioners with resources, training and activities that bring STEM learning to life for young people wherever they are.
The EY STEM project is funded by £3.5m from the Scottish Government and £1.3m from Moray Council and is one of eight Moray Growth Deal projects underway.
Business and Employment Minister Richard Lochhead said: “Our £32.5 million investment in the Moray Growth Deal aims to boost skills and employment opportunities across the region. This new centre is a brilliant example of what we can achieve when we work together with Moray Council and local partners.
“By sparking children’s curiosity in science, technology, engineering and maths from an early age, we’re helping to give young people in Moray the tools to thrive. This is about investing in Moray’s future and ensuring local communities benefit from the jobs and opportunities that growth will bring.”
The EY STEM project has been developed in partnership with early years professionals and STEM experts and focuses on hands on learning, industry inspired activities and digital resources. Through the centre and outreach service, the project aims to ensure that children and educators across Moray can benefit from engaging, accessible STEM opportunities.
Leader of Moray Council, Cllr Kathleen Robertson, said the opening of the centre represents a significant investment in Moray’s long term future. “The launch of the STEM Starts Centre is a proud moment for Moray and a key milestone for the Moray Growth Deal.
“By engaging children with STEM learning from an early age, we are laying strong foundations for future skills, confidence and opportunity. This centre – alongside the outreach service – will help ensure that young people across Moray can access exciting, practical learning experiences that support aspiration and achievement.”
The STEM Starts Centre will begin welcoming education partners and community groups from March, with outreach activity rolling out to early learning and childcare settings across Moray in the coming months.
While the Centre is not open for public bookings at this time it is hoped that offer can be developed in due course. Two further Centres in the east and west of Moray are also planned for future development.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has opened formal investigations into X and xAI over their processing of personal data in relation to Grok’s recent generation of sexualised deepfake images and videos that circulated on social media platform X.
The ICO says it has taken this step following the reports that Grok has been used to generate non-consensual sexual imagery of individuals, including children.
The reported creation and circulation of such content raises “serious concerns” under the UK data protection law, while presenting risks and potential harm to the public.
These concerns relate to whether personal data has been processed lawfully, fairly and transparently, and whether appropriate safeguards were built into Grok’s design and deployment to prevent the generation of harmful manipulated images using personal data.
Where those safeguards fail, individuals lose control of their personal data in ways that expose them to serious harm. Examining these risks is central to the ICO’s role in protecting people’s rights and holding organisations to account as they design and deploy AI technology.
This follows the ICO’s previous public statement on 7 January, in which it confirmed that it had contacted XIUC and X.AI to seek urgent information about these reports.
“The reports about Grok raise deeply troubling questions about how people’s personal data has been used to generate intimate or sexualised images without their knowledge or consent, and whether the necessary safeguards were put in place to prevent this. Losing control of personal data in this way can cause immediate and significant harm. This is particularly the case where children are involved,” William Malcolm, executive director regulatory risk and innovation at the ICO said.
“Our role is to address the data protection concerns at the centre of this, while recognising that other organisations also have important responsibilities. We are working closely with Ofcom and international regulators to ensure our roles are aligned and that people’s safety and privacy are protected. We will continue to work in partnership as part of our coordinated efforts to create trust in UK digital services.
“Our investigation will assess whether XIUC and X.AI have complied with data protection law in the development and deployment of the Grok services, including the safeguards in place to protect people’s data rights. Where we find obligations have not been met, we will take action to protect the public.”
Ofcom has also provided an update on its investigation into X concerning its alleged breach of the Online Safety Act – the regulator is currently analysing evidence on whether X has broken the law, and has made a request to the social media firm for relevant information regarding the case.
In Ofcom’s update, it explained that it currently is not investigating xAI, the company behind chatbot Grok, as it does not fall under the scope of regulated AI chatbots.
Under the Online Safety Act, only user-to-user services are regulated, meaning that a chatbot would not be subject to regulation if they only allow user to chatbot interactions, do not search mutiple websites or act as a search service, and as long as they cannot generate pornographic content.
While Grok generated sexually explicit images, these would not likely be classified as pornography, therefore under its current scope, Ofcom cannot take action against xAI under the Online Safety Act.
The ICO, which investigates data protection, is not hampered from investigating the chatbot firm directly, however.
Some of the UK’s major banks have agreed to a £11 billion lending package which aims to help businesses invest and expand abroad.
The lending commitment, from the UK’s five leading banks, is one of the largest collective moves by the banking sector in over a decade, representing an historic show of confidence in the UK economy.
Senior executives from NatWest, HSBC UK, Barclays, Lloyds and Santander finalised an agreement with the Government at a roundtable in Westminster convened by the Business Secretary and the CEO of UKEF Tim Reid.
Together, the banks serve half of all British businesses across all corners of the country.
“Strengthening Britain’s export potential relies on British businesses having the means, motive, and opportunity to succeed in new overseas markets,” business secretary Peter Kyle said.
“The £11 billion these banks are making available will help meet the ambitions of smaller British businesses to fully export, expand and exploit these international market opportunities. It is positive proof of UK lenders’ confidence in the growth prospects of British enterprise.”
The lending is set to be drawn entirely from the banks’ own balance sheets and will give small and mid-sized enterprises a powerful route to access the finance advice they need to compete globally.
UK Export Finance (UKEF), the government’s export credit agency, will guarantee up to 80% of eligible loans issued by each bank. Banks can apply UKEF’s guarantee automatically for working capital loans of up to £10 million.
Alongside funding, businesses will also benefit from advisory support through banks’ relationship managers and UKEF’s regional Export Finance Managers, helping them navigate global markets and seize new opportunities.
“Britain’s small businesses are ready to take on the world – and this £11 billion commitment gives them the firepower to do it,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said.
“We’re turning the power of the City into rocket fuel for UK exporters – backing ambitious firms in every part of the country to break into new markets, create good jobs and drive the next decade of British growth.”
SpaceX, the aeropsace company owned by Elon Musk, has acquired xAI, his AI venture, in a $1.25 trillion merger that would see the consolidation of two of Musk’s major firms before he takes SpaceX public.
The two companies said the deal would form “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform.”
SpaceX is set to gain some of xAI’s properties, including social media platform X and AI chatbot Grok.
In the deal, SpaceX was reportedly valued at $1 trillion, with xAI having a valuation of $250bn.
Citing Musk’s motivations for the deal, the announcement explicity highlighted the CEO’s ambitions to build data centres and satellites in space to increase power capacity for AI.
“Current advances in AI are dependent on large terrestrial datacenters, which require immense amounts of power and cooling. Global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions, even in the near term, without imposing hardship on communities and the environment,” the deal announcement said, dubbing “space-based AI” as “the only way to scale.”
The new deal follows a period of Musk consolidating his businesses – xAI acquired X in early 2025, and Tesla planned on investing $2bn in the AI businesses as recently as last month.
Musks’ firms are facing a mixed reception in the market: SpaceX has had its valuations bolstered by lucrative deals with the US federal government to continue building satellites, though Tesla’s recent earnings report showed a slump in revenues.
Meanwhile, xAI has faced global controversy of the recent torrent of sexually explicit non-consensual deepfakes of women and even children profiferating across X, generated using Grok. xAI pulled the ‘spicy mode’ feature from nations where that type of illicit image generation is illegal, but has not fully disabled the feature.
Musk is facing controversy of his own, with the recent Department of Justice release of documents concerning sex offendor and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, which showed Musk exchanging emails with the late criminal concerning potential visits to his private island.
Worldwide IT spending is expected to reach $6.15 trillion in 2026, up 10.8% from 2025, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.
“AI infrastructure growth remains rapid despite concerns about an AI bubble, with spending rising across AI‑related hardware and software,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “Demand from hyperscale cloud providers continues to drive investment in servers optimised for AI workloads.”
Server spending is projected to accelerate in 2026, growing 36.9% year-over-year. Total data center spending is expected to increase 31.7%, surpassing $650 billion in 2026, up from nearly $500 billion the previous year.
Software spending growth for 2026 has been slightly revised downward to 14.7%, from 15.2% for both application and infrastructure software.
“Despite the modest revision, total software spending will remain above $1.4 trillion,” said Lovelock. “Projections for generative AI (GenAI) model spending in 2026 remain unchanged, with growth expected at 80.8%. GenAI models continue to experience strong growth, and their share of the software market is expected to rise by 1.8% in 2026.”
Shipments of mobile phones, PCs, and tablets continue to grow steadily. Total spending on devices is projected to reach $836 billion in 2026. However, market-demand constraints will slow growth to 6.1% in 2026.
“This slowdown is largely due to rising memory prices, which are increasing average selling prices and discouraging device replacements,” said Lovelock. “Additionally, higher memory costs are causing shortages in the lower end of the market, where profit margins are thinner. These factors are contributing to more muted growth in device shipments.”
STAC (Smart Things Accelerator Centre), Scotland’s industry-led technology accelerator, has appointed Jim Rowan as its new Chair as the organisation launches a £15 million investment fund.
The Glasgow-born former CEO of Volvo Cars and Dyson brings three decades of global technology leadership to drive Scotland’s ambition to build world-class technology companies capable of competing internationally.
As Chair, Rowan will lead STAC’s strategic direction, leverage his global networks to open international markets for portfolio companies, and champion Scottish deep tech capabilities on the world stage.
His appointment comes as STAC launches its first fund, focusing on Scottish startups and companies ready to scale across robotics, AI, quantum computing, photonics, and advanced manufacturing.
Rowan most recently served as CEO and President of Volvo Cars, during which time the company achieved record profits in 2023 and 2024 in its 98-year history. He was recognised as CEO of the Year by Newsweek and Autonews and named to Time magazine’s global 100 climate leaders list. Prior to Volvo, Rowan served as COO then CEO of Dyson and has founded two successful start-ups.
Commenting on his appointment, Rowan said: “My generation grew up with James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell, and Adam Smith as markers of Scottish achievement. And while every Scot is proud of this history, it’s time for new, modern names in Scotland’s story that are reference points for excellence in innovation and advancement of technology.
“We’re an industrious nation with enormous intellectual horsepower and STAC is building the system to turn that potential into globally competitive companies, creating a new legacy for future generations.
“After spending more than a decade living and working in Asia, I’ve seen how the right system design transforms capability into competitiveness. Scotland has world-class universities with genuine strength in the enabling technologies that will define the next decade – 6G connectivity, med and biotech, quantum computing, small modular reactors, AI-enabling infrastructure.
“The pieces exist. But we need to strengthen the connection between them. STAC bridges academia, industry, government, and finance.
“We’re good at innovation in Scotland, but we need to get better at invention at scale. As a nation, we need to think bigger, act quicker and be much more comfortable betting on ourselves. STAC is the vehicle to compete in next-generation technology.”
STAC operates Scotland’s unique industry-funded accelerator model, connecting high-potential startups with leading corporate partners including RBS, Plexus, Eurofins, Pelion and major technology manufacturers.
The model has been designed to be replicable and to scale as the company grows. Founded in 2021, the organisation has supported 120 startups, facilitated £50 million in investment, created 400 jobs, and maintains the highest density of women entrepreneurs among UK deep tech accelerators.
In September 2024, the organisation opened ‘thebeyond’, a 22,000 square-foot state-of-the-art facility at Skypark in Glasgow.
Paul Wilson, CEO and co-founder of STAC, said: “For too long, Scottish deep tech companies have hit a ceiling. They build world-class technology here, but when it comes to scaling, they’ve been told they need to move to London, Silicon Valley, or elsewhere to access capital and markets. Jim’s appointment, alongside our £15 million fund launch, challenges that narrative directly.
“His global network, combined with STAC’s model of connecting companies with corporate partners, means our companies can access international markets and investment while keeping their headquarters and innovation here in Scotland. Through our partners, we provide intensive problem-solving sessions, co-development opportunities, and direct routes to global markets.
“Scotland can believe we’ll build globally competitive technology companies from here. STAC helps build that belief by demonstrating proof points. World-class industry leaders like Jim backing Scottish talent and ambition, coupled to a new operating system designed to improve execution and reduce friction – this combination will help deliver real results, repeatedly.”
Outgoing Chair, Richard Lewis, will continue to support STAC as a board member and advisor, bringing his extensive experience chairing and advising leading tech start-ups across Scotland. Commenting on Rowan’s appointment, he said: “I am delighted to welcome Jim as STAC Chairman, an appointment that reflects the ambition, reach and global scale that we have delivered in a short period of time.
“I look forward to working with him and the team to continue to deliver high quality support to Scotland’s most ambitious young companies.”
A new study will trial self-driving, zero-emissions shuttles on Orkney island, offering residents the opportunity to travel on driverless vehicles.
The Kirkwall AutoLink trial will transport passengers between Kirkwall Harbour and Kirkwall Airport in Orkney via self-driving Auto-Pods in an effort to enhance travel and decrease carbon emissions.
Kirkwall Airport handles 160,000 passengers annually, but most transfers from the airport still rely on private cars, putting pressure on local infrastructure and the environment.
In continuing work with Urban Foresight, the new trial will see autonomous vehicles from manufacturer Aurrigo traverse the approved link.
The project will investigate if a self-driving, zero-emission vehicle could safely and responsibly improve connectivity between the harbour and the airport in Kirkwall.
Residents showed caution and curiosity in the early research into the study, and the upcoming demonstrator event, featuring a small Auto-Pod, will allow residents to see the vehicles in action and understand how they work.
“This demonstrator event is an exciting opportunity for Orkney to experience autonomous technology up close,” Callum White, head of zero emission mobility at Urban Foresight, said. “It gives people the chance to ask questions, see how the vehicle operates and share their views in a way that directly influences how autonomous mobility could work in rural areas.”
Richard Fairchild, chief operations officer at Aurrigo, added: “We’re proud to bring our autonomous pod to Orkney and demonstrate how this technology can operate safely and effectively in remote settings. Engagement events such as this are crucial for building trust and shaping the future of autonomous transport.”
The trial will take place as part of the Feasibility Studies Competition that is a part of the £150 million CAM Pathfinder programme, a UK government initiative delivered by Zenzic.
The trial will take place on 9-10 February 2026, and will seek feedback from participants to support future decisions on the design, regulation, and deployment of the autonomous shuttles.
The Home Office has released a new White Paper introducing sweeping reforms to UK police, from the launch of a National Police Service to the roll out of increased AI and facial recognition.
The new white paper will see major reform across UK policing, with the consolidation of forces across England and Wales, more cross-border collaboration with Police Scotland, and the centralisation of the police infrastructure model.
National Police Service
The National Police Service will see the National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, regional organised crime units, police helicopters, and national roads policing come together in a single organisation.
This will better allow these organisations to share technology, intelligence, and resources; it will also take over responsibilities for forensics, including digital forensics, from 43 local forces.
The new National Police Service will also take on the responsibility for shared services, equipment, and IT procurement, rather than leave these remits to individual local authorities. The service will buy equipment on behalf of all police forces operating in England and Wales.
Technology
The UK government is investing over £140 million to roll out technologies across UK policing.
The number of live facial recognition vans is set to increase five-fold, with 50 vans available to every police force in England Wales.
Further, the government will also roll out new AI tools to help identify people from CCTV and other video footage submitted as evidence. Live facial recognition technology is set to receive about £11.6 million in funding to improve its capabilities across police.
A national facial recognition system is also set to receive £26m to launch.
A new national centre on AI – Police.AI – will be set up to roll out AI to all forces in an effort to decrease the burden of paperwork on officers.
Further, Police.AI will act as a registry of AI deployments across the police force, providing guidance on how forces can ensure these tools are functional and reliable.
The White Paper also aims to see more tech specialists working in police forces to fight fraud and cyber-crime, as well as access important information via devices for criminal conviction.
To do this, the Home Office says it will work with the police forces to recruit specialists in cybersecurity and technology, making it easier for people to volunteer their skills.
The move to increase tech skills, technology investment, and to integrate forces shows the growing threat of complex crimes involving technology.
Fragmented forces have often hampered investigations that could have benefited from uniform and consolidated data.
Further, local forces are able to make their own decisions when it comes to the integration of new technologies like AI and facial recognition.
While these remain controversial, especially in the context of law enforcement, the patchy reception between police forces means that these technologies are rolled out with shaky foundations in technology and regulation.
A new report reveals that a Scottish council may have had “gaps” in their cybersecurity arrangements ahead of a sophisticated and significant cyber-attack.
Comhairle nan Eilan Siar faced a cyber-attack two years ago, which had an immediate impact on the council and nearly caused the complete loss of the council’s data.
The ransomware attack was carried out through malware installed on the council’s services, which was used to steal and encrypt vital data. The attack continues to “have a significant impact on its operations,” the Account Commission said.
The new report from the Account Commission reveals that, while Comhairle nan Eilean Siar did “escalate the issue appropriately” when it discovered the attack, there were “gaps in their cyber security, business continuity, and disaster recovery arrangements.”
While the report conceded that more robust controls may not have prevented the attack, “stronger controls may have helped to reduce its impact or improve the speed of detection and response.”
Currently, the council is still experiencing the consequences of the attack, and while progress has been made, key systems still need to be rebuilt.
The full cost of the attack has been estimated, but does not include the time burden on staff as well as the continued rebuild.
As part of the review, the audit provided some recommendations that Comhairle and other public sector bodies should take heed of.
This includes reviewing IT infrastructure to ensure it is resilient and meets disaster recovery standards, cyber testing and disaster recovery exercises are conducted regularly, staff are trained regularly, and the capacity and capability of the IT teams match the IT department’s resilience needs.
This incident highlights the importance of robust cyber security safeguards,” the report concluded. “No organisation can fully mitigate the risk of the ever increasing threat and sophistication of a cyber-attack but it’s crucial that organisations are prepared.”
By 2027, 50% of companies that attributed headcount reduction to AI will rehire staff to perform similar functions, but under different job titles, according to Gartner, Inc.
“While AI-driven layoffs have captured attention, the reality is more complex,” said Kathy Ross, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice.
“Most recent workforce reductions were influenced by broader economic conditions rather than automation alone.
“As organisations encounter the limits of AI and rising customer expectations, they will need to reinvest in human talent to sustain service quality and growth.”
Despite widespread speculation that AI will drastically reduce customer service headcount, a Gartner survey of 321 customer service and support leaders conducted in October 2025 revealed that only 20% of customer service leaders have actually reduced agent staffing due to AI.
The majority report that headcount remains steady, even as they support more customers.
“AI simply isn’t mature enough to fully replace the expertise, empathy, and judgment that human agents provide. Relying solely on AI right now is premature and could lead to unintended consequences,” Emily Potosky, Senior Director, Research in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice, added.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) and NatWest Group have launched a joint campaign aimed at accounts payable professionals and finance personnel that highlights the risks of Invoice Fraud, a crime that costs businesses millions each year.
One of the most common and costly forms of financial crimes, invoice Fraud happens when criminals deceive individuals and businesses into paying fake invoices or diverting a genuine payment into accounts controlled by fraudsters.
Fraudsters can impersonate suppliers, intercept emails or send convincing invoices to generate immediate payments into their own accounts. The aim is to manipulate victims into transferring funds to the fraudsters instead of their legitimate destination.
Figures released by Action Fraud reveal that in September 2025 alone, Invoice Fraud victims lost a total of £3,908,086 from 83 Report Fraud cases, averaging more than £47,000 per case. Invoice Fraud accounted for 85% of all Payment Diversion Fraud losses in September 2025.
The campaign provides guidance on identifying and preventing this fraud, including checking for changes in invoices, verifying invoices by direct calls, and never transferring money until you are certain the details are correct.
“Invoice fraud is one of the highest harm types of fraud experienced by victims and it has a huge impact on those who become a victim. Businesses can be destroyed by a loss of cashflow from a fraudulent payment, families and livelihoods are at serious risk of collapse if fraudsters are successful,” Nick Sharp, deputy director fraud at the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC) in the NCA.
“By providing the correct information to those in a position to thwart the fraudsters’ efforts, we can stop the worst examples of Invoice Fraud in their tracks. That is why the NCA is actively targeting and disrupting the criminal networks behind Invoice Fraud through investigations and intelligence sharing with international partners. However, prevention remains equally as important as disruptions.
“This campaign is a vital part of our strategy – by raising awareness and strengthening defences within the finance sector, we can significantly reduce opportunities for criminals to succeed.”
Avani Patel, head of Commercial & Institutional Fraud, NatWest Group said: “We are delighted to be partnering with the NCA on this incredibly important campaign. Invoice fraud represents a serious and growing threat to both our business and corporate customers.
“Criminals are undertaking increasingly sophisticated methods to commit fraud, often targeting the Accounts Payable and Finance departments of small sole‑traders and multi‑national corporations.
“This joint campaign with the NCA will equip businesses with the knowledge and tools they need to protect themselves against devastating invoice fraud attacks.
“We are urging all businesses to adopt a ‘Check, Verify, Never’ mindset – checking for any changes to payment details, independently verifying those changes with trusted contacts, and never transferring money until fully satisfied.”
A new facility designed to help small businesses thrive in the UK space sector has opened at Airbus Defence and Space’s Stevenage site, backed by £3.9 million from the UK Space Agency.
The Airbus Launchpad will provide SMEs, start-ups and research organisations with access to laboratories, workspaces and testing facilities through a no-cost residency programme. The facility can accommodate over 50 people and aims to strengthen the UK space supply chain while developing homegrown skills and capabilities.
The UK Space Agency funding comes from the Space Clusters Infrastructure Fund and was match-funded by Airbus. Three companies – Applied Atomics, Spintex and Stars Edge – will take up residence from early February.
“By backing our SMEs and start-ups, we’re helping brilliant British ideas become successful businesses that create jobs and strengthen our supply chain,” Space Minister Liz Lloyd said.
“This partnership between Airbus and the UK Space Agency shows what we can achieve when industry and government work together to build a space sector where the smallest of businesses can thrive.”
The Airbus Launchpad forms part of Airbus’ Community for Space Prosperity programme, which aims to grow UK space supply chain activity through research, innovation and outreach.
The Airbus Launchpad is the latest facility to open with support from the UK Space Agency’s Space Clusters Infrastructure Fund, which is helping to build world-class facilities for the UK space sector.
Earlier this month, the £20 million Westcott Space Hub opened in Buckinghamshire with £5.8 million in government backing, providing testing facilities, training spaces and commercial workspace for space businesses.
“The Airbus Launchpad is another important example of how collaboration between industry leaders and innovative SMEs can strengthen our space sector,” Dr Paul Bate, CEO of the UK Space Agency said.
“By giving start-ups and smaller businesses direct access to world-class facilities and expertise, we’re helping turn brilliant ideas into the products and services of tomorrow. Our £3.9 million investment through the Space Clusters Infrastructure Fund will help develop homegrown skills, diversify the supply chain, and create new space capabilities for the UK.”
Kata Escott, Managing Director Airbus Defence and Space UK, said: “Successful SMEs are essential for the future of the UK space sector and I’m proud that we are able to use our position as the UK’s largest space company to lean in and support their development.
“This initiative is about creating the conditions for collaboration, innovation and growth. By connecting with SMEs and innovators, and in partnership with the Government, we are accelerating progress for the UK at a time when it has never mattered more.”
Despite a decline in the number of ransomware groups actively operating across the globe, the number of victim organisations climbed year on year and quarter on quarter in the last quarter of 2025.
This is according to ReliaQuest’s Ransomware and Cyber Extortion in Q4 2025 report, which found that the last three months of 2025 saw ransomware victims increase by 50% compared to the third quarter, and rose 40% compared to the same time span in the previous year.
The research suggested that while the amount of ransomware groups dwindled, the most advanced and organised syndicates are increasing their activity.
To achieve maximum impact with minimum risk, ransomware groups have been focussing on infiltrating networks and executing ransomware quickly to avoid detection.
To put further pressure on targeted organisations to pay ransom, threat actors are commonly releasing snippets of stolen data on the dark web as part of their persuasion tactics.
ReliaQuest found that the most prolific ransomware groups in the last quarter of 2025 were Qilin, Akira, and Sinobi.
With over 450 victims, Qilin accounted for the most compromised organisations in the last three months of 2025, with big ticket targets including Japanese beer company Asahi.
Akira ransomware followed behind, with over 200 victims in the same time period.
Sinobi, which saw a 300% increase in its targets in quarter four of 2025, became the third most active ransomware group in Q4 2025. The group likely started in 225 as a spin off from the Lynx ransomware group, which is still active.
Outside of the top three, the report noted that the Clop ransomware group claimed 116 victims despite little activity in the previous quarter.
ReliaQuest noted that ransomware in this time period relied on established tactics and persistent weaknesses – slow vulnerability patches, a lack of enforced access controls, and poor data exfiltration detection efficiency.
Organisations are advised to harden their remote access controls to prevent the exploitation of edge devices, strengthen their data exfiltration monitoring by tailoring detections and alerts, and secure high-impact shared infrastructure to prevent ransomware from proliferating into an enterprise-wide outage.
Big tech was fined $7.8 billion in 2025, Proton‘s fine tracker found, but is this seemingly substantial number really creating a financial deterrent for big tech to not veer outside of regulations?
Breaking down the data, it was Google parent company Alphabet that owed the most in fines in 2025 – the tech giant was fined $4.24 billion.
Amazon was fined $2.5 billion last year, with Apple raking up $851.2 million in fines, followed by Meta with $228 million. Microsoft’s total fines for 2025 have yet to be reported.
While these amounts seem monumental, these major tech companies do not exactly appear phased in terms of their free cash flow.
Free cash flow includes any amount of cash generated by a company that can be used for “strategic opportunities,” including investments and fines.
Google’s $73.55 billion in cash flow meant that it could pay off its fine of $4.24 billion in about 21 days.
Apple’s $98.77 billion in cashflow means that it could pay off its fine in just three days, three hours, and 28 minutes.
Meta’s fine would only take one day and two hours to pay off if it relied on its $44.84 billion in cash flow.
Amazon had the longest pay back time of around 86 days with its comparatively small pool of $10.56 billion free cash flow.
The small dent these fines make in big tech’s free cash flow seems to not be a big enough curb for these companies that continue to face legal and regulatory pushback and fines.
Fines surrounding data privacy, fair market competition, and even tax evasion run rampant as nations try to regulate big tech into submission. But it seems fines will either have to better reflect a detrimental blow to a firm’s earnings, or regulators are going to have to find a more effective way to ensure compliance.
2025 fine charges range from monopolistic practices, using data without user consent, privacy violations, self-favouring practices, abuses of dominant positions, as well as other issues.
None of these charges were novel, and Turkey even fined Google for not complying with a previous investigation’s requirements.
As the Online Safety Act in the UK continues to find non-compliant firms and issue new fines, and Meta introduces its “pay or consent” ad model for Facebook and Instagram to the UK, it might be time to reconsider the effectiveness of fines.
Business confidence in Scotland rose one point during January to 37%, according to the latest Business Barometer from Bank of Scotland.
Companies in Scotland reported higher confidence in their own business prospects month-on-month, up 15 points at 53%. When taken alongside their optimism in the economy, down 13 points to 21%, this gives a headline confidence reading of 37% (vs. 36% in December 2025).
A net balance of 42% of businesses in the country also expect to increase staff levels over the next year, up one point on last month.
Looking ahead to the next six months, Scottish businesses identified their top target areas for growth as investing in their team, for example investing in training (53%), evolving their offering, for example by introducing new products or services (36%) and investing in sustainability (34%).
The Business Barometer, which surveys 1,200 businesses monthly and which has been running since 2002, provides early signals about UK economic trends both regionally and nationwide.
National picture
Overall, UK business confidence fell three points in January to 44%.
While firms’ confidence in their own trading prospects rose seven points to 59%, their optimism in the wider economy fell 14 points to 28%.
London was the most confident UK nation or region in January (68%), followed by Northern Ireland (66%) and the West Midlands (65%).
Sector Insights
Retail sentiment increased marginally in January, up two points to 49%, while confidence in the service sector rose slightly, up one point to 42%, the first increase since the summer. Confidence fell in the construction sector following a particularly strong increase in December.
“It’s great to see businesses in Scotland remain confident,” Martyn Kendrick, Scotland director at Bank of Scotland Commercial Banking, said.
“What’s especially positive is that more Scottish firms than anywhere else in the UK are planning to invest in sustainability from decarbonising their operations to making their products and services more sustainable. This is an important step as Scotland works towards its net zero target by 2045.
“We’ll continue to support businesses across Scotland as they strengthen their sustainability credentials, including through offerings like our Clean Growth Financing Initiative, which provides access to discounted lending to help fund a wide range of environmentally friendly measures.”
Hann-Ju Ho, Senior Economist, Lloyds Commercial Banking, said: “Firms are reporting confidence in their trading prospects at the start of the year, despite a slight softening of wider economic optimism. This points to businesses’ ability to manage external risks and a focus on growth opportunities.
“The first rise in confidence in the services sector in seven months is encouraging given the sector’s central role in supporting UK economic activity.”
Paul Kempster, managing director for Commercial Banking Coverage, Lloyds Business & Commercial said: “It’s encouraging to see businesses start the year with renewed confidence in their ability to deliver for customers, setting themselves up well to capture the growth opportunities ahead. Keeping a close focus on cashflow and making strategic investment decisions will be key to acting quickly as new opportunities emerge.”
Following from last year’s pledge, the UK government has announced the establishment of a new Centre for AI Measurement to be led by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
The centre, backed by £10.5 million in government funding, is a cornerstone of the AI Assurance Innovation Fund, designed to accelerate the development of secure, transparent and trustworthy AI technologies.
As high-capability AI systems become more integrated into the economy, the new centre will address the critical need for scientifically robust approaches for AI assurance, the process of identifying and mitigating risks before they impact businesses or the public.
“Robust, trusted tools for assessing the safety and effectiveness of emerging AI systems are essential for businesses to deploy them with confidence,” AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, said. “That’s why it is one of the key pillars of the AI Opportunities Action Plan.
“The centre delivers on that promise – uniting industry, start-ups and researchers to create new ways for organisations to identify and mitigate risks early. In the long-term, this will help speed up the adoption of AI – keeping the UK in pole position for cutting-edge AI innovations.”
The centre will offer the collaborative environment required to undertake research while also providing expertise and support to empower industry, startups and researchers looking to develop and pilot technical assurance tools, with the aim of moving trustworthy AI assurance tools to market faster.
As the UK’s National Metrology Institute, NPL already plays a large role in developing tools and approaches to increase confidence in AI. For example, through NPL’s Life Cycle for Trustworthy and Safe Artificial Intelligence.
Alongside the new centre, NPL is a founding partner of the AI Standards Hub, an initiative dedicated to shaping global standards for AI. The AI Standards Hub Global Summit is taking place 16-17 March in Glasgow, with a focus on the interplay between AI standards, measurement and assurance.
By underpinning AI assurance with metrology (the science of measurement), the new centre aims to give the UK a distinct competitive advantage, positioning the nation as a global leader in AI adoption.
“The UK has world-class expertise in AI and through the creation of the Centre for AI Measurement, we aim to strengthen the UK’s leadership in developing and adopting secure and trustworthy AI,” Dr Peter Thompson, CBE, CEO of NPL said.
“As the UK’s National Metrology Institute, NPL will work with industry and lead in developing and validating scientifically robust technical AI assurance capabilities, ensuring the centre becomes an independent national resource that supports development of the UK’s AI technical assurance capabilities, economic growth and national security.”
The need for tech skills is narrowing, as recruiters seek specialist skills to prepare their organisations for AI and Machine Learning.
This is based on data from hiring platform Indeed, which released its Opportunity Index for 2026, highlighting the roles that are emerging at the centre off the UK labour market this year based on factors such as postings, flexibility and wage growth.
The index reflects how wider economic, social and technological shifts are influencing where opportunity is appearing, from continued demand for skilled trades and essential services to the growing importance of sustainability and specialist technology roles.
Spanning fields such as technology, healthcare, education and construction, the jobs reflect how the UK economy is evolving, and where employers are actively hiring.
Pilates Instructor tops the list, reflecting the significant growth of the health and wellbeing industry over the past several years, while Principal Software Engineer and Traffic Manager closely following, placing second and third, showing the diversity of in-demand skills.
Tech Roles Evolve, With Machine Learning Driving Demand
While technology continues to shape the labour market, demand is concentrating around high-impact, specialist roles. Machine learning engineer and principal software engineer stand out as employers seek professionals who can translate data and automation into real business outcomes. Rather than broad tech hiring, the market is rewarding deep technical expertise, particularly in areas linked to AI adoption, productivity gains and decision-making at scale.
Sustainability Is Shaping Career Opportunity
The transition to a greener economy is translating into tangible job growth. Roles such as ‘renewable energy engineer’ underline how sustainability is no longer a niche sector but a core driver of employment. As the UK accelerates investment in clean energy, retrofitting and environmental regulation, careers tied to sustainability are offering both stability and long-term progression into 2026 and beyond.
This trend also aligns with the UK’s longer term green ambitions, including its commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and recent government plans such as the establishment of Great British Energy to drive investment and jobs across the clean energy economy.
Human Skills Remain in Demand
Roles rooted in personal connection, wellbeing and trust are increasingly commanding competitive pay. Positions such as Pilates instructor, dance instructor, dental hygienist and practice nurse highlight growing demand for professionals whose value lies in expertise that cannot be automated.
As employers and consumers place greater emphasis on health and quality of life, these results show how even in the age of tech, human-centred roles are remaining in-demand as workers put their health and wellbeing first.
Trades and practical roles remain a cornerstone of the UK economy and their value is rising. Careers including fire stopper, HGV technician, plumbing engineer, and building inspector reflect sustained demand driven by infrastructure investment and tighter safety regulations. With fewer entrants and increasing complexity, these roles offer strong job security, competitive pay and long-term resilience, making skilled trades an increasingly strategic career choice heading into 2026.
In the UK, this demand is being reinforced by current policy and regulatory developments. For example, the government set out plans to deliver 1.5 million new homes by 2029, alongside continued investment in areas such as transport and utilities. Meeting these ambitions is increasing the need for skilled, accountable professionals on site, particularly in roles that support compliance, safety and the long-term performance of the built environment.
“As we look towards 2026, jobseekers are thinking beyond pay alone,” Matt Burney, Senior Strategic Advisor at Indeed commented.
“They are asking whether a role will let them use and build skills that still matter in a changing economy. This list highlights jobs where employers are actively hiring and where pay and progression are moving in the right direction.
“What stands out is the range, from advanced tech roles to skilled trades and public services, all tied together by skills that are in demand and becoming more valuable.”
By 2027, 35% of countries will be locked into region-specific AI platforms using proprietary contextual data, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company. Gartner also predicts that platform lock-in will rise from 5% to 35% by 2027.
“Countries with digital sovereignty goals are increasing investment in domestic AI stacks as they look for alternatives to the closed US model, including computing power, data centres, infrastructure and models aligned with local laws, culture and region,” said Gaurav Gupta, VP Analyst at Gartner.
“Trust and cultural fit are emerging as key criteria. Decision makers are prioritising AI platforms that align with local values, regulatory frameworks, and user expectations over those with the largest training datasets.”
Localised models deliver more contextual value; regional LLMs outperform global models in applications such as education, legal compliance, and public services, especially in non-English languages.
Nations Will Need to Invest 1% of GDP in AI Sovereignty by 2029
With non-Western customers changing alignment due to concerns of overly Western influence, AI sovereignty will lead to reduced collaboration and duplication of effort. Because of this, Gartner predicts that nations establishing a sovereign AI stack will need to spend at least 1% of their GDP on AI infrastructure by 2029.
AI sovereignty refers to the ability of a nation or organisation to independently control how AI is developed, deployed, and used related to its geographical boundaries.
Regulatory pressure, geopolitics, cloud localisation, national AI missions, corporate risks and national security concerns are driving governments and corporations to accelerate investments in sovereign AI. A fear of falling behind in the technological AI race will also push nations and companies to innovate rapidly and invest in an attempt to achieve self-sufficiency in all aspects of the AI stack.
“Data centres and AI factory infrastructure form the critical backbone of the AI stack that enables AI sovereignty, ” said Gupta. “As a result, data centres and AI factory infrastructure will see explosive build-up and investment going forward, propelling a few companies that control the AI stack to achieve double-digit, trillion-dollar valuations.”
With this in mind, Gartner says that CIOs must take four key steps to maintain AI sovereignty:
Design model agnostic workflows using orchestration layers that enable switching between LLMs across regions and different vendors.
Ensure AI governance, data residency, and model tuning practices can meet country-specific legal, cultural, and linguistic requirements.
Establish relationships with national cloud providers, regional LLM vendors, and sovereign AI stack leaders in priority markets and build a vetted list of partners.
Monitor AI legislation, data sovereignty rules, and emerging standards that may affect where and how they can deploy AI models and process users’ data.
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded US tech company Palantir with a £240.6 million contract over three-years to work on its data analytics.
The deal will start on 1 April; the contract was described as an agreement “for continued licensing and support to data analytics capabilities supporting strategic, tactical and live operational decision making across classifications, across defense, and interoperable with Nato and other allied nations Palantir systems,” according to the contract tender.
The deal is met with multiple lines of controversy, as OpenDemocracy investigations uncovered a direct link between Palantir and the MoD, with the US-based tech company hiring four ex-MoD employees before the new deal was agreed.
The MoD did place restrictions on Palantir’s hire of Barnaby Kistruck, a former policy director at MoD, saying he could not rely on government information to give the firm an unfair advantage, must not use his government contracts, and may not advise on bids for government contracts in the 12 months following his departure from MoD.
Palantir confirmed toThe Registerthat all employees are required to adhere to any non-compete clauses they are bound by.
Further, the MoD contract was awarded directly to Palantir rather than through a procurement competition, a decision rationalised by the MoD under a security and defence exemption.
Even without the leadership controversy, Palantir’s growing provenance in the UK’s government continues to raise hair. The UK’s continued reliance on US big tech and Palantir’s roles in surveillance, has struck a chord in the UK’s own discourse surrounding privacy and immigration.
The data and analytics firm has established its European defense headquarters in London, and its new contract is seen as an expansion of its previous MoD contract signed in September to boost the use of AI by the UK’s military.
The firm was also chosen as the vendor for NHS England’s federated data platform back in 2023, which was also met with controversy.
New Green party leader Zack Polanski criticised the firm’s NHS contract, saying: “This Trump-supporting military surveillance outfit has no place in Britain’s most important institution.”
Thiel himself has been the subject on much controversy – and general dismay – for his own believes about society and AI. He recently presented his theory on the anti-Christ, which he frames as a figure that will use fears of an AI-driven, climate change-caused, nuclear Armageddon to frighten and control the globe, to a lecture hall in France.
The UK government has officially designated a data centre site in North Lanarkshire as an AI Growth Zone, seeing the site secure £8.2 in private investment for the region.
Delivered by home-grown data centre company DataVita around their data centre site in Airdrie – and in partnership with AI cloud firm CoreWeave – the Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone aims to bring more than 3,400 jobs over the course of the coming years, including delivering 50 apprenticeships to nurture the next generation of Scottish AI expertise
Of these jobs, around 800 are expected to focus on the high-paying AI jobs of the future, including everything from AI researchers and coders through to permanent staff who will run and maintain data centres. The rest will be made up of immediate construction jobs, as attention turns to building out the entire site, including data centres, supportive infrastructure, and a renewables park.
Alongside £8.2 billion in private investment that will drive economic renewal in the local area, a new community fund will inject up to £543 million into support for a range of local programmes over the next 15 years. The money will come as a direct result of the work carried out at the site, being raised as data centre capacity comes online.
“Today’s announcement is about creating good jobs, backing innovation and making sure the benefits AI will bring can be felt across the community – that’s how the UK government is delivering real change for the people of Scotland,” technology secretary Liz Kendall said.
“From thousands of new jobs and billions in investment through to support for local people and their families, AI Growth Zones are bringing generation-defining opportunity to all corners of the country.”
Bolstering the benefits for local communities even further, DataVita’s parent company HFD Group will also contribute a separate £1 million per year towards local charities and community groups.
The development brings together three connected elements: 500MW of AI-ready data centre capacity, more than 1GW of privately wired renewable energy infrastructure, and purpose-built Innovation Parks aimed at attracting next-generation industries.
“Scotland has everything AI needs, the talent, the green energy, and now the infrastructure. But this goes beyond the physical buildings,” Danny Quinn, Managing Director of DataVita, said.
“We’re creating innovation parks, new energy infrastructure, and attracting inward investment from some of the world’s leading technology companies. This is a massive opportunity for North Lanarkshire & Scotland, and we want to make sure local people share in it.
“The £543 million community fund means the benefits stay here, good jobs, new skills, and investment that actually reaches the people who live and work in this area.”
Enterprises are entering a new phase of AI adoption, moving beyond pilots and chatbots towards agentic systems that can reason, plan and take action across real business workflows.
Databricks’ 2026 State of AI Agents report draws on fully aggregated, anonymised telemetry from more than 20,000 organisations worldwide – including over 60% of the Fortune 500 – to examine how AI agents are being deployed in production environments.
The findings show a sharp acceleration in multi-agent use, alongside a growing focus on governance, evaluation and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
Mult-agent system: The next frontier?
Enterprises are transitioning from single chatbots to multi-agent systems that autonomously orchestrate end-to-end workflows.
Databricks found that usage of multi-agent workflows on their platform has grown by 327% in just four months.
Technology companies, especially digital natives, are building multi-agent systems nearly four times more than any other industry, reflecting early enterprise maturity.
AI is critical to workflows
Enterprises are taking a pragmatic approach to AI by solving real-world business problems specific to their industry. Manufacturing and automotive industries typically use AI for predictive maintenance (35%), retail and consumer goods opt for market intelligence (14%), while health and life sciences use AI mostly for medical literature synthesis (23%).
Four out of ten of the top AI use cases focus on practical customer concerns such as customer support, advocacy, and onboarding.
Businesses are increasingly using multiple LLM model families (such as ChatGPT, Claude, LLama, and Gemini), aligning their use cases to those that perform best for a given task and maintaining vendor flexibility. As of October 2025, 77% of customers were using two or more, while the share of those using three or more rose from 36% in August to 59% in October.
Evaluation and governance
Databricks found two major factors in common for companies moving from generative AI experimentation to getting it into the real world.
Businesses that actively use AI governance put 12x more AI projects into production. Having unified governance dictates how data is used, setting guardrails and establishing accountability.
Customers that use evaluation tools put 6x more AI projects into production. These are frameworks that measure, test and improve the quality and reliability of AI models at all stages of deployment.
Agents in database operations
AI agents now create 80% of databases, up from near zero just two years ago.
Nearly all (97%) of database testing and development environments are now built by AI agents. Agents are dramatically reducing the time needed to clone, branch, and test databases, supporting faster experimentation and deployment.
With the rise of “vibe coding” business users without deep technical expertise can create AI apps and help democratise the technology across the company.
Over 50,000 data and AI apps have been created since the Public Preview of Databricks Apps, with a 250% growth rate over the past six months.
“For businesses across EMEA, the conversation has moved on from AI experimentation to operational reality,” Dael Williamson, EMEA CTO at Databricks, said.
“AI agents are already running critical parts of enterprise infrastructure, but the organisations seeing real value are those treating governance and evaluation as foundations, not afterthoughts.
“Just as importantly, competitive advantage is shifting back towards how companies build – not simply what they buy.
“Open, interoperable platforms allow organisations to apply AI to their own enterprise data, rather than relying on embedded AI features that deliver short-term productivity but not long-term differentiation.
“In highly regulated and risk-aware markets across EMEA, that combination of openness and control is what separates pilots from competitive advantage.”
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has launched a review into the implications of advanced AI on consumers, retail financial markets, and regulators.
The Mills review, led by FCA director Sheldon Mills, will seek views centring on the evolution of AI in financial markets, and how consumers, retailers, and regulators will need to adapt in the future.
AI is already embedded across financial services, with rapid advances in generative, agentic, and emerging forms of AI. The next phase of change could be profound, having the power to reshape markets, change the way firms compete and how consumers use retail financial services.
“AI is already shaping financial services, but its longer-term effects may be more far-reaching,” Mills said. “This review will consider how emerging uses of AI could influence consumers, markets and firms, looking towards 2030 and beyond.
“By taking a forward-looking view, the review will help the FCA continue to support innovation while promoting the safe and trusted adoption of AI in retail financial services.”
The FCA is seeking views on how AI could evolve in the future, including the development of more autonomous and agentic systems.
The review will look to understand how any developments in AI could affect markets and firms, including changes to competition and market structure and UK competitiveness.
It will also look at the impact on consumers, including how they can be influenced by AI as well as their new expectations on the financial market based on AI’s integration.
Finally, Mills will seek views on how financial regulators will need to evolve with AI to ensure that retail financial markets can work well.
Influences on the wholesale market and the broader societal impacts of AI are out of the Review’s scope, though it aims to recognise how developments in these areas may indirectly influence retail financial services.
To supplement the review, the FCA is seeking feedback to inform how the regulator can guide the financial sector through AI driven transformation.
The deadline to submit a review is 24 February, and can be provided here.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has today proposed a package of measures to make Google Search more fair in the competitive sphere, especially when it comes to AI.
This includes making sure publishers, including news and other content producers, get a fairer deal over how their content is used in Google’s AI Overviews.
Google Search accounts for more than 90% of all general search queries in the UK – with millions of people relying on it as a key gateway to the internet.
More than 200,000 firms in the UK collectively spent more than £10 billion on Google’s search advertising last year.
In October 2025, the CMA designated Google with strategic market status (SMS) in search services, which means the engine will face more stringent requirements for fair competition, open choices, and transparency.
Now, the CMA is consulting on some proposed conduct requirements designed to support innovation while also ensuring people benefit from fair competition.
These include increasing publisher choice in how their content is used in Google AI Overviews. This would give publishers the option to opt out of their content being used in AI features on Google or being used to train AI models. Google would also be required to properly attribute content used in its AI results.
Google would also need to ensure that its approach to search results rankings are fair and transparent, with an effective process for raising and investigating issues.
To make switching search services easier for people, Google would be required to have default choice screens on Android mobile devices, as well as choice screens on Chrome browsers.
People and businesses would also be able to access and make use of Google search data more easily under the proposed mandates.
“Today is an important milestone as we consult on the first conduct requirements under the digital markets competition regime in the UK,” Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA, said.
“These targeted and proportionate actions would give UK businesses and consumers more choice and control over how they interact with Google’s search services – as well as unlocking greater opportunities for innovation across the UK tech sector and broader economy.
“They would also provide a fairer deal for content publishers, particularly news organisations, over how their content is used in Google’s AI Overviews.”
Before these new rules can come into effect the CMA is required to consult on the proposals, and feedback can be submitted until 25 February 2026.
Every adult in the UK is eligible to take free, newly benchmarked courses to gain practical AI skills for work – as the joint government and industry programme sees a major expansion to upskill 10 million workers.
In order to make Britain the fastest adopting AI country in the G7, the UK is setting ambitious targets to ensure the workforce is adequately skilled for the opportunities of AI. This could create more higher-skilled jobs and free workers up from routine tasks.
A selection of industry-developed AI courses, newly available on government’s AI Skills Hub, have been checked against Skills England’s AI foundation skills for work benchmark, with those who complete these courses receiving a virtual AI foundations badge.
Open to all UK adults online, taking as little as under 20 minutes, the courses will give people the skills needed to use simple AI tools effectively in the workplace and teach the use of AI for tasks like drafting text, creating content and completing administrative tasks, to free up time to focus on other work.
This training will seek to give both workers and employers confidence in their new skills, and set standards for what good AI upskilling looks like.
NHS workers and local government employees will be among those to benefit. Major public sector, business representative organisations, and industry partners onboarding – including Britain’s biggest employer, the NHS – is enabling government to raise the ambition to now reach 10 million workers this decade. This is equivalent to upskilling nearly a third of this country’s workforce and includes reaching at least 2 million SME employees.
Recognising that AI will bring changes to jobs and work as we know it, the Tech Secretary is also launching the new AI and the Future of Work Unit to remain front-footed in addressing inevitable challenges.
Backed by a panel of experts from business and trade unions, the unit will seek provide the best analysis and evidence on AI’s impact on the economy and labour market to provide timely advice on when new policies should be implemented across government. It will ensure the AI transition boosts economic growth, supports workers to adapt, protects communities from the mistakes of past industrial change, and delivers a fair, dignified future of work for everyone, where people are supported into better jobs in a more productive economy.
“We want AI to work for Britain, and that means ensuring Britons can work with AI,” secretary of state for science, innovation, and technology, Liz Kendall said.
“Change is inevitable, but the consequences of change are not. We will protect people from the risks of AI while ensuring everyone can share in its benefits.
“That starts with giving people the skills and confidence they need to seize the opportunities AI brings, putting the power and control into their hands.”
The new partners joining the initiative include: British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), Cisco, Cognizant, Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Department for Education (DfE), Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), Institute of Directors (IOD) – Local Government Association (LGA), Multiverse, NHS, Pax8 and techUK will unlock AI upskilling for even more workers.
They will join the ranks of founding partners Accenture, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Sage, SAS and Salesforce to take the AI Skills Boost programme to the next level and upskill 10 million workers with AI skills by 2030.
Pornhub, the world’s most visited adult site, says that it will officially block UK users from next week, citing the Online Safety Act’s “failed system” of age verification checks.
New UK registrations to the site will be blocked from 2 February, though existing, age-verified UK users will be able to retain access to Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, the adult sites under Canadian company Aylo.
The decision to block new UK users follows the rules introduced in July 2025 under the Online Safety Act, which forced sites with adult content to input strong age verification checks to prevent children from accessing the platforms.
In the following days of the rules coming into effect, Pornhub and other sites saw a major drop in UK traffic, while downloads of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) shot up as people tried to evade the verification rules.
Age verification tools often require users to input personal details like ID cards or credit cards, which cyber experts have noted creates a major cyber risk, as this data could now be in danger of a breach or cyber-attack as sites rush to implement age checks.
Online safety advocates have also critiqued the age check mandate, saying that it could drive underage users, and users who wish to remain private, into darker areas of the internet with more harmful or even illegal material.
Aylo criticised the Online Safety Act’s age verification mandate when it announced its exit, saying that it “made the internet more dangerous for minors and adults”, and “jeopardises the privacy and personal data of UK citizens.”
The firm said it would “no longer participated in the failed system that has been created in the United Kingdom as a result of the OSA’s introduction.”
Aylo’s vice president of brand and community, Alex Kekesi, warned: “Our sites, which host legal and regulated porn, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will still be easy to access.”
“Despite the clear intent of the law to restrict minors’ access to adult content, and commitment to enforcement, after six months of implementation, our experience strongly suggests that the OSA has failed to achieve that objective.
“We cannot continue to operate within a system that, in our view, fails to deliver on its promise of child safety, and has had the opposite impact.
“We believe this framework in practice has diverted traffic to darker, unregulated corners of the internet, and has also jeopardised the privacy and personal data of UK citizens.
“Based on our data and experience, effective enforcement is not possible, circumvention is rampant, privacy is compromised, and new, unregulated sites quickly fill any gaps left by responsible operators.
“In other jurisdictions, Aylo has often been one of the only major platforms to comply, only to see traffic diverted to even larger, non-compliant sites.
“Although larger operators are compliant, we believe the OSA has created an ecosystem where the vast majority of sites with age-inappropriate content are left unchecked.
“Users are turning to sites that do not have uploader verification measures and do not moderate content, leading to an increased risk of exposure to dangerous or illegal content.”
An Ofcom spokesperson commented: “Porn services have a choice between using age checks to protect users as required under the Act, or to block access to their sites in the UK.
“There’s nothing to stop technology providers from developing solutions which work at the device level, and we would urge the industry to get on with that if they can evidence it is highly effective.
“Our job is to enforce the rules as they stand. We’ve put in place age assurance rules that are flexible and proportionate, and we have seen widespread adoption.”
They went on to say that Ofcom has launched probes into over 80 porn sites, and even issued a £1 million fine on a porn provider over the rules.
While the regulator says that it will continue to communicate with Aylo to understand its change of stance, it maintained that “any changes to the law around device-based age assurance is a matter for government.”
TikTok is facing a probe in the US following claims the social media platform is censoring critical posts and users following its change of ownership.
California governor Gavin Newsom said that the state will begin an investigation into whether TikTok is censoring political content that is critical of President Trump and his allies.
Since ByteDance was forced to divest its majority ownership of TikTok’s operations in the US, a group of investors, and US firm Oracle, owned by Trump ally Larry Ellison, took over the majority stake of the company.
Less than a week later, US TikTok users raised complaints that content critical of the president, his policies, or associated were being suppressed across the platform.
Users reported that they were blocked from using the word ‘Epstein’, the surname of the late convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein, and the title of the files that US law makers and citizens have pressed to have revealed to the public.
Users also claim that videos showing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and associated protests against them have been blocked on the platform.
While users on X provided screenshots showing TikTok saying that a message with ‘Epstein’ was blocked for being ‘in violation of our Community Guidelines’, and a Senator from California saying his post about ICE was blocked, TikTok alleges that this is all routed in “major infrastructure” issue.
“While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve together with our data centre partner,” TikTok said in a statement, claiming the issues were due to a power outage at a US data centre.
“You may notice multiple bugs, slower load times, or timed-out requests, including when posting new content. Creators may temporarily see ‘O’ views or likes on videos, and your earnings may look like they’re missing. This is a display error caused by server timeouts,” the statement continued.
However, Newsom said that his government has received confirmation from independent and verified reports that TikTok is suppressing content that is critical of Trump and his policies.
“Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports – and independently confirmed instances – of suppressed content critical of President Trump,” the governor wrote on X.
NEW: Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports — and independently confirmed instances — of suppressed content critical of President Trump. @CAGovernor Gavin Newsom is launching a review of this conduct and is calling on the… https://t.co/D6vQ890gO8
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) January 27, 2026
The California governor has been a consistent critic of President Trump, especially since ICE raids torrented Los Angeles in June last year.
It remains unclear what exactly may be causing the issues on TikTok, as users reported issues not only with possible censorship but also speed and glitches.
DownDetector received over 600,000 reports of issues from US users of TikTok between Saturday and Monday, the BBC was told.
Users shared struggles with search, loading videos, slow speeds, issues accessing monetisation tools, and having their videos having worse visibility to users despite no prior issues.
Resilience was undoubtedly the key theme for the cyber industry in 2025.
Organisations were urged to move away from the assumption that their environments are impenetrable and instead told to accept the reality that breaches will happen. They were also advised to shift their defences to a layered strategy, adopting technology and processes to minimise the impact of attacks and safeguard their recovery.
But when it comes to achieving true ‘business resilience’ a company’s policies and controls can’t stop at cyber.
Last year the world witnessed outages at AWS and Vodafone that rippled across organisations bringing their operations to a halt.
These incidents were not malicious, but their impacts were severe, demonstrating that operational disruption can be just as damaging as a cyber-attack, which means they can’t be overlooked when organisations are enhancing their resilience.
True business resilience means preparing for all forms of digital disruption. For many, this requires a more consolidated and accountable approach to managing their digital estate.
Achieving resilience in complex digital environments
Today’s digital environments are sprawling and complex, spanning cloud platforms, IT systems, Operational Technology, electronic security systems, on-premises platforms and, connectivity solutions.
However, when multiple providers are responsible for the different elements making up a business’s digital environment, it becomes extremely difficult to maintain visibility and achieve resilience. Accountability becomes unclear, and there is no single lens covering the entire digital estate.
Last year’s AWS outage provided a clear example of this challenge.
The incident impacted approximately 70,000 organisations globally and many did not realise they were vulnerable until hidden dependencies, such as their third-party SaaS providers and partner APIs built on AWS, ground to a halt.
For these businesses, recovery was slow because they lacked consolidated visibility across their disconnected digital dependencies.
Without clear ownership across the estate, incident response becomes fragmented, slowing recovery and increasing operational risk.
In contrast, when organisations adopt a consolidated operating model, working with a single strategic technology partner capable of supporting the entire digital infrastructure, they gain greater consistency, visibility and accountability across all assets.
A consolidated provider provides end-to-end oversight across the digital environment, reducing coverage gaps and ensuring assets are monitored and managed through a unified operational view.
Clear accountability removes ambiguity during incidents, enabling faster, more coordinated response when disruption occurs.
With deployments designed, delivered and supported under a unified model, organisations benefit from a deeper understanding of their environment. This reduces the risk of unknown systems, limits visibility gaps and ensures dependencies are clearly understood when outages or incidents occur, enabling teams to mitigate their operational impact more effectively.
This approach also streamlines commercial management: one invoice, one contract, one point of contact, and a closer working relationship that adapts seamlessly as business needs evolve.
Business resilience and efficiency remain top priorities for all leadership teams. By consolidating oversight of their digital estate under a single accountable partner, organisations can improve visibility, strengthen resilience and simplify management across multiple environments.
This provides organisations with one dedicated and coordinated team overseeing connectivity, IT, cyber and physical security, ensuring every component of the digital estate is monitored, managed and protected by experts with deep end-to-end operational understanding of the environment.
New advice on using apps and other digital tools to support mental health is being published by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), as part of free online resources developed with NHS England for the public, parents, carers and professionals who use or recommend these tools.
More people in the UK, particularly young people, are turning to digital tools for mental health support.
From symptom-tracking apps to virtual reality therapies, these products are now widely available and often used alongside NHS and community care, but it is not always clear which are reliable, safe or right for an individual.
The new guidance aims to help people make more informed choices and know what to do if something doesn’t feel right.
“When someone turns to a tool to help with their mental health, they need to know it is safe, effective, and built on reliable evidence. Our aim is to give people clear, practical advice they can use in everyday life, so they understand what good looks like and when to speak up if something doesn’t feel right,” MHRA Chair and professor of primary care at the University of Oxford, Professor Anthony Harnden, said.
“As a GP, I’ve seen how patients can benefit from accessing digital tools alongside traditional forms of care. This guidance supports better conversations between clinicians and patients and helps everyone ask the right questions about whether a tool is right for them.
“Digital mental health technologies are not a replacement for professional healthcare. Anyone experiencing mental health difficulties should seek support from trained professionals.”
The MHRA provides five things to check before using a digital mental health tool to help users make more informed decisions when turning to an online tool for mental health advice.
1. What is it claiming to do?
Does the product offer general wellbeing support, or does it claim to diagnose, treat or manage a mental health condition? Claims about medical benefit should be clearly explained and supported by evidence.
2. Who is it for?
A tool built for adults may not be suitable for teenagers or children. Age and intended users should be clearly stated.
3. Is there evidence it works?
Trustworthy products will explain how they have been tested or evaluated, for example in a clinical study. Be cautious of products making big promises without clear supporting information.
4. What happens to your data?
These tools often collect very sensitive personal information. You should be able to easily find out how your data is stored and used.
5. Is it regulate as a medical device?
Some digital mental health technologies are classed as medical devices, for example those claiming to diagnose, treat or manage a mental health condition. These must meet safety standards and display a CE or UKCA mark. People can look for the marking and check whether the product is registered using the MHRA’s online public register. This gives you extra reassurance, as it means it meets UK safety standards, is registered with the MHRA and is monitored once in use.
Not all digital mental health technologies are regulated as medical devices – some are instead classed as wellbeing or lifestyle products. This does not necessarily mean they are unsafe, but they may not have been through the same checks.
“As more people turn to digital mental health technologies for support, we need practical ways for regulators, developers, and healthcare providers to work together so that safe, effective interventions reach those who need them,” Head of Digital Technology, Discovery Research and Mental Health at Wellcome, Matthew Brown, said.
“These technologies offer transformative opportunities and we need better evidence to understand what works, for whom, and in which contexts. Our partnership with MHRA and NICE over the coming years reflects this commitment, bringing research, policy, and innovation together to create earlier and more effective support for anxiety, depression, and psychosis.”
The UK is being hit harder economically by AI, with the nation losing more jobs to AI than creating them compared to rival countries.
This is according to a new report from Morgan Stanley, which found that the acceleration of job loss over job creation due to AI is hitting the UK faster than countries like Germany, the US, Japan and Australia.
The Morgan Stanley study, shared with Bloomberg, investigated organisations that had been using AI for at least a year, with a focus on five industries, including retail, real estate, transport, automobiles, and health-care equipment.
While British firms using AI say an average 11.5% productivity boost, firms in the US saw nearly the same bump, but actually created more jobs than they cut.
In the UK, firms said that AI caused a net job loss of 8% over the past 12 months, the highest rate compared to equivalent economies, and twice the international average.
The news comes at a time when UK workers are already facing unemployment at a five year high, and staff squeezes as firms contend with rising national insurance contributions.
Most of the jobs at risk appear to be those most easily replaced by AI, including software developers. UK employers cut or did not rehire for about a quarter of their jobs due to AI.
While other countries followed this pattern, firms outside of the UK typically hired more people because of AI, whereas UK firms did not. However, the US was the only country to see a rise in jobs due to AI.
Young people and white collar workers are being hit the hardest, with job openings falling across the entire economy by over a third since 2022, with a fifth of these losses coming from sectors most impacted by AI.
Entry-level jobs are most at risks, with Morgan Stanley saying that most organisations plan to cut jobs that would require two to five years of experience, putting university grads and early-careers workers at more risk of unemployment in sectors where AI is taking hold.
There’s only two weeks left to nominate someone for the 2026 Scottish Cyber Awards, honouring outstanding cyber talent in Scotland.
Now in its eighth year, the Scottish Cyber Awards continues its tradition of highlighting people and organisations shaping the future of Scotland’s vibrant and prosperous cyber ecosystem.
The event not only serves as a cornerstone of Scotland’s cyber calendar each year, but it offers a unique opportunity for networking and socialising with the top minds and organisations in cyber today.
The evening ceremony will be held on Thursday, 26th March at the EICC Edinburgh, following our 12th annual Scot-Secure Summit.
There’s just two weeks left to nominate yourself or others for the prestigious awards though, so take a look at the categories below and see if you or someone you knows fits the bill!
Individual & Leadership Awards
Cybersecurity Student of the Year
Cybersecurity Leader of the Year
Cyber Evangelist Award
Innovation & Impact Awards
Cyber Innovation Award
Financial Services Impact Award
Public Sector Impact Award
Cyber Resilience Award
Cyber School of the Year
Cyber Culture Award
Best Security Awareness Campaign
Business & Inclusion Awards
Cyber Start-Up of the Year
Cybersecurity Company of the Year
Diversity in Cyber Award
The EU Commission is opening an investigation to see if X’s Grok AI chatbot violated the Digital Services Act over the dissemination of manipulated sexualise images over the social media platform.
The formal investigation follows the torrent of sexualised deepfakes generated by Grok prompted by users under its ‘spicy mode’, which enabled imges of people to be ‘undressed’ and clad in revealing clothing or in sexualised positions. The mode was used on images of real people, mainly women, and included images of children.
The investigation seeks to clarify is X acted appropriately under EU law to mitigate the risks associated with Grok and its function
A senior EU official told reporters on Monday that the Commission so far has reasons to believe that X may not have carried out an ad hoc assessment of Grok when it rolled out its spicy mode, and the changes it made, though welcomed, wee not enough to resolve the issues and their associated risks.
The EU Commission already called the sexualised images of women and children generated by Grok “appalling”, now the Commission will see if X will pay a financial price for the pictures.
“Non-consensual sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” EU technology chief Henna Virkkunen said in a statement about the investigation
X has restricted Grok’s spicy mode abilities based on user location, and has said that generated images of ‘undressed’ people will be banned in regions where it is illegal. Still, it has not revealed what areas would see this restriction, or what laws would deem the tech illegal.
“With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the DSA, or whether it treated rights of European citizens – including those of women and children – as collateral damage of its service,” Virkkunen said.
Scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh are developing a tool to help organisations and their human resources teams get ready for the wider use of digital twinning technologies.
Digital twins are digital replicas of the physical world that allow systems and scenarios to be tested much faster and more affordably than in real-world trials. They are increasingly being explored in sectors including transport, manufacturing, construction and energy to support smarter, lower-carbon decision-making.
To help employers understand what the introduction of digital twins means in practice, researchers are developing a Human Capital Readiness Index for Digital Twinning.
The work sits within TransiT, a national digital twinning research hub jointly led by Heriot-Watt and the University of Glasgow and focused on rapidly decarbonising transport in the UK.
Dr Muhammad Shujaat Mubarik, a researcher with TransiT and an Associate Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Heriot-Watt University’s Edinburgh Business School, explained: “Because digital twins change how decisions are made, adopting them is not just a technical challenge. It also demands new skills, mindsets and ways of working across organisations.
“Our Human Capital Readiness Index will help us understand what specific human resources are needed in an organisation for digital twinning and what kinds of behavioural capabilities are required.
“For example, if a logistics service provider wants to adopt our transport digital twin, their employees might need specific expertise in areas like cybersecurity, analytics or artificial intelligence.
“On the behavioural side, digital twins can be helpful, but they can also become counterproductive if the flow of information is overwhelming. So, we look at what capabilities are needed to make sense of that information and act on it.”
The prototype Human Capital Index is expected to be a simple online tool where organisations enter key information about their workforce and operating context. It will then generate an indicative readiness score, along with practical recommendations for improving skills and organisational readiness for digital twinning.
Dr Mubarik is a researcher in TransiT’s ‘Work Package 2’ research group, which is focused on human factors and explores how people interact with and make decisions about transport.
An industrial economist by background, Dr Mubarik examines how human capital, innovation and digital technologies reshape industrial value chains, with a focus on resilience and decarbonisation. He co-authored the book Human Capital, Innovation and Disruptive Digital Technology, which sets out methodologies for constructing a Human Capital Readiness Index for technology adoption. These concepts are now being adapted for digital twinning in transport. A PhD research student has joined TransiT to help develop and test the index.
“Digital twins are expected to become everyday technology in the industrial world,” Dr Mubarik added. “Within TransiT, we are developing a network of interlinked digital twins representing the UK’s transport system. Transport operators and travellers will be able to use these tools to identify lower-emission options.
“Our Human Capital Readiness Index will provide a form of gap analysis so we can suggest to organisations what kinds of training, recruitment or development programmes might be needed to ensure they can realise the full value of these digital twins.”
TransiT is using digital twinning and related digital technologies to identify the lowest-cost, least-risky pathways to net zero emissions in UK transport across all modes – road, rail, air and maritime – for both passengers and freight.
By aligning this technological innovation with practical insights about human capabilities, the team aims to accelerate the impact of digital twins and support a well-managed transition to a net zero transport system.
TransiT is funded by the UK Research and Innovation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the main funding body for engineering and physical sciences research in the UK, and is a collaboration of eight universities and almost 70 industry partners.
The UK government appears to be u-turning on its approval of a hyperscale data centre planned for a greentbelt area outside of London following pushback from the local council and environmental advocates.
Plans were approved for a 90MW data centre in Buckinghamshire last year despite the local council rejecting the plans put forward by developers Greystoke Land and Altrad UK.
Residents were concerned about the associate energy needs and costs of running the data centre, as well as its environmental impact on air quality and local wildlife.
Prior to approval, inspectors of the land advised that the data centre could impact the local landscape, but said that the need for data centres was more important that these potential effects.
Further, the government said that an environmental impact assessment (EIA) was not required for the data centre plans.
Since then, however, Foxglove and Global Action Plan, environmental campaign groups, brought claims against the developers saying that the energy use of the data centre was not considered, both in terms of demand impacting the local supply as well as its environmental impact.
While the court hearing was not attended by the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government, a letter sent and seen by PA Media by the Treasury Solicitor admitted that the “claim is arguable and the permission should be quashed.”
The letter said that the government approved the data centre plans under the assumption that “mitigation measures” would be put in place, such as the “sourcing of low carbon energy” to negate the issues of carbon emissions and energy demand.
However, the letter admitted that the government “no longer considers these could be secured,” and therefore the current plans were approved under a “serious logical error.”
The full legal court case will proceed later, but the case so far points to the growing gap between community perception and developer zeal when it comes to data centre developments. The lack of requirements for environmental impact assessments, and the ability for the UK government to overturn a local council’s rejection, makes the national government’s enthusiasm for data centres that much more questionable.
The environmental impact goes far beyond landscape effects and carbon emissions, as biodiversity in greenbelts could be threatened. Further, energy demand without proper supply allocation could impact local communities and prices.
Scotland is seeing this debate manifest closer to home, as the need to power the AI revolution collides with efforts to protect the natural environment, keep energy prices down, and improve clean energy resources.
Action To Protect Rural Scotland shared with The Nationalthat three protected sites are being considered as sites by developers for new hyperscale data centres. Two of these locations include greenbelt sites, one outside Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, and the other on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
While nations accept the apparent need for AI data centres to keep up with technological advancements, the consistent controversy surrounding development plans reveal major gaps in environmental regulation and local authority when it comes to responsibly building these structures of ‘critical national infrastructure’.
By 2030, cost per resolution for generative AI (GenAI) will exceed $3, higher than many B2C offshore human agents, according to Gartner, Inc.
Rising data centre costs, a pivot from subsidised growth to profitability for AI vendors, and increasingly complex use cases that consume more tokens and require expensive talent, will lead to soaring AI costs for customer service organisations, Gartner predicts.
“Customer service leaders are determined to use AI to reduce costs, but return on those investments is far from guaranteed,” said Patrick Quinlan, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Customer Service and Support practice.
“Full automation will be prohibitively expensive for most organisations; instead, leading organisations will use AI to drive customer engagement rather than to cut costs.”
The business analysis firm predicted AI will transform regulatory compliance and customer experience priorities as well.
By 2028, Gartner predicts that regulatory changes related to AI will increase assisted service volume by 30%.
Regulatory pressure to ensure the right to talk to a human will result in a surge of assisted-volume interactions as customers exercise their right to opt out of AI.
“Regulations mandating easy access to human agents will encourage customers to request a human by default, bypassing AI agents,” said Quinlan.
“As a result, organisations will have to maintain or even rehire human agents, possibly at higher numbers or at a higher salary than they previously paid. Failure to maintain appropriate staffing levels could lead to deterioration of the customer experience, with customers waiting for long periods to speak to a human.”
By 2030, Gartner says 10% of Fortune 500 firms will double customer service spending in order to use AI for hyperpersonalised, proactive experiences and competitive advantage.
With the cost of GenAI rising, most organisations will abandon efforts to cut costs through automation, instead pursuing other goals. There will emerge a clear differentiation opportunity for those who leverage AI not just for issue resolution, but to create value throughout the customer journey.
“Customer service leaders will turn to AI to improve the customer experience. They’ll look beyond cost optimisation to other benefits, such as increasing customer lifetime value, repurchase rate and brand loyalty,” said Quinlan.
“To be successful, organisations must invest in data, technology and talent. As proactive and personalised service becomes a customer expectation, early adopters will gain competitive advantage.”
The Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL) today announced the four fintechs selected to receive grants through its latest Future of Wealth Innovation Call, delivered by FinTech Scotland in partnership with SuperTech WM.
The six-week programme concluded on 15 January with a Showcase Day, where 21 fintechs presented solutions to the challenge: helping consumers make informed financial decisions and access more tailored wealth support, while keeping pace with evolving regulation.
Throughout the programme, and against the backdrop of the joint HM Treasury-Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Advice Guidance Boundary Review (AGBR) which seeks to help close the UK’s advice gap by clarifying how firms can provide more meaningful support under the Consumer Duty, participants took part in workshops and deep dive sessions to develop, refine and tailor their propositions to real world industry needs and potential pilots with partners. The FCA was involved throughout and provided both valuable clarity and guidance.
The Innovation Call was delivered with the support of 10 strategic partners: PwC, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Sopra Steria Financial Services, NatWest Group, M&G, BNP Paribas, Dudley Building Society, Wesleyan and Standard Life; alongside academic partners at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow, and Growth Builders, which supported delivery.
Following the Showcase Day, four fintechs were selected to receive £50,000 each to further develop their solutions. Over the grant period, the awardees will continue to collaborate with industry and academic partners to test, validate and accelerate their innovations towards adoption and scale.
The winners are:
Finspector
Finspector is an AI-powered compliance platform that automates the review and monitoring of financial promotions across text, images, video, and social media. It helps regulated firms reduce risk, evidence compliance, and scale marketing activity with confidence across jurisdictions.
Planda
Planda is a behavioural AI platform that helps financial services firms move beyond outdated segmentation to deliver hyper-personalised customer engagement. By connecting data across enterprise workflows, Planda builds dynamic customer segments that evolve in real-time, enabling institutions to personalise at scale and deepen relationships.
Amplified Global
Amplified Global uses AI and Machine Learning to help firms assess, simplify, and demonstrate consumer understanding at scale, ensuring they meet compliance obligations with confidence. Its technology analyses and enhances intelligibility, helping organisations turn complexity into clarity. Through a guided digital journey, it makes content more engaging, measurable, and human – redefining how people connect with information.
Afternoon Finance
Afternoon’s the new data + AI first operating model for advice firms. Data collection is automated with a focus on completeness and quality. AI modules automate work, allowing a doubling of clients with the same team and with less risk from meeting to report in under 2 minutes.
Aleks Tomczyk, Chief Executive, FinTech Scotland, commented: “The Advice Guidance Boundary Review is pivotal to widening access to meaningful financial support across the UK. Too few people are saving adequately for retirement, and historically advice has skewed towards higher earners. Government, regulators and industry are aligned on helping the wider population make better-informed financial decisions. By funding these four winning projects and opening real-world pilots with partners, we’re accelerating practical solutions that improve consumer decision-making and access to support, while helping firms operate confidently within the advice–guidance boundary.”
Kate Murray, Strategic Projects Lead, Scottish Widows & Lloyds Banking Group, said: “We want to fill the advice gap that currently exists in Britain and ultimately, enable people to have a much more prosperous financial future. The Innovation Calls present such a massive opportunity. We at Lloyds Banking Group are changing the way we do change and innovate to go faster. Bringing in outside thinking, technology, and just a completely different perspective can help us achieve that.”
Hilary Smyth Allen, Chief Executive, SuperTech WM, added: “Partnership matters because that’s how you really get things done with impact. Through the partnership with FRIL, we’ve been able to work across a broader spectrum of the ecosystem. Consumers come in all shapes and sizes, and so does the industry that services them. Innovation for us means we are maximising outcomes for those consumers.”
Crawford Taylor, CEO & co-founder, Afternoon Finance, stated: “The advice gap is real, and firms are under growing pressure to support more people, with better outcomes, under tighter regulation. Afternoon exists to make that possible, using data and AI to remove friction, reduce risk and radically improve how advice is delivered.
“This funding allows us to continue to accelerate our mission: helping advice firms support more clients, more effectively, without compromising quality, compliance or trust. Being selected as one of just four winners from over twenty fintechs is a huge validation of the approach we’re taking.”
FRIL isled by Innovate UK on behalf of UK Research and Innovation, the pilot Innovation Accelerators programme invested £100m in 26 transformative R&D projects between 2022-25 to accelerate the growth of three high-potential innovation ecosystems – Glasgow City Region, Greater Manchester and West Midlands. The programme was boosted by an additional £30m of public funding for 2025/26 spread equally across the regions. Innovation Accelerators is piloting a new model of R&D decision making that empowers local partnerships to harness innovation to drive regional economic growth, attract private investment, and develop future technologies.
Fintech Miconex has announced the appointment of Idong Usoro as chief digital and operations officer as it continues its global scale up journey.
An experienced technology and business leader and on the back of recent tenures at the helm of Revenue Scotland, Abbeyfield, and global awarding organisation, NEBOSH, Idong will lead on driving digital maturity, investment and operational transformation at the Perth based fintech, following 7 years of supporting Miconex in a strategic advisory capacity.
Idong brings decades of business and technology experience to Miconex, having worked internationally with private, public and third sectors, enterprise technology providers and research institutes in overseeing execution of commercial strategies, delivery of corporate and technology transformations and deployment of scientific and research innovation to businesses and communities.
Established in 2015, Miconex is one of the fastest growing Scottish fintechs, and a leading provider of ‘shop local’ initiatives in Europe and North America. Miconex’s Town & City Gift Card and Downtown Gift Card initiatives are active in 200+ places in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA.
In January, Miconex announced £24m in local gift card sales in 2025, an increase of 60% on 2024, as shoppers make the move to local gift cards to show support for local businesses. Miconex has estimated that the £24m will drive 486,000 specific visits to high streets and shopping districts in 2026, based on estimates of 3 trips into town per gift card.
In 2025, Miconex built on the success of its digital gifting product in Europe by launching digital gift card technology in Canada and the USA, alongside EML Payments. The launch included the introduction of digital e-cards and the tokenisation of physical cards, both allowing Miconex’s Downtown Gift Cards to be added to digital wallets, enabling contactless payment technology.
Idong said: “Miconex’s growth over the past 10 years has been extraordinary, which is down to its innovative, entrepreneurial approach and its ability to be disruptive in the sector. Over the past 7 years, I’ve supported Miconex with a variety of initiatives and strategic projects in an advisory capacity that have helped establish its stable growth trajectory and opportunities for scaling that it faces today.
“As CDO at Miconex, my focus will be on the maturation of technology, data, governance frameworks, processes and driving performance through strategy, executing roadmaps that will deliver the best experiences to customers as Miconex continues to scale up and maximise new opportunities.”
Miconex’s closed-loop physical gift cards are branded to specific town, city or downtown areas, locking spend into local economies. Miconex utilises a model that is fee free for businesses. Cards can be purchased online or in-person for redemption with local businesses.
Colin Munro, CEO of Miconex said: “Idong has been a core strategic advisor to Miconex for a number of years, so to bring Miconex on board as a director and chief officer in the company marks an important stage in our development and growth as a company. In 2025, we celebrated 10 years since the first Town & City Gift Card launched in Perth, today we have over 200 programmes and ambitious plans for 2026 and beyond. We know that Idong will be pivotal to driving Miconex forward during our next phase of growth.”
Hosted at the W Hotel in Edinburgh on January 22, the Rubrik Cyber Security Summit saw the threat hunting and recovery specialists move beyond the headlines with talks and panel discussions that took delegates behind the scenes of the top cyber threats affecting businesses.
The packed conference, attended by industry body leads, cybersecurity experts, and sector specialists, roused conversation and in-depth analysis of the current trends rocking the cyber sphere.
Here, we’ll take you through some of the highlights from the stacked conference agenda, touching everything from advanced cyber defenses, identity recovery, and thought leadership on the future of cyber strategy.
From Recovery To Resilience
Cyber-attacks are getting smarter — and more damaging, The basics – backup, data encryption, and siloed departments are a good place to start to secure your assets, but are barely scratching the realm of bare minimum in today’s sophisticated cyber landscape.
As AI lowers the playing field and cyber-as-a-service elevates attack specs, the fallout of an attack has only increased in scope. Enhanced disaster recovery has become paramount as attacks increase in volume and complexity, and reputational damage broaches not just the tech world, but into the mainstream.
“We’re seeing ransomware becoming quicker, quicker, quicker,” Grant Dinning, Rubrik UK Public Sector Sales and Engineering Manager said. “Trying to get ahead of that is difficult.”
The rise of AI and “cyber industrialisation” has transformed even the least technically skilled threat actors into forces to be reckoned with.
“The ‘assume breach mentality’ needs to be a must,” Dinning said. “You are no longer looking to stop them getting in, but assuming someone is already inside your organisation. This means going towards detection, and creating a rapid recovery response.”
This goes beyond simple questions of MFA, immutable backups, and the ability to recover – “It’s about building muscle memory to recover on a regular basis.”
Making this argument evermore compelling is the growing raft of evidence pointing to the varied and critical damage ransomware attacks and data breaches can lead to.
On home territory, the Jaguar Land Rover ransomware attack and its associated supply chain interruptions contributed to the UK economy contracting by 0.1% rather than expand 0.1% as it was predicted. A cyber-attack has been shown to change the trajectory of a nation’s economic output – surely the industry is beginning to take note.
Still, boards are driven by three main things, according to Vil Dhutia from Rubrik X: if they lose their license to operate, if they are audited, or if the survivability of their profit is challenged.
Convincing a board usually means targeting the third point, before an audit takes place or a license is lost.
Dinning and Dhutia both remarked on how reputational damage is more consistently contributing to cybersecurity decisions, as cyber awareness penetrates the mainstream.
The major cyber-attacks seen in the UK in spring last year not only rocked the retail industry, but the public, as store shelves were empty and online services were caput. Cyber-attacks entered the public consciousness as people were more directly affected than ever in the UK.
Essentially, making a business case for more proactive cyber resilience and disaster recovery has never been easier, but the mitigation of a cyber incident has never been more complex.
Rising Complexity: Identity As An Emerging Vulnerability Vector
Ransomware is morphing as it is attacking, the vulnerability threat landscape is expanding, geopolitical fragmentation is increasing risk, and the supply chain ripple effect only increases the stakes of any attack.
Regulatory scrutiny, tech debt icebergs, the need for more tools and their associated sprawl, and the cyber skills shortage are fatal hazards to manoeuvre through for enterprises at all levels and at all stages of their resilience journey.
As Vil Dhutia detailed, identity is becoming an ever-more-critical vulnerability to secure; an organisation’s sprawling active directory can be its biggest burden in a cyber-attack.
It can be an attack vector, and one of the most critical aspects to recover. This recovery, however, requires advanced cyber forensics, as well as capabilities to better understand a cyber-attack, mitigate its damage, as well as service disruption.
This involves “identifying the blast radius of an incident,” Dhutia explained. Doing this can “shorten the decision making time in a recovery process, understanding what was impacted, what wasn’t impacted, and what can be kept going.”
Rubrik has consistently found an overemphasis on prevention rather than recovery. The transition to an “assume breach” mentality is key to creating a viable recovery plan, especially as identity attacks and identity compromise increases.
Understanding the vulnerability of identities at a user level, understanding the challenges of non-human identities, and the concept of shadow AI are all emerging concepts for cybersecurity teams to not only integrate, but explain to their boards.
Converting these challenges into cyber solutions and practices, and then into muscle memory, takes strong leadership, a skilled team, and an integrated approach across an organisation and their vendors.
Another concept – and headache – that Baillie Gifford CISO Gary Marshall, brought up in his fireside chat at the event, concerned external assume breach protocols.
While organisations may be adopting assume breach methods, regularly test their recovery process, have bullet-proof business continuity plans, would get an A* on a DORA audit, and even have an identity management process – their third parties might fail them.
“To an extent we are assuming breach internally, and third parties are doing that too in their own organisations,” Marshall said. “But no one is assuming a breach of their third parties.
“That’s still a journey we need to go on in our assume breach posture.”
CISO’s need a long-term strategy to keep assets and systems secure – but the threat landscape is constantly evolving and changing.
It’s tough to keep up, tough to convince the board of the importance of cybersecurity, tough to keep fighting after consistent high-profile hits rattle the ecosystem.
“Its important to extract yourself from that technical world, and even that strategic role, to have that view from 40,000 feet and think about what we want to achieve as a security function, and as a business,” Marshall explained.
As some of the most powerful people in the world turn at least some of their attention to cybersecurity, CISOs and cybersecurity professionals will have to continue working from the ground level to keep things secure in an ever-more insecure world.
Britain’s youngest office workers are increasingly relying on AI to get through everyday tasks, despite fears that the same technology could ultimately threaten their job security.
Many Gen Z workers feel intense pressure to appear more qualified than they believe they are when entering the workforce, with the latest Kahoot survey finding that over 65% now use AI to draft CVs, cover letters and job applications.
Men were more likely than women to embellish their CVs, at 53% compared with 46%, with work experience, technical skills, qualifications and awards among the most exaggerated sections.
This reliance on AI does not end once they enter the workplace, with nearly six in ten admitting to using AI to complete everyday tasks due to feeling undertrained or lacking the skills to keep pace with more experienced colleagues.
This caused several Gen Z to voice the need for better training, calling for more real-life applications and interactivity.
While many young office workers view AI as essential to staying afloat at work and bridging skills gaps, fears persist that the technology could eventually replace them. More than half believe AI poses a threat to their job security, with nearly two in ten worried it could make their roles obsolete.
Jon Neale, growth director UK and Ireland at Kahoot, said: “Employers who want to fulfil their potential need to provide clear guidance, better training and genuine support, rather than leaving AI to fill the gaps,” adding that “this reliance on AI is a short-term fix for a much deeper, widespread issue”.
Despite these concerns, young workers show little appetite to abandon AI tools, with three in ten seeing their understanding of the technology as a “big advantage” over older colleagues and just five per cent viewing their tech savviness as a disadvantage in the workplace.
Sheila Flavell CBE, COO of FDM Group commented: “As AI adoption accelerates across industries, organisations must ensure their workforce has the skills to work effectively alongside these technologies. Our research highlights that over half (54%) of organisations now say AI skills will be required in all early-career roles, however, only 6% of teams currently have high AI proficiency.
“This gap underscores the urgent need for upskilling both existing staff and graduates entering the workforce. AI is not a replacement for human expertise, it amplifies it. By embedding practical AI training into professional development, organisations can equip employees to critically assess, guide, and collaborate with AI tools, rather than outsourcing thinking to technology.”
Beyond concerns around AI, Gen Z workers also voiced frustration with wider aspects of office life, including being drawn into meetings that could have been emails, dealing with micromanaging managers and being scheduled into meetings late on Friday afternoons.
Flexibility emerged as a key priority, with 33% citing it as the most important factor in their working lives and 45% expressing a preference for hybrid working arrangements. However, opinions were divided, with one in five preferring to work in the office full time, often pointing to the value of in-person learning and collaboration for career development.
Pay was also identified as a major driver of performance, with nearly three in ten citing financial rewards as their main motivation, despite 89% reporting unpaid overtime. In contrast, just 13% said praise and recognition were their primary motivators, while 78% prioritised higher pay over a more senior job title.
Twelve start-up companies have each been awarded £35,000 to fast track high-tech solutions to help improve people’s lives and public services.
Projects include finding new ways to improve support for people with long term health conditions, systems to help tackle teacher workload and the creation of a portal to gather the authentic language data required for building Gaelic digital technology such as voice recognition software.
The companies will enter a 15-week Accelerator phase of CivTech, the Scottish Government business incubator, working with their public sector sponsors to produce a Minimum Viable Product for use and further development.
At the end of the programme, the companies could secure significant contracts and the opportunity to share major public investment of up to £7.7 million.
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes visited the University of Edinburgh, one of the sponsors of the project being led by Community Enterprise to develop a portal that will address the scarcity of available Gaelic language data.
“CivTech is a unique programme that not only provides critical support to some of Scotland’s most promising and growing tech start-ups and SMEs, but at the same time harnesses their creative talent and innovation to improve public services,” deputy first minister Kate Forbes said.
“CivTech 11 has once again delivered hugely promising proposals to tackle a wide range of challenges. I look forward to the Accelerator helping to deliver more game-changing products and services that can continue improving the public services that matter to people across the country.”
Provost of the University of Edinburgh Professor Kim Graham said: “Turning bold ideas into solutions that improve people’s lives is at the heart of what we do at the University of Edinburgh. This programme offers significant support to pioneering start-up companies, including developing their expertise in Gaelic technologies that are fit for a digital world.
“As part of the University’s commitment to Gaelic language and culture, the funding will support our work to overcome barriers to accessible speech and language data, providing a blueprint for other minority languages worldwide.”
Digital Lead at Community Enterprise Jane Mackinnon said: “We’re excited to join the CivTech Round 11 Accelerator, bringing our community focused approach together with creative and technical expertise, in partnership with Fèisean nan Gàidheal, to support the future of the Gaelic language.
“By creating a safe, simple way for communities to contribute authentic Gaelic data, we aim to protect cultural heritage and open new digital opportunities for speakers and learners.”
