The use of AI tools in investor research means that CFOs are devoting more time to investor relations (IR), according to Gartner, Inc. a business and technology insights company.
“It is going to become increasingly difficult for organisations to control their narrative and influence investors with manual methods alone,” said Dymah Paige, Director Analyst, Research in the Gartner Finance practice.
“To keep pace, CFOs should be considering private AI solutions available on the market today that can help them to spend more of their time and effort on higher impact priorities.”
A Gartner survey of 146 CFOs, conducted from October through December 2025, found that 35% or more of respondents reported an increase in the volume, frequency, and time sensitivity of investor communications and engagements in 2025 when compared to 2024.
CFOs are dealing with more unexpected questions from investors during earnings calls as well, Gartner found.
The rise of AI may be improving investor’s research acumen, but it could also be driving investor curiosity in when they can expect a return on their AI investments.
Organisations are consistently under pressure to show their ROI when it comes to AI adoption; despite investors continuing to shovel billions into the AI bubble, the pressure is transforming the AI boom. Investors are looking at infrastructure and energy, and want to see swift-moving and straightforward revenue streams.
“Many institutional investors are using or evaluating AI tools in their investment and research processes,” said Paige. “If CFOs want to communicate to the markets effectively, while protecting their organisations against the hallucinations of public AI-powered answer engines, they must adapt their investor communications strategies to AI, as well as humans.”
The good news for CFOs, according to Gartner analysts, is that the same finance AI capabilities that are accelerating investor research processes can be used by finance and IR teams to enhance the depth of intelligence and operational efficiencies in their IR workflows.
“Companies can leverage these tools off the shelf and start to deploy right away, but in private, contained, and traceable environments. Some of the world’s biggest companies are already using these tools in their IR activities,” said Paige.
New data released today by Coursera, one of the world’s largest online learning platforms, reveals the critical skills that learners are prioritising for 2026.
Coursera’s Job Skills Report 2026, which captures data from nearly six million Enterprise learners across almost 7,000 organisations, including businesses, higher education institutions and governments, finds GenAI skills demand continuing to surge.
Among all enterprise learners, across all functions and sectors, enrollments in GenAI have increased by 234% year-over-year. This represents 14 enrollments per minute in Coursera’s catalogue of more than 1,100 generative AI courses — up from eight per minute last year.
The report identifies the fastest-growing skills across three in-demand career areas increasingly shaped by AI — Data, IT, and Software & Product Development — alongside Generative AI skills that are becoming essential regardless of job role.
Critical thinking sees demand surge
As AI tools become embedded in everyday workflows, the role of human judgement is increasing in importance; reflecting this, enrolments in courses that equip learners with critical thinking skills have seen triple-digit YoY growth across all cohorts.
This trend is especially pronounced for learners focused on GenAI, where demand for Critical Thinking has surged 185% YoY, reflecting the increasing importance of being able to serve as an expert validator of AI’s output.
As AI automates routine analytical tasks, the value of human cognitive skills has appreciated. Critical Thinking is the second fastest-growing skill for learners in the Data cohort; enrolments have risen 168% year-over-year. YoY growth in Critical Thinking across other learner cohorts is also high: +101% for Software & Product learners and +91% for IT learners.
GenAI use cases broaden as gender gap narrows
Coursera’s research also finds that the gender gap in GenAI training is narrowing across enterprise learners.
GenAI-related enrolments among female enterprise learners increased from 36% in 2024 to 41% in 2025, suggesting that women are increasingly being given access to GenAI skills in the workplace: a trend that is conducive to a more equitable AI economy.
The report highlights that, much like digital literacy two decades ago, GenAI proficiency is becoming a foundational skill essential to nearly every job role, regardless of function or industry.
The most prominent application of GenAI among learners is creativity and communication, with Content Creation ranking as the #1 fastest-growing GenAI skill. Learners are moving beyond basic creation toward more advanced use cases, with the high demand for AI Personalization (#2) and Generative AI Agents competencies (#3) signaling a shift toward customization and autonomous AI deployment.
Secure and resilient foundations drive IT skills demand
The rapid deployment of AI has elevated governance and security to core operational requirements. This is reflected in learner demand, with Responsible AI (#6) and Information Privacy (#9) having emerged in the top 10 fastest-growing skills, indicating a shift from governance as a niche legal concern to a core operational requirement for data teams.
This demand is sparked by a new, complex regulatory landscape. With over 120 countries implementing international data privacy laws and governments around the world now adopting new AI regulations, professionals who understand these frameworks are in high demand. The cost of noncompliance is steep. Organisations in breach of the EU AI Act, for instance, may receive fines of up to €35 million or 7% of global turnover.
The rapid adoption of AI has intensified security risks, pushing Cybersecurity to rank as the ninth fastest-growing IT skill, while enrolments in Network Security grew by 83% year-over-year, reflecting rising concern over AI-driven vulnerabilities.
“Last year, we all experienced the unprecedented acceleration driven by Generative AI. In 2026, that acceleration is the baseline rate of change. But a productive relationship with AI is not inevitable,” Anthony Salcito, Enterprise GM, Coursera, said.
“It requires new skills being developed at speed and at scale. As Generative AI becomes embedded in everyday work, learners must combine AI capabilities with strong technical foundations, while human judgment and critical thinking increase in importance to ensure AI is deployed responsibly.
“The fastest-growing skills as identified by Coursera reflect this shift, showing that interacting with, guiding and validating AI is now as critical as building or operating the technology itself. At the same time, the narrowing gender gap in Generative AI highlights the opportunity to build a more balanced and inclusive AI-ready workforce.”
AI-powered search and shopping agents are rapidly reshaping ecommerce economics, according to new research from Pattern Group Inc.
Pattern’s latest study finds that 76% of ecommerce organisations have reduced customer acquisition costs as consumers increasingly rely on AI-driven tools to discover and purchase products. The research also shows that one in three ecommerce brands (33%) has already deployed AI-powered shopping agents, signalling a fundamental shift in how consumers interact with online retail.
The findings are detailed in Pattern’s report, From Insights to Execution in AI-Powered Commerce, based on a survey of 1,000 senior business leaders across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates.
“AI agents aren’t a future interface—they’re a new operating layer for commerce,” said Ryan Byrd, Chief Technology Officer at Pattern. “Brands that treat agentic AI like just another marketing channel will fall behind. This shift rewards accuracy, availability, and trust, favoring brands built on clean data, real-time operations, and real customer value.”
As shoppers turn to AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to guide purchasing decisions, confidence in AI’s commercial impact is growing.
Eighty-seven percent of respondents expect AI-powered search to drive direct sales growth over the next 12 months.
Investment in AI is accelerating alongside adoption. Over the past year, ecommerce companies invested an average of $291,626 in AI, a figure projected to rise 11% to $323,886 in 2026, as brands prioritise AI-powered customer service, personalised advertising, and intelligent product discovery.
The research also highlights the rapid emergence of agentic commerce. More than half of ecommerce businesses (57%) are exploring AI agent use cases, while 33% are actively preparing for deployment. The fashion sector is leading adoption, with 46% of fashion brands prepared for AI agents to become a primary channel for customer discovery and purchase. The beauty industry is also investing heavily, with 59% exploring AI agents, though only 27% report being fully prepared.
OpenAI is trying to expand its influence across the globe and infiltrate further into our collective consciousness in a new initiative to convince governments to fund infrastructure and increase their AI usage.
Dubbed OpenAI for Countries, the new programme will see OpenAI try to better align itself with countries that may not have achieved the capacity for heavy AI use, as well as expanding its stronghold in areas already adopting AI at rapid pace.
The initiative will focus on widening and deepening OpenAI’s reach across the globe.
The expansion of the programme will see OpenAI work on education, health, AI skills training, disaster response and preparedness, cybersecurity, and startup accelerators.
OpenAI will be launching Education for Countries in conjunction with this partnership to help governments integrate AI into their education systems, partnering with eight countries.
The AI firm says that their programme is designed to be flexible and tailored to a country’s needs and capacity for AI, noting that even those with strong AI adoption are often not using AI to its full capacity.
It says it aims to “end the capability gap” when it comes to AI integration, noting that a capability overhang risks some countries pulling ahead with other falling behind.
OpenAI’s new initiative comes in the middle of a range of announcements for the company as it attempts to expand its reach and ventures.
Earlier this week OpenAI announced it would begin trialling advertisements in some of its ChatGPT conversations as it attempts to quell concerns from investors looking for a return on their billions of funding.
The AI giant as well as other big names in tech continue to negotiate with governments and shelve out billions for infrastructure investment and tides turn away from funding model development and towards powering AI.
OpenAI also announced that it would be rolling out age determination tools on ChatGPT to better tailor its answers to the age of its users, following growing backlash from parents and advocacy groups about the AI chatbots safety for young people.
By 2028, 50% of organisations will implement a zero-trust posture for data governance due to the proliferation of unverified AI-generated data, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
“Organisations can no longer implicitly trust data or assume it was human generated,” said Wan Fui Chan, Managing VP at Gartner.
“As AI-generated data becomes pervasive and indistinguishable from human-created data, a zero-trust posture establishing authentication and verification measures, is essential to safeguard business and financial outcomes.”
AI-Generated Data Heightens Model Collapse Risks and Compliance Demands
Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on “web-scraped” data and a variety of sources, including books, code repositories and research papers. Some of these sources already contain AI-generated content, and if current trends continue, nearly all will eventually be populated with AI-generated data.
According to the 2026 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, 84% of respondents expect their organisation to increase funding for GenAI in 2026. As organisations accelerate both adoption and investment in AI initiatives, the volume of AI-generated data will continue to rise. This means future generations of LLMs will increasingly be trained on outputs from previous models, heightening the risk of “model collapse,” where AI tools’ responses may no longer accurately reflect reality.
“As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, regulatory requirements for verifying ‘AI-free’ data are expected to intensify in certain regions,” said Chan. “However, these requirements may differ significantly across geographies, with some jurisdictions seeking to enforce stricter controls on AI-generated content, while others may adopt a more flexible approach.
“In this evolving regulatory environment, all organisations will need the ability to identify and tag AI-generated data. Success will depend on having the right tools and a workforce skilled in information and knowledge management, as well as metadata management solutions that are essential for data cataloguing.”
Active metadata management practices will become a key differentiator, enabling organisations to analyse, alert and automate decision making across their data assets.
Managing Risks Associated with Rising Unverified AI-Generated Data
Organisations should consider several strategic actions to manage the risks of unverified data:
· Appoint an AI Governance Leader: Establish a dedicated role responsible for AI governance, including zero-trust policies, AI risk management and compliance operations. This leader should work closely with data and analytics (D&A) teams to ensure both AI-ready data and systems capable of handling AI-generated content.
· Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration: Form cross-functional teams that include cybersecurity, D&A and other relevant stakeholders to conduct comprehensive data risk assessments to identify business risks related to AI-generated data and determine which are addressed by existing data security policies and which need new strategies.
· Leverage Existing Governance Policies: Build on current D&A governance frameworks and focus on updating security, metadata management and ethics related policies to address new risks from AI-generated data.
· Adopt Active Metadata Practices: This enables real-time alerts when data is stale or requires recertification, helping organisations quickly identify when business-critical systems may become exposed to inaccurate or biased data.
Business leaders joined representatives from the UK Government and Scottish local authorities at the launch of a new initiative to boost investment in Scotland’s eight cities and its regions.
As part of Scottish Cities Week 2026, Scotland Office Minister Kirsty McNeill launched the Scotland Investment Acceleration Programme at an event bringing together Scottish city leaders, investors, finance sector stakeholders, and officials from the Scotland Office, Department for Business and Trade and the Office for Investment.
A collaborative initiative between the UK Government, TheCityUK and the Scottish Cities Alliance (SCA), the Scotland Investment Acceleration Programme will provide structured support, technical guidance and market intelligence to enable local authorities and cities attract inward investment from around the globe.
“Scotland’s cities and regions hold immense potential for inward investment: We have the talent, the ingenuity, and the resources,” Scotland Office Minister Kirsty McNeill said.
“This is about building a competitive advantage for Scotland, ensuring our regions and communities are ready to secure the vital capital that drives growth and creates jobs. Together, we will enhance capability, attract investment, and accelerate growth for the benefit of all of Scotland.”
The Programme will run throughout 2026, starting with the inaugural Scottish Cities Week Round Table in London, and continuing through events in Scotland.
It will include teach-ins, workshops and webinars to build local authority leaders’ knowledge and capacity, technical sessions on investor expectations and project assessment criteria, guidance to help strengthen investment propositions, networking and peer learning forums to foster collaboration and share best practices, and support for showcasing opportunities and major investment events.
“Scottish Cities Alliance is proud to support the Scotland Investment Acceleration Programme. Building capability and fostering collaboration between governments, investors, and our Scottish city partners is essential to unlocking transformative investment,” Cllr Raymond Bremner, Chair, Scottish Cities Alliance and Leader, Highland Council said.
“Through initiatives like Scottish Cities Week London, we champion inclusive, sustainable growth and showcase Scotland’s strengths to ensure our cities thrive in a competitive global economy.”
The UK’s Gambling Commission said that Meta is turning a “blind eye” to advertisements of illegal casinos on its social platforms, alleging that the social media titan has a lacklustre approach to fighting the illegal advertisements.
As the ICE 2026 gambling conference in Barcelona, Tim Miller, the commission’s executive director, presented the struggles of regulating legal online gambling and reducing its harm, while managing and halting the proliferation of illegal gambling rings.
“Gambling regulators across the world are increasingly identifying suppliers, affiliates, advertisers, tech companies and others that work with licensed operators but who are also providing the same services to the illegal market,” he said.
Working internationally to regulate providers that may host illegal activity is difficult to do from a regulatory standpoint, which is why “there is an important and essential role for industry to play,” he explained.
Miller directly turned his attention to Meta, saying that users would more than likely to hae encountered ads for illegal casions on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
He alleged that Meta is more than capable of finding, flagging, and removing these ads without needing intervention from regulators.
Miller said that this pattern “could leave you with the impression they are quite happy to turn a blind eye and continue taking money from criminals and scammers until someone shouts about it.”
He said in previous engagement with Meta surrounding the issue, the tech firm has suggested that the Gambling Commission use AI tools to monitor and report the ads; Miller retorted that: “I would be very surprised if Meta, as one of the world’s largest tech companies is incapable of proactively using their own keyword facility to prevent the advertising of illegal gambling.”
The issue lead Miller to pose the question: “‘Whose side are you on?'” to Meta and other platforms that are allegedly allowing illegal casinos to run ads unchecked.
He said that despite having the capabilities to find these ads, Meta “simply chose not to look.”
When asked for comment, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters: “We’ve been working closely with the Commission to identify and remove all the flagged ads found in violation of our policies, and we’re using this intelligence to further improve the proactive detection tools we already have in place,”
AI is fuelling the fifth wave of cyber-crime, transforming the criminal ecosystem, leading to surges in dark web enterprises and driving attack evolution, according to research from Group-IB.
Over the past thirty years, cyber-crime has evolved through successive waves, from manual phishing in the late 90s, industrialised ransomware, all the way to supply chain and ecosystem attacks that characterised the early 2020s.
There has been a 371% surge in dark web forum posts featuring AI keywords since 2019, and a ten-fold increase in replies (1199%). Now, adversaries are industrialising AI, turning once specialist skills such as persuasion, impersonation and malware development into on-demand services available to anyone with a credit card.
The fifth wave of cyber-crime
Group-IB’s infiltration of dark web forums and underground marketplaces, found in 2025, AI abuse dominated dark web discussions with 23,621 first posts and 298,231 replies. Interest peaked in 2023 following the release of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022 with over 300,000 replies on AI posts, coinciding with the release of GPT-4 and rising regulatory/societal concern.
Unlike earlier waves of cyber-crime, AI adoption by threat actors has been strikingly fast. AI is now firmly embedded as core infrastructure throughout the criminal ecosystem rather than an occasional exploit.
Crimeware for the price of a Netflix subscription
Group-IB investigations suggest that a few distinct seller types are routinely marketing and packaging AI crimeware to lower-skill buyers on underground markets, making sophisticated attacks accessible to novices. Vendors are mimicking aspects of legitimate SaaS businesses, from pricing tiers and subscription models to customer service support.
AI crimeware typically falls into three main categories: LLM exploitation, phishing and social engineering automation, and malware and tooling. These dark web offerings are affordable and often bundled together to make them more attractive to potential buyers.
The operating systems of modern cyber-crime
Dark LLM’s: Threat actors are moving past chatbot misuse and are creating proprietary Dark LLMs that are more stable, capable, and have no ethical restrictions. Group-IB identifies at least three active vendors offering Dark LLMs with subscriptions ranging from $30 to $200 per month, and a customer base exceeding 1,000 users.
Jailbreak framework services and instructions: Jailbreaking allows legitimate LLMs to output disallowed, unsafe, or malicious content through reusable templates or instructions to bypass guardrails. Group-IB found that by the end of Q3 2025, the volume of these posts almost equalled the total volume for 2024, focusing predominantly on ChatGPT and OpenAI models.
Deepfake-as-a-service: Group-IB’s monitoring of dark web forums shows a thriving marketplace for “synthetic identity kits” offering AI video actors, cloned voices, and even biometric datasets for as little as $5 USD. Group-IB analysts detected and exported 300+ dark web posts from 2022 to September 2025 referencing “deepfake” and “KYC, with 2025 seeing a 52% increase in unique usernames. Attackers are harvesting samples with as little as 10 seconds of audio from social media, webinars or even past phone calls to create convincing clones.
“AI has industrialised cyber-crime. What once required skilled operators and time can now be bought, automated, and scaled globally,” Craig Jones – Former INTERPOL Director of Cybercrime and Independent Strategic Advisor said.
“While AI hasn’t created new motives for cybercriminals—money, leverage, and access still drives the ecosystem—it has dramatically increased the speed, scale, and sophistication with which those motives are pursued. The shift marks a new era, where speed, volume, and sophisticated impersonation has fundamentally changed how crime is committed and how hard it is to stop.”
How defenders are mobilising against weaponised AI
Weaponised AI is a global challenge that no single organisation or regulator can tackle in isolation. Unlike traditional malware, AI-enabled attacks leave little forensic trace, making detection and attribution harder. For defenders, this landscape demands urgent adaptation.
Group-IB’s research underscores the need for intelligence-led security strategies that place adversary behaviour at the centre, combining predictive threat intelligence, fraud prevention, and deep visibility into underground ecosystems. Cross-border collaboration between the private sector, law enforcement, and regulators will be essential to counter this evolving threat.
“From the frontlines of cyber-crime, AI is giving criminals unprecedented reach,” Dmitry Volkov, CEO and Co-founder of Group-IB, said.
“Today, AI is enabling criminals to scale scams with ease and create hyper-personalisation and social engineering to a new standard. In the near future, autonomous AI will carry out attacks that once required human expertise.
“Understanding this shift is essential to stopping the next generation of threats and ensuring defenders outpace attackers, moving towards an intelligence-led security strategy that combines AI-driven detection, fraud prevention, and deep visibility into underground criminal ecosystems.”
Three Scottish companies have been named in The Sunday Times 100 Tech 2026, an annual ranking of the UK’s fastest-growing tech companies.
In the software league table LendingCrowd, the Edinburgh-based fintech, featured at number nine. The firm provides technology-enabled lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and has seen strong growth (207.08%) following its transition to institutional capital funding, with turnover of around £12.1m and sustained expansion across its loan book.
Glasgow-headquartered digital healthcare provider Phlo ranked 13th in the software category, following a year of growth driven by the expansion of its direct-to-consumer weight-loss platform and the scaling of its B2B digital pharmacy and infrastructure services.
Phlo achieved 500% year-on-year revenue growth between FY2024 and FY2025, fuelled by the rapid adoption of its direct-to-consumer digital health platform, Phlo Clinic, alongside continued growth in its B2B digital pharmacy and infrastructure services.
Adam Hunter, CEO of Phlo (pictured), commented: “Being recognised in The Sunday Times 100 Tech is a huge moment for Phlo and a reflection of the team we’ve built and the trust patients place in us every day. From our clinicians and pharmacists to our product and engineering teams, everyone at Phlo is focused on making healthcare easier to access, safer to use and better connected.
“We’re proud to be building and scaling a UK-wide digital health business from Scotland, and to see that work recognised alongside some of the UK’s most ambitious technology companies.”
In the hardware and other technology category, Skyrora – the Glasgow-based aerospace and space launch company – appeared at number 42 on the list, with annual sales growth of 33.25% and revenues of around £36.1 million. The business is developing small satellite launch vehicles and innovative manufacturing technologies as it pushes toward first launches from UK soil.
Global chief executives are reporting their lowest level of revenue confidence in five years, according to PwC’s newly released Global CEO Survey presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The survey, which includes responses from more than 4,000 CEOs across 95 countries and territories, finds that only 30%of business leaders are confident in their company’s revenue growth prospects over the next 12 months, the weakest outlook since 2021.
More than half of CEOs (56%), report that AI has not yet delivered any measurable financial benefit. However, a third (33%) say they have already seen gains in either cost efficiency or revenue growth, while the remainder report improvements in both areas.
Chief executives cite growing uncertainty driven by geopolitical instability, rising trade tariffs, escalating cyber threats, and the accelerating pace of technological change.
One in five CEOs report that their companies are highly exposed to potential financial losses from trade tariffs, while one third identify cyber risk as a major threat to their business. In addition, 42% say that the speed of technological disruption is a significant concern for their organisation.
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a defining factor in corporate performance as the survey reveals a clear divide between companies that are scaling AI across their operations and those that are still in the experimentation phase.
Kenny MacAulay, CEO, Acting Office, a software platform for accounting practices said: “As businesses grapple with increasing challenging trading conditions, it’s crystal clear that AI and tech investment is now a make-or-break investment for companies seeking to initiate growth.
“It’s not just an issue of increasing revenue and reducing overheads, it’s about having the digital systems in place to optimise customer communications, compliance and digital invoicing to improve the performance of the business from top to bottom. Those that recognise the need for digital change will thrive, those who fail to read with warning signs may struggle to survive.”
PwC’s analysis shows that companies deploying AI broadly across products, services, and customer experience are achieving the strongest returns, while those running limited pilots are seeing far fewer benefits.
Sachin Agrawal, managing director for Zoho UK commented: “The decline in CEO revenue confidence highlights the scale of change businesses are navigating, from geopolitical uncertainty to rapid technological transformation. Strong digital health and end-to-end digital transformation are now critical for building resilience and positioning organisations to weather the ongoing polycrisis.
“AI is already delivering meaningful value for companies embedding it into core operations, but its success depends on robust data management. High-quality, well-governed data ensures that advanced technologies like AI operate securely, responsibly, and at scale.
“Reducing cyber risk also makes it essential to select technology partners with strong security credentials, a commitment to data privacy, and proven regulatory compliance. Innovation must go hand in hand with strong governance to strengthen cyber resilience, maintain trust, and unlock sustainable growth in an increasingly digital global economy.”
Graeme Stewart, head of public sector at Check Point Software said: “Cyber-criminals have repeatedly demonstrated a ruthless ability to bring major employers to their knees, knocking manufacturers out of action for weeks, if not months. These incidents not only put jobs at risk, but they also inflict grievous damage to individual economies, with the consequences rippling across global supply chains and impacting governments around the world.
“Cyber risk should be at the very top of the Davos agenda, with governments and major businesses recognising the need for a global action plan to increase security defences and mitigate the devastating consequences of downtime following a successful attack.”
The UK government is launching a consultation on banning under 16s from social media following growing concern from parents and child advocacy groups on the tech’s effect on children’s mental health and safety.
There has long been debate surrounding the effect of social media on teens and children, with concerns surrounding not only the content shared but the addictive nature of the technology on young people’s brains.
Australia recently launched its own ban on social media for under 16s, prompting other governments to seriously consider a potential outright ban and safety assurances and other protections fall short in addressing growing worries.
The UK government’s consultation will identify the next steps in the government’s plan to boost children’s wellbeing online, ensuring they have a healthy relationship with mobile phones and social media.
In the mean time, immediate action will include Ofsted checking school mobile phone policy on every inspection, which schools expected to be phone-free by default.
Amid concerns that young people’s lives are dominated by too much time in front of devices, the government will support families by producing evidence-based screen time guidance for parents of children aged 5 to 16. This is in addition to guidance for parents of under-fives that will be published in April.
Ministers will examine the most effective ways to go further to ensure children have healthy online experiences, building on the world-leading Online Safety Act.
A consultation on children’s use of technology – backed by a national conversation – will seek views from parents, young people and civil society – with the first events in a nationwide tour to be held in the days ahead. The government will respond to the consultation in the summer.
Evidence from around the world will be examined on a wide range of suggested proposals, including looking at whether a social media ban for children would be effective and if one was introduced how best to make it work. Ministers will visit Australia to learn first-hand from their approach.
The consultation will look at options including raising the digital age of consent, implementing phone curfews to avoid excessive use, and restricting potentially addictive design features such as ‘streaks’ and ‘infinite scrolling’.
It will seek views on a range of measures, including determinging the right minimum age for social media access, exploring ways to improve age assurance technology accuracy, and assessing if the current digital age of consent is too low.
It will also look into removing or limiting functionalities to drive addictive use of social media, as well as explore further interventions to support parents in helping their children navigate the digital landscape.
“Through the Online Safety Act, this government has already taken clear, concrete steps to deliver a safer online world for our children and young people,” technology secretary Liz Kendall said.
“These laws were never meant to be the end point, and we know parents still have serious concerns. That is why I am prepared to take further action.
“Technology has huge potential – to create jobs, transform public services, and improve lives. But we will only seize on that potential if people know they and their children are safe online.
“We are determined to ensure technology enriches children’s lives, not harms them – and to give every child the childhood they deserve.”
New research from Monzo reveals British small businesses invest nearly £5 billion (£4.8 bn) every year in tax and accounting software.
With Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax changes coming in April, Monzo is aiming make submitting quarterly updates and the end of year tax return simpler and more accessible for Britain’s smallest businesses by launching a free, HMRC-recognised tax tool.
The new MTD rules will require sole traders and landlords to use approved digital systems to submit quarterly income and expenses updates.
While Monzo’s latest research shows 7 in 10 (70%) sole traders are aware of the upcoming MTD update, over 1 in 4 (28%) say they’re not confident they’ll be ready for April. Encouragingly, almost two thirds (61%) say simpler or more integrated tools would make tax filing easier, showing strong desire for solutions that bring banking and tax together in one place.
To help sole traders and landlords prepare with confidence, Monzo is launching a free, HMRC-recognised tax tool, powered by Sage’s embedded services technology, fully available before the new tax year starts on April 6.
The tool allows anyone with a free Monzo Business account to submit tax updates directly to HMRC from the Monzo app, offering a simple, in-app filing option for straightforward needs, while many businesses will continue to use broader accounting software and advisor support as their needs grow.
Tax admin can be a source of pressure for self-employed people. 1 in 2 (52%) sole traders say managing business taxes is stressful, and nearly half (44%) admit they’ve filed late because the process felt too confusing or time consuming. On average, sole traders spend around 25 hours a year on tax admin – more than 3 full working days that many would prefer to spend growing their business or enjoying time with loved ones.
“Making Tax Digital for Income Tax will help people keep clearer records and get their tax right. Using software which has been recognised and approved by HMRC will make it easier for sole traders and landlords to meet the new requirements and be ready ahead of April 2026,” Jennifer Staves, Deputy Director, Strategic Design: Making Tax Digital, at HMRC, said.
“Making Tax Digital is designed to make tax simpler, but we know many sole traders feel overwhelmed by what these changes mean for them,” said Jordan Shwide, General Manager at Monzo Business. “By launching a free, HMRC-recognised tax tool, in partnership with Sage, we’re making it easier for sole traders to send tax updates straight from their bank account, so they can feel stress-free and confident in April.”
“For small businesses, tax can often feel more complicated than it needs to be,” said Gordon Stuart, SVP, Fintech & Embedded Services, Sage. “By embedding trusted tax and compliance tools into everyday banking, we’re helping simplify tax and reduce friction, so people can feel more confident as Making Tax Digital approaches.”
Over half of UK business leaders (58%) rank cyber breaches as a top risk, according to a new survey from Nardello & Co.
The global investigations firm surveyed 250 UK business leaders, revealing a landscape shaped not by a single dominant threat but by a range of problems leaders much manage simultaneously.
While nearly six in ten identify cyber breaches as one of their most significant concerns, and two in ten have experienced a cyber breach in the past two years, three quarters of business leaders doubt their firm’s ability to manage these threats.
Compliance concerns, including changing industry regulations and complex enforcement actions like sanctions, are ranked highly, with 37% of respondents citing them as a top worry. Additionally, 30% flag financial crime, including fraud, bribery, corruption, and embezzlement, as a major threat.
Another encompassing concern is reputational damage, ranked by about a quarter (26%) as a top three concern. Among them, 42% worry about the reputational impact of a data breach, 28% worry about the spread of misinformation online, and 24% worry about negative media coverage. 18% express concerns about managing wrongful allegations from employees.
The data reveals these concerns influence behaviour, with 20% of leaders admitting to attempting to ameliorate reputational risk by making “safer” decisions; decisions that were not necessarily in the best interests of their companies.
To avoid their remarks being taken out of context, 57% of leaders are now more cautious when speaking. Nearly half (42%) avoid social media engagement for fear of reputational risk and nearly 1 in 10 (7%) avoid meeting with junior colleagues due to the increasing fear of false allegations.
These fears are grounded in reality: 16% of businesses have faced false allegations in the past year, including false claims of misconduct, harassment, or unethical behaviour).
In terms of geographic risk, Africa is cited by 26% of respondents as the region where organisations face the greatest operational risk exposure, followed closely by the Middle East at 24% and Asia, 22%.
Despite a growing global appreciation of risk, the report suggests uneven preparedness across UK businesses.
Only 44% confirmed they carry out pre-hire screening, and only 48% confirmed they have an anonymous whistleblowing channel in place.
Only 50% confirmed they maintain a formal ethics programme, and only 59% confirmed they provide regular training on misconduct and compliance.
“Despite organisations facing an increasingly sophisticated array of risks, the data highlight a degree of complacency that could well be existential for a business,” Chris Morgan Jones, regional managing director of EMEA said.
“Preparation, planning, and careful attention to specific risks can diminish the impact of any crisis and frequently prevent one.”
The UK government is launching a new unit – CustomerFirst – to modernise public services and improve the experience of millions of people who rely on them.
CustomerFirst is a new unit within Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), led by Tristan Thomas, formerly of Monzo, with Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, as first co-chair.
The announcement comes as part of the government’s Roadmap for a Modern Digital Government, setting out how technology will be used to transform services across the state.
Bringing together the best civil service operators alongside leading private sector disruptors and transformation specialists, it will test innovative ways to tackle delays and frustrations by partnering with departments to rewire the government services on which millions rely.
CustomerFirst will look to build services that make use of AI and modern solutions to mirror excellent customer services in the best of the private sector – from modern banking and online shopping to utilities.
At energy firm Octopus, for example, generative AI tools assist in drafting 35% of all customer emails, slashing wait times and receiving customer satisfaction ratings of 70%.
CustomerFirst will help the employees delivering services, not just end customers – ensuring dedicated customer service staff have the right tools to do their job well.
It will also deliver savings for taxpayers through end‑to‑end reform and smarter use of technology by departments. There is a potential £4 billion saving from moving service processing online, rather than phone, post or in person.
“Too often people are put off from interacting with the services they need by the frustration that comes with waiting on hold, filling in endless forms, and jumping through hoop after hoop,” minister for digital government Ian Murray said.
“A culture of ‘computer says no’ is not good enough, and this Roadmap sets out the wide range of brilliant work happening across government to improve public services and citizens’ interaction with them.
“Alongside that we’re launching CustomerFirst – taking bold steps in how we redesign services so they meet the demands of modern life – fast, simple, and stress-free.”
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is the first to partner with CustomerFirst, aiming to make life easier for motorists by deploying technology on the front lines of customer service.
OpenAI is introducing ads to ChatGPT in a rolling trial to some select users in the US, as well as launching a new tier to its subscription service.
Some users will begin to see adverts on their ChatGPT conversations – the AI model will use prompts and sessions to influence the adverts it shows to make them more tailored and relevant.
Ads will appear like banners at the bottom of ChatGPT’s replies in chats, and will aim to be relevant to the ongoing conversation: travel ads for conversations about travel, clothing ads for conversations surrounding fashion choices.
OpenAI says that while the ads will use user data, data will not be shared with advertising companies. The ads will be separated from the “organic” answer produced by the chatbot, OpenAI said.
The firm says that its foray into ads is “so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits.”
The exploration into advertising, and the introduction of a new subscription service which could cost users $8 a month, comes as investor pressure mounts for AI models like ChatGPT to become profitable.
OpenAI has fostered prolific growth since it introduced ChatGPT to the world and brought AI mainstream, but it has yet to make itself truly profitable.
It continues to plough through investor cash while its subscription models struggle to make a dent in its rising compute costs.
The firm had a loss of about £5.98bn in the first six months of 2025, according to the Financial Times. Of its hundreds of millions of users, only about 5% pay for the service over its three paid tiers.
While it began its journey as a non-profit, OpenAI has increasingly looked to build revenue from its AI models.
Digital skills provider CodeClan is set to debut the UK’s ‘first applied agentic AI programme’ to equip firms for the next wave of AI.
Delivered by tech ecosystem builder CodeBase, which relaunched CodeClan last year, in partnership with University of Edinburgh Business School, one of Europe’s leading business schools, and Qwasar Silicon Valley, the US’s leading software engineering school, the 12-week hybrid course enables senior engineers to build, deploy and optimise enterprise-scale agentic AI systems.
Martin Boyle, VP Transformation at CodeBase and CodeClan lead, said: “We know the successful execution of agentic AI translates to sea change productivity gains, economic uplift and resilience, but we also understand the inherent challenges, so we’ve co-designed a best-of-class programme tapping into expertise from multiple ecosystems aimed at companies who want to be to the forefront of talent readiness and future competitiveness.
“The initiative bridges the gap between immediate industry demand for data science and AI expertise with the delivery of practical tech skills.”
“Edinburgh is one of the birthplaces of machine learning and AI research and innovation”, added Martin Boyle, “so it’s fitting that this initiative will help to drive Scotland’s role in this hugely important area.”
The programme is aimed at software engineers and technical practitioners who are already comfortable building systems and now want to design AI that can reason, act, and operate with a degree of autonomy.
Professor Gavin Jack, Dean of the University of Edinburgh Business School, said: “Upskilling and reskilling expert developers, engineers and data scientists is vital to maintaining a thriving AI ecosystem.
“By empowering companies to create their own AI agents, this course is important in understanding how AI can be used in practice to inform and shape the future of responsible, impactful AI adoption.”
Cohort participants will gain practical experience in: agentic AI architecture and design principles; engineering and LLM optimisation techniques; multi-agent orchestration and and intelligent task automation; retrieval-augmented generation for enterprise search and knowledge systems; AI governance, compliance and security fundamentals; scalable deployment strategies for production-grade AI systems; taking concept prototype to deployed agentic solution, and; developing a fully deployable agentic AI tool tailored to the needs of the participant’s organisation.”
Iain Mackie, Co-founder and CEO at Malted AI, one of Scotland’s leading VC-backed AI scaleups, said: “Agentic systems are the next step-change in how software gets built and how organisations operate, but the real advantage will go to teams who can engineer these systems safely, reliably and at scale.
“This programme is exactly the kind of collaboration Scotland needs to keep pushing – bringing industry, academia and delivery partners together to turn world-class talent into real-world capability, and move from exciting prototypes to deployed systems that deliver measurable value.”
With the first cohort beginning in March, participants will spend between 5-10 hours on the course every week, including a weekly 3-hour workshop. In-person workshops will take place at the Edinburgh Futures Institute in the first and final weeks of the programme.
Marion Thain, Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute, said: “Edinburgh Futures Institute is working with partners across the University of Edinburgh to ensure the University can better meet the upskilling and reskilling needs of the population in relation to AI. We are particularly committed to ensuring a training that puts social responsibility at the heart of economic development.”
Delivery takes place through live, instructor-led sessions with active participation expected. The cohort will spend time building and experimenting between sessions, with the pace of the programme designed to align with an individual’s full-time role.
The cost for the Applied Agentic AI programme, which is open to applicants across the UK and Europe, is £3,500. Applications are now open and will close at the end of February. There are expected to be a maximum of 50 people in the first cohort.
Workers are spending over three hours a week cleaning up AI ‘workslop’, raising concerns and questions about the real effectiveness of AI use across different sectors and jobs.
This is according to new data from Zapier, which surveyed 1,100 enterprise AI users to find the reality of using AI at work.
While ‘AI slop’ is being used more commonly to describe the use of AI to create mostly nonsensical videos and images at a large scale for distribution across social media sites, ‘AI workslop’ carries more stakes – this is AI-produced work that may look fine at first glance, but often requires revision and reconfiguration, potentially requiring more time to correct than to just produce the result in the first place.
Zapier found that 58% of those using AI at work spent over three hours a week revising or redoing AI outputs.
Despite this, 92% still say that AI boosts their productivity, showing that people still see a clear pay off in using AI at work.
Still, 74% say they have experienced at least one negative consequence from low-quality AI outputs.
Investigating further, Zapier found that data analysis was the biggest source of AI workslop, not writing.
When looking more specifically at how workers are viewing AI, Zapier found that untrained workers were six times more likely to say that AI makes them less productive.
Providing workers with the right skills to make their AI use more effective is therefore paramount to their experience in using AI on the job.
Further, how AI is integrated into their work, and what tools are offered, will determine how workers review their relationship with AI.
Almost all (97%) of those with access to AI orchestration tools say that AI boosts productivity. Those with prompt templates, libraries, and ongoing training report similar levels of productivity enhancement (95%).
Without training, guidelines, or libraries, and just about three quarters (77%) say that AI helps them, which is still a decent figurehead for AI integration.
Scams and fraud in the crypto sphere amounted to an estimated $17 billion in 2025, according to data from Chainalysis.
The crypto analysis firm found that scam operations are being increasingly industrialised, driven by AI adaptions and cyber-crime-as-a-service offerings.
These innovations drove impersonation scams with a 1400% year-on-year growth, with AI scams increasing profitability 4.5 times over traditional methods.
High-yield investment programmes and pig butchering continue to dominate crypto fraud categories, but scams are converging due to AI advancements, Chainanalysis found, making traditional scam categories less distinct.
Impersonation scams are leveraging public trust in government institutions as well as big names in crypto.
A phishing scam targeting millions of Americans using a road toll collection system leveraged trust in a digital government system and was enacted by a Chinese-speaking cyber group called Dracula using phishing-as-a-service tools.
In the private sector, victims were defrauded of about £16 million through by a scammer impersonating Coinbase customer service representatives.
Chainanlaysis found that impersonation scams are increasingly moving to target the DeFi ecosystem, while other scams tended to rely on targeting centralised exchanges.
All the while AI continues to enhance the effectiveness of scams overall. Scams with links to AI tools and AI vendors tend to scale more quickly and be more severe, with higher payoffs, than those without visible links to AI.
While AI-linked scams amass 4.5 times the revenue of non-AI scams, the technology also improves the efficiency of the scams, with a higher daily revenue and an increased transaction value.
The research also revealed the increasing industrialisation of crypto scam operations, with a growing number of services culminating in a business model of specialised actors.
Chainanalysis discovered developer groups supplying phishing software, data brokers listing potential victims, tools offered to scale spam messages, specialists in dealing with stolen money, and even recruitment groups seeking skilled cyber-criminals.
“This modular, service-based approach is a force multiplier and allows even technically unsophisticated criminals to execute sophisticated phishing campaigns, substantially lowering the barrier to entry for cryptocurrency fraud,” the Chainanalysis team said.
Many of these operations perform within the realm of social media, selling user profile accounts and access to perform scams at scale.
These tools and platforms are incredibly effective – scams employing these kits are 688 times more effective in terms of money, and four times more effective in terms of average transaction size compared to traditional scams.
The growing industrialisation of crypto scams will need an equally sophisticated and orchestrated approach to bring them down, Chainanalysis said. This will require a mix of real-time fraud detection systems and victim support, as well as cross-border coordination and international support for building technical assistance
Worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.52 trillion in 2026, a 44% increase year-over-year, according to Gartner, Inc. a business and technology insights company.
“AI adoption is fundamentally shaped by the readiness of both human capital and organisational processes, not merely by financial investment,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner.
“Organisations with greater experiential maturity and self-awareness are increasingly prioritising proven outcomes over speculative potential.
“Because AI is in the Trough of Disillusionment throughout 2026, it will most often be sold to enterprises by their incumbent software provider rather than bought as part of a new moonshot project,” said Lovelock.
“The improved predictability of ROI must occur before AI can truly be scaled up by the enterprise.”
Building AI foundations alone will drive a 49% increase in spending on AI-optimised servers for 2026, representing 17% of total AI spending.
AI infrastructure will also add $401 billion in spending in 2026 as a result of technology providers building out AI foundations.
The analysis matches what has already been heard from investors – investment will stay very much in the AI arena, but will shift towards more infrastructure projects rather than stay concentrated to big tech.
Construction of data centres and updates to energy grids will be driven by AI, but funding will not necessarily go directly to big tech companies currently benefitting from the AI boom.
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) was formally put into place by the EU last year as a regulatory framework to strengthen the financial sector’s resilience against information communication technology risks, placing a responsibility on financial institutions and their service providers to ensure maximum security and minimum incident.
Sparked by a range of cybersecurity incidents hitting a plethora of Europe’s financial institutions, the EU took a look at the industry and noticed a pattern of market consolidation in key vendors and the enhanced security risks inherent in an increasingly interconnected, co-dependent system.
Financial services institutions are being recognised as critical infrastructure that must continue to operate despite any cyber incident disruptions. The importance of the finance sector makes it a major liability: massive organisations often concentrate their supply chain to a few key vendors, and financial institutions are associated with a major pay off for threat actors seeking a lucrative target.
These factors drove the EU to institute DORA, building on existing legislation to create a framework of responsibility across the entire financial sector supply chain. It specifically targets ICT services, with a specific focus on third party suppliers.
Since DORA was adopted and put into place in January 2025, financial services have been scrambling to catch up and implement the new legal requirements, ranging from auditing to enhanced cybersecurity testing.
Financial firms felt skills and budget squeezes ahead of DORA coming into force, and even with the regulations in full effect, companies operating in Europe are often behind on their compliance. This was certainly the case for DORA with PwC noting that only a very small share of firms had integrated DORA requirements into day-to-day operations by mid-2025.
Further, the effectiveness of the legislation is difficult to ascertain. Even with a major breach on a financial institution – which are rarely straight forward – intense investigations and post-incident analysis would be required across complex supply chains to ascertain if an incident occurred due to negligence under the scope of the Act.
As more firms fully adopted the frameworks required under the act, the EU finally designated 19 firms that would be classified as critical third-party computing providers, which would bring them under enhanced scrutiny. These firms have been identified as integral to Europe’s financial sector, particularly to their ICT environments, and include the likes of Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft, and the Tata Consultancy. Under DORA, they will face enhanced legal requirements to ensure their integral offerings are secure.
A year in, however, and DORA seems to have made little ripples in the tech regulatory world besides stressing out the IT and security departments of financial institutions.
The strict EU requirements are not necessarily unnecessary, but difficult to track and prove for assessment by regulatory bodies. Security leaders in the financial sector seem to hold juxtaposing ideas surrounding DORA; it serves as both an important push for bold security strategies, setting a fire under weary feet dealing with evolving risks and legacy technology, but equally, it squeezes budgets, presenting regulatory and governance comprehension challenges.
Is DORA just another box to tick in the long list of EU regulations facing firms? In two, ten, five years will it hold up against transforming technology and a sprawling risk ecosystem? One year in with DORA, where do we stand?
Complexity Leaves Adoption Uneven
“One year on from DORA’s enforcement, Europe’s regulatory landscape has shifted. Between DORA, the EU AI Act, and NIS2, organisations now operate within a more unified, accountability-led framework that demands real transparency, traceability, and algorithmic accountability,” Martin Reynolds, field CTO and at Harness said.
And it’s true – the regulatory landscape has gotten more complex when it comes to regulation, with the EU trying to cover its legal bases if firms are found to slip up when it comes to securing key infrastructure. Besides these security and tech focussed legislations, big tech continues to come under scrutiny in the EU with digital markets and digital services regulations
“One year on since DORA came into effect, barriers to full compliance persist,” Soniya Bopache, SVP and General Manager at Arctera, said. “ Despite its emphasis on early detection, accurate reporting, and strong data integrity, navigating legislation with over 1,000 specific requirements is no easy feat, especially given many firms continue to grapple with complex IT environments.
“Balancing legacy systems with new and emerging technologies can often hinder comprehensive defence strategies, especially at a time when the threat landscape is rapidly growing more sophisticated,” Bopache added.
While DORA may be a “welcome and necessary first step” in securing the financial services ICT supply chain, “adoption has been uneven,” Chris Hosking, AI and cloud security evangelist at SentinelOne said.
“Many organisations are still treating DORA as a paper exercise, while real-world risk is being driven by sprawling SaaS and cloud environments, poor visibility of ICT assets, and growing dependence on complex software supply chains.
“At the same time, firms are struggling to accurately investigate and classify incidents quickly enough, particularly when attackers rely on social engineering rather than technical compromise.”
Further, getting prepared is no easy feat, and the price tag is hefty.
“One year into DORA, many banks have paid through the nose to improve operational resilience – investing in new monitoring capabilities, better system visibility, and speeding up incident reporting. But it’s still early days, and only time will tell if these often-rushed modernisation efforts have done enough to avoid costly non-compliance fines,” Steve Round, co-founder and president at SaaScada, said.
Unchallenged, What Does the Future of DORA Hold?
In just its first year, DORA has had little time to fully cement itself in the EU financial ecosystem, let alone be enforced as the result of a cyber incident.
“With DORA only a year old, there have been no notable breaches or enforcement actions. But this is just the calm before the storm, as transforming – and regulating – the operational resilience of an entire industry and tech ecosystem doesn’t happen overnight,” Jonathan Gill, CEO of Panaseer, a cybersecurity firm, said.
“Less than half (48 percent) are truly confident that cybersecurity reports to the board, risk teams, and regulators are clear and comprehensive. Whilst two-thirds (67 percent) lack full visibility into how effectively their security controls are working and only 29 percent are confident the security team knows their true risk level,” Gill added, noting the varied preparedness among financial institutions facing the DORA.
As technology advances and security risks shift and expand, keeping up with regulation is even more vital – but will DORA soon be old news?
“Research shows up to 45% of AI-generated code contains vulnerabilities, with issues ranging from hallucinated dependencies to language-specific failures. When development accelerates but testing, governance and security don’t keep pace, the result isn’t innovation; it’s exposure,” Reynolds said.
“In the age of AI, DORA serves as an important reminder that velocity without verification is risk,” he added.
Financial firms can continue to face existing and future risks, essentially: battling legacy tech liabilities whilst preparing for AI threats.
“By adopting a multi-faceted approach, organisations can not only overcome these challenges, they can gain a strategic advantage. Adopting tools that deliver full visibility across data environments enables fast, accurate incident reporting across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures,” Bopache advised.
“Embedding a strong culture of compliance, extending to third-party providers and reinforced through regular testing of response plans and continuous staff training, will be critical. Those that act proactively will not only reduce the risk of substantial penalties, but also strengthen trust, resilience, and operational continuity in an increasingly complex digital landscape.”
In essence, this can look like switching “to a more integrated, intelligence-led approach to compliance,” Gill said.
For many financial institutions, modernisation will be key in keeping up with evolving threats and expectations.
“The banks that started by modernising their core systems and improving overall data quality are in the best possible position,” Round said. They now have access to real-time insights that are boosting resilience, but also making it easier to launch personalised products and features faster, earning customer trust and increasing their share of wallet.
“On the other hand, those that have treated DORA as a box-ticking exercise will keep paying for the same problems, year after year.”
But DORA itself may need a level of transformation to keep up and hold firms accountable. Tracking compliance and understanding the liabilities that lead to security incidents is complicated and also requires cyber and data skills, excellent data practices, and meaningful compliance.
“To remain effective against today’s fast-moving threats, DORA will need to keep evolving – with a stronger focus on measurable security outcomes and how organisations actually operate, rather than box-ticking compliance,” Hosking said.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit has disrupted a major cyber-crime-as-a-service network – RedVDS – after it obtained court orders in the UK and Florida.
This coordinated major legal action between the US and the UK Microsoft’s DCU has taken; it relied on the UK legal system as the RedVDS infrastructure was hosted on a UK-based provider, with many of the networks’ victims also residing in the UK.
RedVDS provided threat actors with disposable virtual computers that could be used to securely expand their operations for as little as £18 a month.
In its investigation, DCU estimated that the cyber-criminals using RedVDS compromised over 191,000 organisations since September 2025, profiting at least $40m in just the uS.
Threat actors used RedVDS for a range of cyber-crime, from phishing scams to fraudulent infrastructure, and but seemed to be most proficient at business email compromise.
RedVDS was also often used in conjunction with AI to better identify multiple targets and to enhance phishing lures, and create deepfakes for scams.
The use of RedVDS appears prolific. with over 2,600 distinct RedVDS virtual machines sending an average of one million phishing message per day to Microsoft customers alone.
The subscription service appears to be fuelling cyber-crime hitting a range of sectors, from real estate to construction, manufacturing, healthcare, education, logistics, and legal services.
Taking down this cyber-crime service syndicate involved working with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, as well as support from the German cyber-crime and criminal authorities.
“Cyber-crime today is powered by shared infrastructure, which means disrupting individual attackers is not enough,” Steven Masada, assistant general counsel, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, said.
“Through this coordinated action, Microsoft has disrupted RedVDS’s operations, including seizing two domains that host the RedVDS marketplace and customer portal, while also laying the groundwork to identify the individuals behind them.”
Following global backlash, X will now prohibit its AI chatbot Grok from producing edits of photos of real people showing them in revealing outfits in areas where it is illegal.
“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing,” a statement from X read.
This follows global alarm bells over Grok’s ‘spicy mode’ which allowed users to upload photos of real people and have the AI model make edits to ‘undress’ the images. This was often done without the consent of the person in the photo, and watchdogs found that it was being done to images of children as young as five years old.
Following the discovery of the prevelance of these deepfake images across X, governments, including the UK, urged for investigations into the social media company over child sexual abuse material (CSAM) concerns. In the UK, the Online Safety Act make it illegal to share deepfakes; the Data (Use and Access) Act, which makes it a criminal offense to create or request them, however, has yet to be enforced despite coming into law in 2025.
UK ministers called the images circulating on X “vile” and debates were begun on if the UK parliament and other government outlets should continue to use X as a social platform.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer described it as “vindication” following his calls for X to prohibit its AI model from producing the illegal content.
“We now geoblock the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire via the Grok account and in Grok in X in those jurisdictions where it’s illegal,” X said.
Paid users will continue to be the only ones able to use Grok to edit images on its platform, following a change of policy shortly after the deepfake controversy arose.
Still, the geographical nature of the ban means that the technology is not universally prohibited, and countries that may be behind on regulation could still see citizens producing such material as long as specific laws against it are not in place.
While going forward, the creation of deepfake ‘undressed’ images of real people in the UK will be blocked, it remains uncertain what legal proceedings will follow for people who have already been victims of the practice.
Further, Ofcom has already begun an investigation to X, and may still fine the social media firm if it is found to have been in breach of the Online Safety Act. If X is found to have broken the law, it could face a fine of up to 10% its worldwide revenue.
UK startups and scaleups raised $23.6 billion in venture capital funding in 2025, a 35% increase on 2024 and the first annual growth in UK VC investment in four years, according to new analysis from HSBC Innovation Banking UK and Dealroom.
The rebound makes 2025 the third-highest year on record for UK startup funding, underpinned by renewed investor confidence, strong late-stage activity and a surge in AI investment.
The UK innovation economy is now worth a combined $1.3 trillion in enterprise value, with more than half of this value (58%) generated by companies founded since 2010. This growth continues to translate into meaningful economic impact, with UK startups now employing over 1.8 million people.
Megarounds drive growth
The recovery in UK VC investment during 2025 was fuelled by a resurgence in late-stage megarounds of $100 million or more (36 megarounds), coupled with investment growth across all life stages, from seed to breakout stage.
The largest raise of the year came from Revolut, which secured $2 billion and is now valued at $75 billion. Other notable rounds included Rapyd ($500 million), Verdiva Bio ($411 million) and CityFibre ($500 million), reflecting sustained investor appetite for scale across fintech, health and infrastructure.
The UK has now produced more than 200 unicorns and $1 billion-plus exits, with 16 new unicorns added in 2025 alone. The 200-unicorn milestone was surpassed in the first week of 2026, making the UK the third country, after the US and China, to reach this level, achieving the milestone just six years after passing 100 unicorns in 2020. Notably, 37% of UK unicorns remain at the pre-exit stage, highlighting a substantial pool of unrealised value and a strong pipeline for future exit activity.
A record year for AI investment
UK AI startups raised a record $7.9 billion in venture capital in 2025, up from $4.4 billion in 2024, with AI accounting for 33% of all VC investment during the year, compared with 25% the previous year. Major rounds contributing to this total came from the likes of AI infrastructure company Nscale, DeepMind drug discovery spinout Isomorphic Labs, and AI avatar platform Synthesia. The scale and breadth of investment reflects continued momentum across both AI infrastructure and applied AI, as use cases mature across healthcare, finance, media and industrial sectors.
Fintech remains the UK’s most funded sector
Fintech was once again the UK’s most funded innovation sector in 2025, driven by large scale investment into companies such as Revolut, FNZ and Rapyd. In total, more than 300 fintech funding rounds were completed during the year, attracting $6.6 billion in VC investment.
Health ranked as the second most funded sector, securing $4.2 billion in new investment. Leading rounds included Isomorphic Labs, Verdiva Bio and OrganOx, reinforcing the UK’s position as a global hub for health tech and life sciences innovation.
UK retains Europe’s leading position
The UK remained Europe’s leading destination for venture capital in 2025, raising more investment than Germany ($8.1 billion), France ($7.7 billion) and Switzerland ($3.6 billion) combined.
Within the UK, London continued to lead the way, attracting $17.7 billion in venture capital, followed by Cambridge ($2.2 billion) and Oxford ($707 million), reflecting the continued depth of the UK’s innovation ecosystem beyond London.
“This investment is a testament to British innovation and enterprise. From fintech, to AI, to Deep Tech and life sciences, our startups and scaleups are leading on the world stage,” Secretary of State Liz Kendall said.
“This government is committed to backing our innovators and entrepreneurs. We will continue to create the conditions for these brilliant initiatives to start, grow and succeed right here in the UK, creating great jobs and opportunities for people in every corner of our country.”
Simon Bumfrey, Head of Banking, HSBC Innovation Banking UK said: “2025 demonstrated the underlying strength of the UK’s innovation landscape, as VC investment surged to its strongest level in four years and the third highest on record. This signals not only a renewed wave of investor confidence, but also highlights the impactful contribution of tech and life sciences to the wider UK economy.
“Growth was evident across all stages of funding, with strong late-stage activity complemented by sustained momentum at the breakout and early stages. This showcases the depth of high-quality companies being built and scaled across the ecosystem, with the UK also continuing to lead in spinout value creation in Europe.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has produced new guidance for teams operating in operational technology (OT) to set out secure connectivity principles in the field.
This builds on the previous guidance published by the NCSC on creating and maintaining complete and accurate records of their OT environment.
Like in any environment, connectivity brings a wealth of benefits – “remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and integrated analytics” are some of the key examples the NCSC cites. Still, it also brings about increased risks such as an expanded attack surfaces, turning legacy devices into liabilities, increasing supply chain complexity, and bringing in remote access risks.
Similarly, historic OT environments would not have been designed with a consideration of connectivity, resulting in jarring security gaps that can be difficult to close.
The guidance provides eight principles for OT teams to bring to their approach to securing connectivity.
Principle 1. Balance the risk and opportunities: This involves the creation of a full business case to support a decision with a full risk analysis.
Principle 2. Limit the exposure of your connectivity: Adopting an exposure management approach, with proactive risk mitigation.
Principle 3. Centralise and standardise network connections: Reducing complexity, consolidating access points, and having uniform security controls across the entire OT estate.
Principle 4. Use standardised and secure protocols: Optimise prioritisation for security protocols across the state for standardisation and the right balance of security and access.
Principle 5. Harden your OT boundary: Invest in modern, modular, and replaceable boundary assets, ensuring a flexible security control to allow for boundary evolution.
Principle 6. Limit the impact of compromise: Layer security controls to reduce the impact of threats to other systems, focusing on contamination and lateral movement.
Principle 7. Ensure all connectivity is logged and monitored: Comprehensive record keeping can make compromise detection easier, as well as helping to understand capability.
Principle 8. Establish an isolation plan: Create a plan to isolate OT environments in the case of a cyber incident in conjunction with a business continuity plan.
“The stronger your connectivity design, the harder it becomes for adversaries to cause disruption – whether their target is your data, your process, or the critical services your OT supports,” the NCSC wrote in a blog post discussing the guidance.
Microsoft has launched a new initiative to lessen the environmental impact and resource strain of US data centres as AI drives construction across the globe.
The rise of AI has accelerated the drive for data centre construction, especially among major tech leaders looking to secure their AI supply chain. Still, data centres need more resources, namely energy and water, to power ravenous AI models.
Despite support from government officials to speed up the construction of these data centres, communities in the US have pushed backed due to rising concerns surrounding the environmental effects of these data centres.
To combat fears, Microsoft has released a plan to address these concerns head on – the firm said that it would pay utility rates to a high enough degree to cover its power costs, and work with local utilities in order to increase energy supplies when needed.
It also said it would ensure it replenished more water than that consumed by its data centres, pledging to publish information on the water usage figures of each of its data centres in the US.
“Especially when tech companies are so profitable, it’s both unfair and politically unrealistic for our industry to ask the public to shoulder added electricity costs for AI,” Brad Smith, Microsoft Vice Chair and President said in a statement.
Prior to the initiative launch, Microsoft changed plans to build a data centre in the US state of Wisconsin following push back from the local community. In the new announcement, Microsoft said that it would construct a facility that would prohibit data centre energy costs from affecting consumers.
The new plan also says that Microsoft will work with local communities to train residents to help build and maintain the data centres, as well as provide AI training to all affected communities.
The US President said prior to the announcement that big technology companies looking to build data centres “must ‘pay their own way'” in a post on social media, as voters express continued disillusionment with the economy and the rising cost of living ahead of midterm elections.
More than half of (51%) people in Scotland are now using AI to self-diagnose, with one in ten (11%) who use AI to self-diagnose saying that it helped improve their condition, according to new research from Confused.com life insurance.
The average waiting time for a GP appointment in the UK is currently 19 days, yet searches for “what is my illness?” (85%), “what are the symptoms for” (33%) and “side effects” (22%) have all increased since January 2025.
The research found that people are turning to tools like ChatGPT to expand their health knowledge and self-diagnose, and it highlights their top queries and whether the responses helped.
What health-related queries are people in Scotland searching for with AI?
Symptom checks top the list, with almost two-thirds (63%) of people in the Scotland using AI to search for any physical or mental effects they are feeling. Side effects (48%) follow, with many people (41%) also researching wellbeing techniques in diet and fitness, as well as treatment options (32%) such as medication and surgery. 1 in 10 (9%) are also seeking out mental health support in the form of therapy and coping strategies.
AI Health Query
Percentage
Symptom checks
63%
Side effects of medication or conditions
48%
Lifestyle and wellbeing (diet, fitness, stress management, etc.)
Mental health support (therapy, CBT, coping strategies, etc.)
9%
Why turn to AI?
Currently 11% people in Scotland claim that AI advice has helped improve their health situation, whilst 27% claimed it didn’t very much.
Key advantages for Scottish people using AI include less waiting time or a doctor’s appointment (42%), while some find it more comfortable than speaking face to face with a health professional (23%).
Others say that AI could provide them with a better understanding of future health conditions, allowing for preventative measures (29%).
Scots also said AI could save them money on private healthcare (16%), it could provide them peace of mind on them and their family’s health (16%), and it could give alternative medical advice outside of the norm (14%).
“Advances in AI technology have created a new way for people to approach healthcare and self-diagnosis. More individuals are taking steps to support their own and their family’s wellbeing, getting ahead of health concerns and addressing situations as quickly as possible,” Tom Vaughan, life insurance expert at Confused.com, said.
“While AI can be useful for initial research and gaining an understanding of a condition, it’s clear that for the ultimate peace of mind people should consult a GP or pharmacist. GPs and other medical professionals are the only people who can accurately diagnose conditions, some of which may worsen or become long-term illnesses without the proper treatment.
“For further health reassurance, applying for a life insurance policy can help safeguard families in case any health issues do occur. Critical illness and varied cover options can ensure people are supported in situations where conditions progress or require major treatment, easing stress during what can be an overwhelming time.
“Some providers even offer virtual GPs as part of their life insurance offerings, giving policyholders access to a doctor whenever they need one via video or phone calls. Whilst they may not always be able to issue a diagnosis, they can help with prescriptions and referrals, giving you an efficient and convenient way of having a potential problem investigated quickly.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI is trialling the launch of ChatGPT Health to select users in the US, which will let users upload medical records for detailed advice from the AI chat in its own siloed health channel.
‘Vibe coding’ is revolutionising the the speed and productivity of development teams, enabling those with no or low coding skills to create programmes with AI prompts. With its great promise for enhanced efficiency, however, leaves glaring gaps in security that need to be addressed, Palo Alto Networks research shows.
AI is lowering the playing field for those looking to code, allowing users to generate pages of code through plain-text interactions with AI bots. While this is democratising the practice of coding, the programmes produced by AI often lack vital security controls, creating major vulnerabilities.
Users who are inexperienced will be unable to check AI produced code for these security failings, leaving to exposed flaws that can jeopardise data, create technical debt, and even lead to data breaches and security incidents.
Palo Alto Networks calls these coders ‘citizen developers’ which they define as “personnel without development backgrounds” who lack the expertise necessary to check the code AI develops.
Development teams, squeezed by demands from transformative tech stacks, of course see vibe coding as an innovative time-saver, but the risks are real.
“As organisations rapidly adopt these tools, a gap is widening between productivity and security. The “nightmare scenarios” are no longer hypothetical; they are documented, real-world incidents,” Palo Alto’s Unit 42 research said.
Unit 42 found instances of insecure application development leading to a breach, insecure platform logic leading to code execution and authentication bypass, and data loss resulting from a rogue database deletion.
Security risks in vibe coding result from a number of AI liabilities, ranging from models’ prioritisation of function over security, context blindness, data hallucination, and over-trust in systems.
To address these risks amid rising instances of vibe coding, Unit 42 developed a framework dubbed SHIELD to guide development teams on the safe and responsible use of AI.
S – Separation of Duties – Incompatible duties should not be granted to AI agents as they may over-aggregate privileges and access data it should not.
H – Human in the Loop – Any code impacting critical functions should require a secure code review from a human as well as approval before it is integrated with existing code.
I – Input/Output Validation – For input, issuing guardrails to separate trusted instructions from untrusted data. For output, requiring AI to perform validation checks through Static Application Security Testing.
E – Enforce Security-focussed Helper Models – Create helper models to automatically validate code and perform security tests prior to deployment.
L – Least Agency – Grant minimum permissions to AI agents, and restrict access to sensitive data, with guardrails for destructive instructions like deletion.
D – Defensive Technical Controls – Disable auto-execution to allow for human-in-the-loop oversight, and employ defensive controls to manage execution.
With these in mind, development teams can better reap the benefits of vide coding whilst mitigating unnecessary risks.
A record number of new UK technology companies were incorporated in 2025, highlighting underlying confidence in the sector despite headwinds, according to leading audit, tax and consulting firm RSM UK.
RSM’s analysis shows there were 56,615 new tech incorporations in 2025, up 17% from 48,518 the previous year, and a 47% jump compared to five years ago (38,421).
Nearly all UK regions saw a record number of tech incorporations in 2025, apart from the South East, likely due to skills shortages which may be holding back growth. The biggest year-on-year rises were Wales (up 79%), the West Midlands (up 27%), and the East of England and North West (both up 24%).
Despite ongoing economic uncertainty throughout 2025, tech business leaders remain optimistic. RSM’s Technology Industry Outlook found over three-quarters (76%) said they feel confident their technology business will grow under the current government.
Georgie Bole, director at RSM UK, said: “The record number of new tech incorporations in 2025 is a clear sign of the strength and underlying confidence in UK tech.
“Despite consumer and business confidence being hit by constant waves of uncertainty last year, this doesn’t appear to have filtered through to the UK’s technology industry, which continues to make strides as a global leader in tech.
“The tech industry is highly attractive to investors and entrepreneurs given it cuts across and supports many other industries, and plays a key role in helping to fuel UK economic growth.
“The UK government continues to show its commitment to the tech industry, with targeted funding in areas such as artificial intelligence, support for startups and scale ups, creative tax reliefs to encourage investment, as well as being a key growth-driving sector in the UK’s modern industrial strategy.
“However, one area that UK is falling short on is attracting and retaining the right skills and talent in tech. Failure to address this could hinder UK tech advancement.
“This needs to start with removing barriers to overseas recruitment as well as incentivising tech graduates from UK universities to remain in the UK, so our tech businesses benefit from the skills, knowledge and ideas needed to scale up.”
Number of new technology company incorporations – year-on-year comparison
The UK is looking to expedite laws that would restrict the creation of sexualised deep fake images following the torrent of inappropriate images being produced using X’s Grok AI.
Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, told the House of Commons that she will be introduces a new offence this week which will make it illegal for people to request the creation of or create themselves non-consensual intimate images, which she said will be a “priority offence in the Online Safety Act too.”
She went on to describe the material produced by Grok AI and circulating on X as “vile”, which includes the images of women and even children in revealing clothing and in sexualised positions. Images of women in sexualised positions with signs of harm are also being produced and circulated using Grok AI and on X.
“It is not just an affront to a decent society, it is illegal,” Kendall said.
“Lives can and have been devastated by this content, which is designed to harass, torment, and violate people’s dignity. They are not harmless images – they are weapons of abuse, disproportionately aimed at women and girls and they are illegal.”
Ofcom has launched a formal investigation into X, the minister confirmed, which could result in the firm being fined for millions. Ofcom could even apply for a court order that would block UK access to the site.
According to Kendall, the government is looking to criminalise firms that create tools that enable the generation of non-consensual sexual images while it encourages companies to create better safeguards to prevent their tools from being used for malicious activities.
The UK government is also reviewing its own relationship with X, Kendall told the House, with ongoing discussions on if the government should continue to use the platform for communications.
Calls continue to rally for a boycott of X, which is nothing new to the firm, which faced an exodus of users when Elon Musk took over in 2022, followed by other mass exits following various contentious decisions made by the firm and its controversial owner.
Investors are still backing AI, but priorities seem to be shifting from tech giants towards energy and infrastructure, according to BlackRock.
The asset manager’s 2026 Investment Directions report for EMEA showed now signs of slowing enthusiasm for AI investment, but after years of ballooning market share prices in big tech, attention is veering to the underlying needs that would empower AI advancements.
Investors are looking to fund energy and infrastructure projects – especially data centres – in the coming year, BlackRock found in a survey of 732 client firms.
The main message from BlackRock’s analysis is diversifying – while investors are still keen on AI, investment does not need to be concentrated to big tech moguls. Instead, investors can seek opportunities to plug further into the AI hype by looking at its supply chain – data centres, energy grid updates, and energy innovations.
In the survey, only about a fifth of respondents said that big tech companies were the most attractive AI investment opportunity.
Data centres were the most attractive to firms, cited by more than half, while 37% said infrastructure was the most compelling investment opportunity in the AI sphere.
Construction, utilities, and engineering companies could see themselves soon benefitting from the AI hype.
Only 7% of investors described AI investment as a bubble, with new strategies indicated that it may not burst, but rather disseminate across AI’s wide supply chain.
While AI developers and big tech may continue to tout expanding capabilities and newer models, investors seem to be looking to the physical reality of AI: its high energy demands, data centre requirements, and those associated construction needs.
“It’s increasingly important to risk-manage megacap and AI exposure while also capturing differentiated upside opportunities,” Ibrahim Kanan, BlackRock’s head of core US equity, said in the firm’s report.
The Information Commissioner’s Office has reached a new memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the UK government in an effort to restore public trust after a series of data breaches and incidents within UK government departments.
The ICO says that it has been clear that the government must do more and move faster to improve data security as part of its wider data protection practices.
The UK government has also come under scrutiny for the data breach concerning about 10,000 officers of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Another data leak exposed data concerning about 200 victims of abuse from the Church of England to the public, while the Legal Aid Agency breach saw sensitive data surrounding criminal cases exposed.
The new MoU sets out expectations and responsibilities for both the UK government and the ICO with a goal of building back public trust in their data security.
Both parties have agreed to work collaboratively and transparently to ensure a free flow of information is available to each party.
Within the agreement, the government’s responsibilities include publishing annual assurance statements to the public on how their data is being kept safe, as well as carrying out regular assurance exercises within various departments.
The government will turn to the ICO for expert advice as it expands and deepens a data safety culture throughout its various departments, setting out clear goals to track progress.
The MoU holds the government responsible for enacting a privacy and trust by design approach to the use of personal data or new technologies, with guidance from the ICO.
The government will also provide effective oversight through an accountable governance model to the Transformation Board, which will entail risk and audit boards regularly monitoring department-wide data protection risks and tracking progress.
In turn, the ICO will be responsible for working with the government to use insights to inform guidance and resources for departments, provide expert advice on best practice, and regularly visit the government’s Transformation Board for review.
“Where standards are not met or maintained, the MOU reinforces the mechanisms available to us to hold government to account and take appropriate action where necessary,” the ICO said in its statement on the MoU.
The new MoU follows the publication of the Information Security Review 2023 in August 2025, which investigated 11 incidents of data breaches within UK government departments. Ministers questioned why the government had yet to only implement 12 of the 14 recommendations outlined in the review.
After a short break, we reflect on the deals that saw 2025’s stellar year to its completion, with landmark funding rounds in AI, space, and more.
As the year wound down, firms finalised some major deals in data centre funding, large investments in biotech and quantum breakthroughs, and major acquisitions in the Scottish tech sphere.
All that, and more, coming up.
Funding & Investment
Edinburgh’s Optima Partners Secures Fresh Growth Capital
Edinburgh-based Optima Partners has won fresh backing from Growth Capital Partners (GCP), with the cash earmarked to accelerate the AI consultancy’s ambitious expansion plans across the UK and Europe following a year of sustained growth.
Optima, which specialises in data and AI-led transformation, said that the new investment will allow the firm to scale further and faster by investing in customer operations, expanding strategic marketing, strengthening talent development, and growing its position in regional markets.
Founded in 2013 by Alan Crawley, the company supports enterprise organisations across industries such as financial services, energy, and telecoms, in tackling complex challenges through business strategy, machine learning and AI, and advanced engineering.
UK Gov Launches Fresh Funding for Scottish Space Tech
Scotland’s space industry is set to receive a funding boost under new plans from the UK Government aimed at backing breakthrough technologies and a faster route to commercialisation.
Universities across Scotland will team up with partners around the UK to receive a share of £3.8 million under the National Space Innovation Programme, aimed at developing new tools and systems for secure communications, environmental monitoring, and navigation.
Among the projects awarded funding are a partnership between Edinburgh University and the UK Astronomy Technology Centre to develop an instrument for CubeSats to measure pollution from space, while Heriot-Watt will work with Toshiba Europe on a secure quantum transmitter for small satellites.
At the same time, the UK Space Agency announced £1.1 million to strengthen space clusters in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, working through the UK’s devolved administrations to harness each region’s unique strengths and catalyse investment for local growth.
Dunoon Data Centre Developer Secures £15M for AI Expansion
Argyll Infrastructure Holdings, a Dunoon-based firm focused on building sustainable, high-performance data centres, has announced an initial capital raise of £15 million, the first stage in an ambitious investment plan.
While the firm did not release details of those behind the funding, it said that negotiations were continuing for a further £100 million, expected to be made available within the next six months, with AIH looking to attract future investors to the tune of €2 billion (£1.7bn).
The company said this mega investment, which would count among the largest in Scotland, will support new AI infrastructure sites at both Dunoon and Perth, laying the foundations of a Scottish network designed to deliver resilience, seamless connectivity, and future‑ready capacity.
To anchor the project, AIH has entered a three-year exclusivity deal with SambaNova, the full‑stack AI chip firm reported to be in early acquisition talks with tech giant Intel.
The Scottish data centre builder said that SamabNova’s integrated AI rack solutions could ensure “lightning-fast inference on the best open-source models” while maintaining an efficient carbon footprint.
Glasgow’s Fraunhofer Centre Wins £8M for Quantum Breakthroughs
Glasgow’s Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics (CAP) has secured £8 million in fresh funding from the UK Government to fuel the next wave of breakthroughs in photonics and quantum technologies.
The investment, provided by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will support the Centre’s research and development over the next four years, building on a previous £2 million handed out by DSIT earlier this year for capital equipment.
The cash injection will allow the Centre, based at the University of Strathclyde, to continue its work creating advanced laser and optical systems that address challenges across sectors such as space, defence, healthcare, and renewable energy.
Orbital Marine Power Lands £7M For Next Wave of Tidal Tech
Orkney-based Orbital Marine Power has landed a £7 million investment deal from PXN Ventures to power the next wave of its tidal technology and pursue international commercial projects.
Using floating tidal turbines to generate clean, reliable electricity from tidal currents, Orbital harnesses energy along the UK coast, with a design built for cost‑efficient servicing and scalable manufacturing.
The fresh capital, which comes alongside support from existing shareholders, including Scottish Enterprise, will fuel Orbital’s growth mission. The company said it is on course to double its turbine orderbook, underpinned by UK Government contracts for a total of six turbines delivering 14.4MW at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) site in Orkney.
Edinburgh Biotech MI:RNA Nets $3.6M to Expand Vet Diagnostics
Edinburgh-based molecular diagnostics company MI:RNA has announced the completion of an oversubscribed funding round, raising $3.6 million (£2.7m) to accelerate the firm’s future expansion and commercial progress.
Having achieved a $4 million (£2.9m) Series A in July 2024, this latest funding round attracted participation from existing investors, including NovaQuest, Scottish Enterprise, Kyoritsu Holdings Corporation, VANE (Angel Syndicate), Animal Health Angels, Equity Gap and Gabriel, as well as new investors Holstein UK and AniVC.
The Scottish biotech, which uses biomarkers and advanced modelling to diagnose veterinary disease earlier, said that the return of established investors reflected industry confidence in its early disease detection technology, commercial strategy, and international presence.
Small satellite firm AAC Clyde Space has announced that Bonnier Capital will become its largest shareholder following a strategic investment valued at more than £11 million.
The space tech, headquartered in Sweden but with a global footprint that includes a satellite manufacturing base in Glasgow, said the investment of 140 million kr (Swedish Krona) marks an important step in the business’s long-term development and will allow it to meet growing demand for space-based intelligence.
Acquiring more than a million new shares, Bonnier Capital becomes the company’s largest stockholder, a partnership which AAC Clyde Space said will provide it with the resources to accelerate priority programmes and finance the growth of its operational capacity.
The investment will aid the firm in its mission to turn space-based intelligence into real-world impact across a variety of applications, including weather monitoring, maritime safety, security, defence, agriculture and forestry.
Myriad Energy Targets Small-Wind Market with £865K Boost
Scottish clean-tech Myriad Wind Energy Systems has secured £865,000 in seed funding to help it deploy its first crane-free, small modular wind turbine, tech which could see clean, green, and cost-effective wind power for thousands of businesses across the country.
The Stirling-based firm’s patented technology is designed to open on-site wind generation to areas that have historically been unsuitable due to cost, access, and installation complexity, issues that have caused wind energy to remain underutilised at a smaller scale.
Myriad’s small modular turbine system, however, does not require specialist heavy lifting equipment or access roads, allowing wind power to be deployed across a far wider range of sites, from rural businesses and farms, to industrial estates and off-grid infrastructure.
StretchSense Raises $2.3M For Wearable XR Training Tech
Wearable tech firm StretchSense has secured $2.3 million (£1.75m) in a fresh investment round led by PXN Ventures to accelerate the global rollout of its XR training glove, designed to let organisations immerse employees in realistic virtual environments.
The wearables firm, which announced plans to double its Edinburgh headcount earlier this year, aims to deliver a lifelike training experience, building real-world skills enhanced by haptic technology that creates realistic sensations using vibrations when touching digital objects
The new funding from PXN, supported by Scottish Enterprise, will help the firm to expand its reach across sectors ranging from healthcare and education to aviation and defence, with StretchSense engaging several global partners about licensing opportunities for the XR games consumer market.
Electric vehicle salary sacrifice firm Loveelectric has been acquired by Perkbox for an undisclosed sum.
The deal will allow Perkbox to expand its benefits offerings with Loveelectric’s EV salary sacrifice and charging solutions, opening the service to thousands of organisations and employees already using Perkbox’s app.
Since Loveelectric’s launch in 2021, the Scottish firm has grown quickly, supporting 125,000 employees and 1,500 employers. The firm also recently acquired Bypass, a startup, in order to cut the cost of public charging.
Perkbox offers benefits, employee wellbeing, and engagement in a single app for employees and employers alike, with over four million employees using the service.
The acquisition of Loveelectric is an important step for Perkbox after the launch of its new unified employee experience platform in September of this year.
Label Sessions, the Edinburgh-based global innovation network, has been acquired by digital product consultancy hedgehog lab for an undisclosed sum.
Those behind the deal said that the agreement creates a full-stack innovation consultancy, combining the strength of Label Sessions’ network of more than 500 experts with Newcastle-based hedgehog lab’s skill in AI delivery, product design and development.
The tie-up will aim to help organisations across sectors such as finance, travel, retail, and tech fast‑track the journey from concept to pilot to scalable AI products, cutting both time and the cost of realising real-world impact.
The deal with hedgehog lab builds on Label Session’s mission since the company’s launch back in 2023, to connect business leaders to ‘the best advice from the most interesting people’ in live 1:1 sessions.
The UK has managed to reclaim its number two spot in the global fintech market, seeing investment in the UK fintech market up by 11% in the second half of 2025, according to data from Innovate Finance UK.
Globally, fintech investment increased 21% in 2025 to $53bn, with the US claiming the top spot with $25.1bn in investment across 2,449 deals.
The UK’s $3.6bn in investment put it in second place, with India following close behind with $3.4bn. The UK saw its funding allocated across 534 deals, while India amassed its funding through just 253 deals, reflecting a wider funding ecosystem in the UK.
The UAE made big splashes in the fintech funding ecosystem with its £2bn Binance funding round, accounting for the vast majority of the UAE’s $2.5bn.
Despite following far behind the US, the UK’s number two position places it far ahead its closest European competitors, with France ($1.08bn) and Germany ($997m) rounding out the ninth and tenth spots.
In Europe, the UK managed to raise more capital than the next five countries combined, with the continent showing a more concentrated fintech market overall.
Despite reclaiming its number two position, the UK had a relatively flat year-on-year performance, with just a 0.4% increase on 2024 overall. The second half of the year saw an 11% year-on-year increase in investment, however, driven by the large deal in FNX ($650m).
While it saw a lacklustre improvement in the first half of the year, the second half of 2025 may show signs of an upturn for the UK market.
When it comes to female founders in the UK, investment raised by own by 37% compared to last year. While overall investment has fallen, investment in female-founded businesses appears to be falling faster, meaning intervention is necessary to address this gap.
“Our latest investment figures show the resilience, strength, and global competitiveness of our phenomenal UK FinTech ecosystem,” Janine Hurt, CEO at Innovate Finance, said.
“Attracting a strong $3.6 billion in investment in 2025 – and again claiming second place globally behind only the United States – the UK has once again proven its credentials as a world-leading financial innovation and technology hub.
“Other countries are quickly gaining pace however, and so to maintain our global lead it is imperative that we push ahead on delivering key regulatory reforms with speed, increase access to growth capital, and continue to foster an environment which is attractive for both domestic and international entrepreneurs and investors.
“Our thriving UK FinTech sector is driving growth and productivity across the country, supporting consumers with the cost of living, facilitating greater financial inclusion, and creating thousands of jobs each year.
“We at Innovate Finance look forward to continuing to work with industry, regulators, and government to cement the UK as the best place in the world to start, build and scale a FinTech business.”
‘AI slop’, deepfakes, and misinformation continue to scare journalists as publishers fear the era of AI summaries will send traffic to news and media websites plummeting.
It is no secret that the media has mixed feelings about AI’s role in information sharing – the New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI over allegations of the firm using the news site’s work without credit or permission.
The rise of AI search summarises, which have been integrated on Google Search, have left publishers feeling disheartened at the future prospects of their industry, and that’s before getting into how AI makes it harder for people to tell the difference between fact and fiction.
This is all based on findings from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which surveyed 260 media leaders from 51 countries.
The report revealed growing fears from publishers on the drop in website traffic resulting from Google’s AI Search overviews. Media leaders predicted that referrals from search engines to their websites would fall 43% in the next three years.
While the report points out that not all of this AI material is necessarily harmful or malicious, the rise of deepfakes and AI manipulated images and videos can spell disaster when it comes to the spread of misinformation in elections and geopolitics.
Elections in Latin America, Europe, and Asia faced interference with deepfakes of politicians – while these are often debunked on a large scale, their influence is difficult to track and can create a general sense of distrust among the public.
Further, social media sites, where these AI videos often proliferate, are continually rolling back content moderation even as the UK urges big tech to promote online safety.
But fears over misinformation and the difficulty to ascertain reality may drive a renewed need and push for human-led journalism. Around half (57%) of publishers surveyed said that these trends in AI have the potential to strengthen the need for news media.
However, over a quarter (27%) think that these same trends weaken their position as an increase in disinformation, misinformation, and the ability to manipulate narratives not just with jargon and politicisation but with AI, can lead to polarisation and a lack of trust in news institutions.
Worldwide semiconductor revenue totalled $793 billion in 2025, an increase of 21% year-over-year (YoY), according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc.
“AI semiconductors — including processors, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and networking components continued to drive unprecedented growth in the semiconductor market, accounting for nearly one-third of total sales in 2025,” said Rajeev Rajput, Sr. Principal Analyst at Gartner.
“This domination is set to rise as AI infrastructure spending is forecast to surpass $1.3 trillion in 2026.”
NVIDIA strengthened its lead in the global semiconductor market, while Intel continued to lose its share.
Among the top ten semiconductor vendors ranking, the positions of five vendors changes from 2024.
Nvidia extended its lead over Samsung by $53 billion in 2025, becoming the first vendor to cross $100bn semiconductor sales, contributing to over 35% of industry growth in 2025.
Samsung retained the number two spot, with its $73bn semiconductor revenue driven by memory (up 13%), while non-memory revenue dropped 8% year-on-year.
SK Hynix moved into the number three position and totalled $61bn revenue n 2025. This is an increase of 37% year-on-year, fuelled by strong demand for HBM in AI servers.
Intel lost market share, ending the year at 6% market share, half of what it was in 2021, and found itself in the number four spot.
The buildout of AI infrastructure is generating high demand for AI processors, HBM and networking chips.
In 2025, HBM represented 23% of the DRAM market, surpassing $30 billion in sales while AI processors exceeded $200 billion in sales. AI semiconductors are set to represent over 50% of total semiconductor sales by 2029.
Table 1. Top 10 Semiconductor Vendors by Revenue, Worldwide, 2025 (Millions of U.S. Dollars) (Gartner, Inc.)
AI isn’t really leading to redundancies and hiring freezes – it’s just the economy. This is according to new research from Oxford Economics, which found that AI is potentially just a scapegoat when it comes to unemployment increases.
The study says that more traditional drivers of layoffs – such as past over-hiring, market instability, and economic uncertainty – are more to blame than AI adoption, showing that evidence of workers being replaced by AI is “anecdotal” and “exaggerated.”
In the first 11 months of 2025, the report found that 55,000 job losses were blamed on AI, but this only represented just 4.5% of all job losses in the period. Most were instead credited to the overall economy.
With firms wanting to keep investors happy and with AI being all the rage, Oxford Economics researchers think that even that 4.5% may be overblown.
Connecting layoffs to AI adoption may be a firm’s way of turning bad news into good, the paper posits.
Further, the paper cautions against mistaking correlation with causation. While it is true that recent graduate employment has trended downwards since the launch of ChatGPT, overall graduate employment has also decreased. Recent graduate unemployment is often greater than overall graduate unemployment in times of increasing unemployment, so this factor may not be as heavily influenced by AI as it may seem.
The increase in number of recent grads can also be inflating their unemployment numbers – there just may not be enough jobs to go around, regardless of AI.
The report also questions where the results are if AI is being used to replace obsolete workers, as many claim it threatens to. While AI may be used to transform work, it appears to not be resulting in any obvious productivity gains.
Researchers are cautious to draw too many conclusions from productivity statistics, which are volatile, but they do show that the US and other economies are experiencing at most modest gains in productivity, or even a deceleration.
Overall, the research papers says that AI’s effect on the job market may be overhyped, at least for now.
In order to reach the productivity gains that AI promises, structural reorganisation will be required in order to address existing and resulting bottlenecks.
ChatGPT owner OpenAI is launching a new feature for the AI chatbot that will use people’s health data to give more informed medical advice, the company announced.
OpenAI says it receives upwards of 230 million health and wellbeing questions from users to ChatGPT every day, showing a growing need for accessible medical advice.
The new feature – ChatGPT Health – will allow users to upload their medical documents to the chatbot, as well as health data from other sources such as nutrition and exercise applications.
While OpenAI says this data and ChatGPT Health queries will be stored separately from other chats and will not be used to train AI data, the information will be used to give more personalised medical advice. OpenAI stresses, however, that its new health feature is not intended to offer “diagnosis or treatment.”
The AI plans on using clinical medical records in conjunction with health app data to identify potential patterns for users concerned about their overall health, as well as break down complicated test results or prepare users for doctors appointments.
The new health feature will first be rolled out in the US, where two things are true: universal health care does not exist, meaning a simple visit to the GP or urgent care facility requires private insurance or an out-of-pocket charge, and data protection laws are less strict.
Disclosing medical records to a third party in the US is only protected under some circumstances under federal law – sharing medical data with OpenAI would not be protected under US legislation. Sharing data across the platform could therefore lose these records’ their legal protections – it is unclear if these records could then legally be shared with third parties such as vendors and advertisers.
The feature is not cleared to roll out in the UK and the European Union, where data protection laws are more strict. It will first be rolled out to a small cache of US users in an invitation-only basis.
How Will ChatGPT Health Keep Data Private?
OpenAI has firstly said that it does not plan to run ads on ChatGPT Health, though it is looking to run ads on ChatGPT to help fund its sprawling data centre costs.
ChatGPT Health data will be cauterised from the rest of ChatGPT data and OpenAI says that this data will not be used to train its AI model. ‘Memories’ from the Health section of ChatGPT will stay strictly in that section, and will be encrypted “by default at rest and in transit” across the entirety of the chatbot as part of the firm’s “core security architecture.” Employees will have more restricted access to data, OpenAI also said.
An OpenAI spokesperson told The Register that ChatGPT Health data will only be accessible to a third-party if a user chooses to connect them. It said that only “minimum” information will be shared with partners, who will be held to security and confidentiality requirements, The Register reported.
The encryption OpenAI offers differs from other company’s data encryption privacy guarantees. OpenAI holds this encryption key, and can theoretically decrypt the data because of this.
In practice, OpenAI has been forced to decrypt data in the past – a lawsuit from the New York Times over copyright resulted in a court order for ChatGPT to decrypt 20 million conversations, though these were anonymised.
OpenAI’s health offering comes at a time of skyrocketing healthcare costs for Americans as well as increasing global pressures on healthcare systems. The rise of the wellness industry, coinciding with rampant health misinformation exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, has created a quagmire of rising awareness and disinformation, eroding trust in the health industry.
For people without access to free healthcare, ChatGPT Health may present a free first stop in a health query; but with everything ‘free’ on the internet, Americans may be paying for a visit to Dr AI with their privacy.
Retail enterprises reached a critical inflection point in their AI journeys this past year, according to Nvidia. The chip company, which has seen its profile grow exponentially with the AI boom.
The firm’s State of AI in Retail and Consumer Package Goods: 2026 Trends report shows an evolving and advancing landscape in retail as the sector takes AI investment and deployment into the next stage. The increasing importance of agentic AI, strategic implementation, intermixing with challenges in talent and data, show a transformative era in how AI is prioritised in retail.
Nvidia’s third report gives evidence to a trend throughout AI deployment: an expansion from isolated solutions to enterprise-wide strategies.
When it comes to AI maturation, Nvidia found steady improvement, with 58% of organisations saying they are actively deploying AI solutions, up from 42% in 2024.
A third (33%) are currently assessing AI solutions, which indicates a level of stabilisation from last year’s 47% – organisations appear to be advancing from the pilot stage of their AI deployments.
Despite growing investor concerns on ROI, 95% of organisations said that AI is helping to decrease annual costs, with 89% saying that the novel tech is helping to increase their annual revenue. AI deployments seem therefore to be improving the bottom line, with Nvidia finding measurable impact in operational efficiency, employee productivity, and customer experience.
Nvidia also found that 90% of organisations indicate that AI investment would grow in 2026, with 58% of executives saying that this investment would grow by more than 10%.
The tangible business impact Nvidia cited in its report is clearly invigorating appetite for AI investment for those already seeing a financial return.
As far as what AI deployments may be prioritised, 79% said integrating open source models and tools into their stack is moderately to extremely important.
Further, nearly half (47%) said that their organisations are using or assessing AI agents, with a fifth (20%) saying AI agents are already actively deployed in their organisations.
Organisations are also turning to AI to streamline their supply chain, with 91% saying that AI is helping to decrease annual supply chain costs. Half (51%) said they’re using AI to address operational throughput and efficiency in the supply chain.
The NHS has selected nine common conditions which will be the first to be treated by its NHS Online service which will see its first patients in 2027.
Launched by the Prime Minister in September 2025, today’s announcement sees the first step in delivering the new NHS Online hospital, which will transform how healthcare is delivered, allowing patients to be triaged quickly through the NHS App, speak to doctors via video consultation, and monitored in the comfort of their home, saving unnecessary trips to hospital.
NHS Online is a flagship reform programme at the heart of efforts to modernise the health service. It will harness digital technology to fundamentally change how people are able to access healthcare for generations to come, ensuring it is more personalised, more convenient and more democratic.
While patients will always have the option of in-person appointments, NHS Online will help tackle deep rooted inequalities in the healthcare system by ending the postcode lottery of care and help make getting treatment as easy as online banking.
The service will allow patients to be seen much more quickly by digitally connecting them to expert clinicians across England, no matter where they are in the country.
NHS Online, which will officially take patients in 2027, is expected to deliver the equivalent of up to 8.5 million virtual appointments and assessments in its first three years – four times more than an average NHS trust.
In the first instance, the service will build and scale tried-and-tested innovations already in place across the country such as digital prescriptions and online test results, with millions of patients already accessing virtual appointments and using the NHS App to manage their care.
NHS Online won’t replace traditional care. Patients will always have the choice of face-to-face appointments, and those who need physical examinations or procedures will continue to receive them either at hospital or local hubs nearby.
Women’s health issues including severe menopause symptoms and menstrual problems that can be a sign of endometriosis or fibroids will be among the conditions available for online referrals.
Prostate problems like prostate enlargement and a raised prostate specific antigen (PSA) level will also be covered by the service, along with eye conditions including cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration.
NHS Online will also provide support for other painful and distressing conditions, such as iron deficiency anaemia and inflammatory bowel disease.
Patients will have the option of using NHS Online when their GP makes a referral for specialist care. Instead of having a physical site, patients will be able to receive care from doctors around the country directly through the NHS App – without leaving their home or having to wait longer for an in-person appointment.
Tests, scans or procedures will continue to take place at healthcare sites closer to patients’ homes, while clinicians will be able to review their notes remotely. This streamlines the process and allows patients to move quickly from referral to treatment to follow-up care.
The new model of care will allow patients to be seen at a convenient time without needing to go to hospital, while those who would prefer to be referred via the traditional route will always have the choice to see specialists at a healthcare site.
As more patients choose NHS Online, waiting lists are expected to fall. This will also free up in-person appointments for those who need and want them, helping people be seen more quickly.
“The NHS’s new online hospital will see a huge shift in the way we deliver care, giving patients the option to have an online appointment with a specialist anywhere in England,” Professor Stella Vig, National Clinical Director for Elective Care at NHS England, said.
“We’ve selected nine common conditions which the NHS Online service will initially provide support for when it launches next year, including some women’s health issues as well as prostate problems.
“We know that these conditions can be painful and difficult to cope with so providing faster, more convenient access to diagnosis and treatments will have a real and positive impact on people’s lives.”
Almost a fifth of organisations experienced operational disruptions that lasted as long as two weeks, with the majority facing downtime that lasted nearly five days, when hit with a cyber-attack, according to research into the state of enterprise Cyber Resilience from Absolute Security.
Cyber Resilience is recognised as having the ability to ensure critical cyber defences are operating effectively and to quickly restore business operations following a disruptive cyber incident or major software failure.
This global study of 750 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in the US and UK is the industry’s first research to provide insights into the state of Cyber Resilience, the challenges enterprises face, and steps security and risk executives can take to overcome them. The findings are now published in the first instalment of Absolute Security’s newly launched eBook series, The Resilient CISO: The State of Enterprise Resilience.
Downtime on the Rise
The study revealed that over the past 12 months, 55% of CISOs agreed their organisation had experienced a cyber-attack, ransomware infection, compromise, or data breach that rendered mobile, remote, or hybrid endpoint devices inoperable. When asked about recovery time, a majority (57%) reported their organisations took more than 4.5 days (on average) for full remediation and recovery, with 19% revealing recovery efforts stretched as long as two weeks.
The survey further revealed that 98% of organisations are spending between $1 and $5 million to recover from cyber incidents, with the average cost per incident now $2.5 million. Not a single respondent in the survey said they were able to recover from a cyber incident within a day, when hit by an attack in the past 12 months.
“There is simply no way to avoid the inevitable—at some point every organisation will face the reality of an attack or IT incident that takes down the business. Organisations that aren’t prepared to bounce back quickly face an almost existential crisis, as prolonged downtime can literally crush a business,” said Christy Wyatt, President and CEO, Absolute Security.
“As security and risk leaders, we need to expand our focus beyond just traditional security to also include being the driving force behind ensuring business operations run consistently and without disruption.”
CISOs in the Firing Line
CISOs are increasingly held responsible when it comes to dealing with the downtime caused by cyber-attacks and security software incidents.
Seventy-two percent agree their role has evolved from being responsible for just security and risk, to leading their organisation’s ability to recover business continuity following a cyber-attack, ransomware infection, other security incident, or software failure that stops business operations.
Adding to the pressures of the role, 61% agreed their organisation’s board and C-suite expect the cybersecurity group to guarantee zero breaches and ransomware incidents. A full 59% agreed they are concerned a security or IT incident causing significant downtime could lead to job loss, personal liability, and legal penalties.
67% of CISOs stated they are the primary executive responsible for ensuring cyber resilience, with 68% agreeing their organisation currently has a cyber resilience strategy in place. As threats and vulnerabilities continue to proliferate and the risk of extended downtime grows, 65% of CISOs agree their organisation prioritises cyber resilience over traditional prevention, detection, and response.
These responses are in sharp contrast to what CISOs reported just under a year ago, when in another Absolute Security survey 83% of respondents agreed that cyber resilience was more critical for their organization than traditional cybersecurity measures, with 90% reporting they had a cyber resilience strategy in place.
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.
Scott’s career also includes nearly 15 years at Scottish Enterprise, leading strategic investment teams supporting high-growth Scottish companies and the transition to net zero. Scott also spent her early career as a Relationship Manager at Bank of Scotland, making this appointment a welcome return.
Based at the St Vincent Street office in Glasgow, Scott will oversee an experienced team dedicated to providing tailored guidance, local market insight and sector expertise. The appointment reinforces Bank of Scotland’s focus on building strong, lasting relationships and providing more than just financial services – combining tailored guidance, local knowledge and sector expertise to help firms succeed.
“Glasgow is a leader in finance, retail, industry, culture and fashion, and the most densely populated city in Scotland. The result is a diverse mix of ambitious businesses that are constantly seeking new ways to grow, invest and stay competitive,” Alison Scott, area director for Glasgow and the West of Scotland at Bank of Scotland.
“After spending 27 years of my career working in Glasgow, I know firsthand how exciting the city is for businesses. I’m looking forward to working with my new team to provide the insight, tools and funding to help firms across Glasgow and the West of Scotland capitalise on new growth opportunities and achieve their ambitions.”
Martyn Kendrick, Regional Director for Scotland at Bank of Scotland, said: “Alison brings deep market knowledge, a strong track record in relationship banking and a clear understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing businesses across Glasgow and the West of Scotland.
“Having started her career at Bank of Scotland, her return marks a full-circle moment, and her leadership will be a real asset to our team and the businesses we support across the region.”
The UK government has announced that £140 million will go towards five Scottish Local Region Growth Funds in a bid to drive economic prosperity across Scotland.
Glasgow City will receive £60.9m from the fund over the next three years, with Edinburgh and the South East receiving £37.8m. Tay Cities (£19.5m), Ayrshire (£11.8m), and the Forth Valley Region (£9.8m) will split the rest of the funding.
The programme will fund regional projects which will aim to drive economic growth. That might mean projects like infrastructure investment, business support, or skills development – projects which will make a real difference in terms of skilled jobs and people’s prosperity.
“The UK Government is today backing regional economies across Scotland with £140 million of new investment,” secretary of state for Scotland Douglas Alexander said.
“This new investment will allow local leaders to decide how best to use the funding, which could include projects to improve infrastructure, business support or skills development. The UK Government will now work with local partners to develop investment plans tailored to each region.
“By investing in local areas, reducing child poverty, and bringing down inflation, the UK Government is focused on delivering material change to people across the country – boosting living standards and improving public services.”
The new Scottish Local Growth Funds will provide targeted funding to boost economic growth and improve living standards by investing in the regions that contain the areas with the lowest Real Disposable Household Income (RDHI) per capita.
Funding has been allocated at regional level to enable strategic decision-making and maximum growth impact. Allocations have been allocated across the five eligible REPs in proportion to their population.
Overall, 23 local authorities will receive funding from the local growth fund, including: East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire City of Edinburgh, East Lothian, Fife, Midlothian, Scottish Borders, West Lothian, Stirling, Falkirk, Clackmannanshire, Glasgow City, East Dunbartonshire, East Renfrewshire, Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, South Lanarkshire, West Dunbartonshire, Angus, Dundee City, Fife, and Perth & Kinross
MPs warn that the UK risks falling behind global competitors when it comes to mobile and broadband gaps, calling for an independent review of Britain’s connectivity landscape.
The Digital Communities All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) warns that an ongoing lack of mobile and broadband coverage in parts of the country – urban, rural and coastal – are undermining national ambitions for economic renewal, social inclusion, and technological leadership.
Its latest report calls on government to commission an urgent, independent review of the UK’s digital connectivity landscape, alongside stronger regulatory scrutiny by Ofcom, more strategic investment in connectivity as a driver of economic growth, and decisive action to foster competition and innovation.
The report, Reconnecting Britain: Restoring Trust, Connecting Communities and Driving Inclusive Growth, says that despite progress in expanding digital infrastructure, the UK risks falling behind other countries unless more is done to boost adoption of high-speed broadband and 5G networks.
Digital connectivity underpins everything from economic productivity and public services to education and healthcare. The APPG’s inquiry reveals several systemic weaknesses which a future review needs to address.
Transparency and accountability
Current coverage data relies heavily on operator-supplied modelling, which often fails to reflect real-world experiences. This disconnect has led to policy decisions and investment strategies that do not align with actual need. The report calls for Ofcom to adopt a more robust, independent approach to data collection and regulatory scrutiny.
Market structure and competition
The UK’s digital infrastructure remains dominated by a handful of major operators, limiting competition and slowing progress. Structural barriers—including inefficient planning processes and outdated legal frameworks—continue to stifle innovation. Breaking down monopolies and fostering a level playing field is critical to accelerating rollout.
Economic imperative
Delays in infrastructure deployment could cost the UK tens of billions in lost productivity. Conversely, successful adoption of 5G and full fibre could deliver gains worth over £200 billion by 2035. Closing the digital divide is not just a social imperative—it is an economic necessity.
The UK currently ranks behind many international peers in 5G performance and infrastructure density. Without urgent action, the country risks missing its target of high-quality 5G coverage in all populated areas by 2030. Furthermore, rural and coastal communities continue to face persistent connectivity gaps, deepening social and economic inequalities.
The report highlighted the scale of opportunity available to the UK if investment in digital connectivity is accelerated, like a £159 billion productivity boost by 2035 from widespread 5G adoption, worth more than £500 per person.
Further, investment in connectivity could result in a £73 billion potential uplift to UK productivity by 2034 through nationwide Full Fibre rollout.
The report also found that every £1 invested in digital inclusion returns £9.48 to the economy. In addition, closing the rural connectivity gaps could add £19 billion in annual tax receipts.
Evidence also warns that delays to 5G could cost £41 billon in lost economic output. Currently, gigabit-capable coverage reaches 87% of premises nationwide, but only 62% in rural areas.
The APPG stresses that only through sustained, coordinated action—combining strategic investment, regulatory reform, and stronger local-national partnerships—can the UK close its digital divide and reclaim its position as a global leader in connectivity.
“Digital connectivity is the backbone of modern Britain and is an essential lifeline – a piece of critical national infrastructure – for communities and businesses,” Helen Morgan, MP, chair of the digital communities, APPG, said.
“People in areas with persistently poor broadband or mobile coverage are left at a digital, social and economic disadvantage and risk losing out on opportunities for skills development, employment, and community engagement.
“Without reliable access to high-speed services, the UK cannot achieve its economic ambitions or deliver inclusive growth. An urgent, independent review of the nation’s digital landscape is essential to restore trust, ensure transparency, and unlock the full potential of our economy.”
Finance teams appear to be entering 2026 with a much clearer insight into how AI can benefit their organisation, according to new research from Aqilla.
Research conducted at the company’s most recent user conference found three-quarters of finance leaders want to expand automation, while 83% are optimistic about the impact of AI on finance processes.
This marks a significant year-on-year shift from data collected at the company’s 2024 event, when fewer than two-thirds said AI could help speed up accounting and reporting tasks.
Familiarity with AI is also improving. Just 8% of respondents now describe themselves as fearful of AI, compared with 20% last year who said they did not understand the technology.
This suggests finance teams are no longer debating whether AI belongs in their sector and are more comfortable with allowing it to support everyday activities. One practical reason may be that data entry and imports remain the single biggest bottleneck for almost 40% of respondents, underscoring the scale of repetitive manual work finance teams still have to handle.
Together, the findings suggest that as fear of AI recedes, finance teams are more willing to delegate routine, rules-based work to AI-enabled automation, with many moving beyond pilots and proofs of concept towards wider, day-to-day use.
“The combination of rising confidence and falling fear suggests finance teams are no longer holding AI at arm’s length. Many are starting to consider where and how it can be trusted to take on real work,” said Hugh Scantlebury, founder and CEO at Aqilla.
“At the same time, the persistence of manual bottlenecks and the continued emphasis on accuracy and control indicate that finance leaders are not looking to automate blindly, but to apply AI in ways that preserve visibility, accountability and human judgement.”
Charis Thomas, Chief Product Officer at Aqilla said: “Our customers echo wider market sentiments. They aren’t ready to hand everything over to AI – and neither should they be at this stage. They’re more discerning. They want AI-enabled solutions that remove repetitive work and improve accuracy. But they’re unwilling to trade human accountability. That’s good news in terms of retaining ethical AI use and compliance adherence.”
“These findings suggest that 2026 will be the year when AI can finally take the strain of repetitive work – capturing data, routing items and suggesting classifications – but in ways that still allow users to interrogate, override, pause or slow things down whenever needed.
“That balance is crucial to helping finance teams feel secure as they scale their AI use. Rather than focusing on the technology itself, users are giving careful consideration to governance, skills, and responsible application. This will help ensure deployments support better decision-making, even when pressure increases, and deadlines loom,” Hugh concludes.”
The NHS is increasingly using AI to support its prediction metrics in Accident and Emergency departments to better accommodate it’s busiest periods.
The A&E demand forecasting tool is already being used by 50 NHS organisations, helping them plan how many people are likely to need emergency care and treatment on any given day.
The tool helps NHS staff with smarter planning for shifts and bed space in the long-term, reducing last-minute pressure thanks to clearer forecasts which spot potential bottlenecks. For patients, it will ultimately mean shorter waiting times during busy periods – ensuring people get the care they need more quickly.
This winter has already seen record fly cases putting additional pressure on emergency departments, while the Christmas period typically adds to this pressure with festive challenges like icy falls and other seasonal illnesses.
With the tool being constantly trained on seasonal health data, it will help to spot surges in demand for health services before they happen – giving hospitals the opportunity to put staff in the right place at the right time.
The tool uses this data to highlight regular pinch points where demand is likely to be higher across the course of the year.
That includes a wide range of areas, from Met Office temperature forecasts and hospital admissions through to which days of the week are busier than others. This data then produces forecasts for the coming days and weeks which hospitals can use to more effectively manage resources.
“AI is already improving healthcare by speeding up diagnosis and unlocking new treatments. Now we are going a step further,” technology secretary Liz Kendall said.
“By helping to predict demand, this AI forecasting tool is getting patients the care they need faster while supporting our incredible NHS staff.
“That means easing pressure by ensuring the NHS is at the forefront of the latest technology during the busiest time of year.”
Early feedback from staff has been positive. Hospital managers have praised its impact in supporting them to make better decisions about staffing and capacity, meaning patients can then move through the system more efficiently.
Local NHS organisations using the tool include NHS Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care Board, as well as NHS Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care Board.
“The AI revolution is here and we are arming our NHS staff with the latest technology to help slash A&E waits for patients this busy winter period,” health innovation minister Dr Zubir Ahmed said.
“Innovations like these will help hospitals manage winter pressure and prioritise resources over the coming months as we continue to battle a tidal wave of flu.
“This is part of our 10 Year Health Plan to shift healthcare from analogue to digital as we build an NHS that is fit for the future.”
UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has joined calls to Elon Musk, X CEO, urging him to take swift and effective action against the torrent of sexualised images of women and girls being produced using his company’s Grok AI model.
Following contact from Ofcom, tech secretary Kendall called the recent rise in the use of Grok’s ‘spicy mode,’ which can be used to produce images of scantily clad people, “absolutely appalling.”
Reports have revealed a plethora of images generated by the xAI bot of women and even children in various states of undress. These non-consensual sexualised images do not show people fully nude, but still show images of real people in sexualised poses and in skimpy clothing.
Investigations have shown that images have been produced of children as young as five years old.
Kendall said that the UK government “cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these degrading images.”
She said in her statement: “Services and operators have a clear obligation to act appropriately. This is not about restricting freedom of speech but upholding the law.
“We have made intimate image abuse and cyberflashing priority offences under the Online Safety Act – including where images are AI-generated. This means platforms must prevent such content from appearing online and act swiftly to remove it if it does.”
She echoed the concerns of Ofcom, and supported their contact with xAI regarding the images.
“It is absolutely right that Ofcom is looking into this as a matter of urgency and it has my full backing to take any enforcement action it deems necessary.”
X said in a statement: “We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.
“Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
The creation or sharing of sexually explicit images of a person without their consent is considered illegal under the UK’s Online Safety Act, which says that firms should take “appropriate steps” to mitigate the issue.
The public switch telephone network (PTSN) switch off will take effect in January 2027, but Workflo Solutions, a West Lothian tech firm, warns that some businesses are woefully unprepared for this landmark shutdown of analogue landline phones.
The PSTN switch-off has been deemed necessary because the network of traditional copper lines is no longer equipped to handle the demands of today’s advanced digital world. Bandwidth limitations restrict its ability to support features such as video conferencing and data sharing – crucial tools for modern businesses. And maintaining this ageing infrastructure has become increasingly expensive and impractical.
Any equipment that currently uses the PSTN will stop working in January 2027. From phonelines to security alarms, door entry systems to CCTV, any technology that relies on the old copper lines will be affected.
And so businesses across the UK have been urged to move to a single, digital Internet Protocol (IP) network that primarily uses full-fibre connections. Described by Workflo Solutions as the next generation of business communication, IP leverages the power and flexibility of the internet to deliver voice, data and video services over a single, high-speed fibre optic network. This shift to IP signifies a major technological leap forward in terms of speed, reliability and functionality.
“For sectors heavily reliant on traditional telephony, such as healthcare, telecare and security, it is essential that their critical services remain uninterrupted while alternative solutions are implemented. They need to act now to ensure a smooth transition to digital technologies to avoid disruption to their operations,” Workflo Solution’s managing director Michael Field said.
“Worryingly, there are still some businesses that are woefully underprepared for the switch-off. The move to IP-based networks is unavoidable, and postponing preparations might cause last-minute issues.
“So we’re urging all businesses to act now, review their current systems and begin implementing the necessary updates to ensure a seamless transition to a more advanced, efficient and versatile communication network before they get left behind.”
As the Cyber and Resilience Bill undergoes its second reading in the House of Commons, the Open Rights Group (ORG) is calling on the UK to use the new legislation as an opportunity to further the UK’s digital sovereignty and curb its reliance on US tech companies.
The rights group is calling on MPs to implement a digital sovereignty strategy into the bill in an effort to reduce the UK’s reliance on US tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Palantir, for its digital infrastructure.
“Just as relying on one country for the UK’s energy needs would be risky and irresponsible, so is overreliance on US companies to supply the bulk of our digital infrastructure,” James Baker, the ORG’s Platform Power programme manager said.
“Now more than ever, the UK needs to build and protect sovereignty over its digital infrastructure, and not leave itself vulnerable to the policies and actions of foreign powers such as the US and China.
“Although the US is a historical ally, it’s assertion that it will use hard power to achieve its political, economic and military goals, should raise concerns among parliamentarians in the UK. The Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill is an opportunity to improve the UK’s control over its infrastructure.”
The ORG is calling for the bill to include certain sovereignty stipulations that could prove integral to resilience, one that considers supplier withdrawals, foreign law restrictions to data access, the impact of sanctions, trade disputes and political pressures on systems, and meaningful alternatives should relations with foreign states change.
The ORG’s intervention points out that technically secure infrastructure can remain fragile if they depend on a small number of foreign suppliers, if systems cannot be easily replaces, and if cloud and data services are governed entirely by foreign law.
The rights group pointed to three instances in the past few years that have seen digital infrastructure compromised by foreign powers.
Microsoft reportedly blocked the email account of an International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor following sanctions from the US on the court. While Microsoft denied this allegation, the ICC switched providers and stopped using Microsoft software in 2025.
Further, tractor company John Deere disabled stolen tractors in 2022. While the move was celebrated at the time as the tractors were stolen in Ukraine by Russia, the move indicated that John Deere could apply a kill switch to any of its vehicles given political pressure.
These sobering realities show some of the consequences of a highly connected world, often controlled by who owns said connections.
European organisations trail behind global benchmarks when it comes to AI security controls, new research from Kiteworks has found.
The firm’s Data Security and Compliance Risk: 2026 Forecast Report found that European firms are lacking with it comes to AI threat detection, AI breach response, and AI data flow governance.
The research, based on a survey of security, IT, compliance, and risk leaders across 10 industries and 8 regions, exposes a widening gap between Europe’s regulatory leadership, with regulations such as the EU AI Act, and its actual AI security posture.
European organisations trail on AI anomaly detection (France 32%, Germany 35%, the UK 37% vs. 40% global), training-data recovery (40% to 45% vs. 47% global), and software bill of materials (SBOM) visibility for AI components (20% to 25% vs. 45%+ in leading regions).
When AI systems behave unexpectedly – or when AI-enabled attacks target European infrastructure – most organisations lack the detection capabilities to identify the threat. This can result in compliance fines and negative brand exposure as well as breaches of sensitive data.
“Europe has led the world on AI governance frameworks with the AI Act setting the global standard for responsible AI deployment. But governance without security is incomplete,” said Wouter Klinkhamer, GM of EMEA Strategy & Operations, Kiteworks. “When an AI model starts behaving anomalously, such as accessing data outside its scope, producing outputs that suggest compromise, or failing in ways that expose sensitive information, European organisations are less equipped than their global counterparts to detect it. That’s not a compliance gap. That’s a security gap.”
The report identified six predictions for European organisations in 2026.
1. AI-specific breach detection will lag other regions. France (32%), Germany (35%), and the UK (37%) all trail the 40% global benchmark on AI anomaly detection (the capability to identify when AI models behave unexpectedly). When AI-enabled attacks exploit model vulnerabilities or AI systems access data outside their intended scope, European organisations will be slower to detect the breach, exacerbating the detrimental impact of the exposure.
2. AI incident response will remain incomplete. Training-data recovery (the ability to diagnose AI failures by examining what the model learned from) sits at 40% to 45% across Europe versus 47% global and 57% in Australia. Without this capability, organisations can’t forensically analyse AI incidents or prove what went wrong to regulators.
3. AI supply chain visibility will remain a blind spot. SBOM adoption for AI components sits at 20% to 25% across Europe versus 45%+ in leading regions. Organisations can’t secure AI models built on third-party components they can’t see. As attackers increasingly target vulnerabilities in AI libraries, datasets, and frameworks, this visibility gap stops being a compliance checkbox and becomes an open door. Organisations without component inventories can’t detect exposure, can’t trace compromise origins, and can’t respond until damage is already done.
4. Third-party AI vendor incidents will catch organisations unprepared. Only 4% of French organisations and 9% of UK organisations have joint incident response playbooks with their AI vendors. When a vendor’s AI system is compromised – and that compromise flows into European infrastructure – organisations won’t have the detection mechanisms, communication channels, or containment protocols in place. The breach spreads before they know it exists.
5. AI governance evidence will remain manually generated. European organisations cluster in “continuous but manual” compliance rather than automated evidence generation. This creates dual financial exposure. Regulators assessing fines will find documentation that is slow to produce and inconsistent in quality, while insurers adjudicating breach claims may deny coverage entirely if organisations cannot demonstrate adequate AI governance controls were in place. Governance thus becomes a payout gap.
6. AI incident response will remain incomplete. Training-data recovery (the ability to diagnose AI failures by examining what the model learned from) sits at 40% to 45% across Europe versus 47% global and 57% in Australia. Without this capability, the risk window becomes more severe while compliance exposure becomes more difficult, with organisations unable to forensically analyse AI incidents or prove what went wrong to regulators.
The implications extend beyond compliance. AI systems are increasingly processing sensitive data, making autonomous decisions, and integrating with critical infrastructure. Every AI model that can’t be monitored for anomalies is a system where adversarial inputs, data poisoning, or model manipulation go undetected.
Every third-party AI component that can’t be tracked is a dependency where upstream compromises silently inherit into your environment. Every AI vendor relationship without a joint incident playbook is a breach that spreads unchecked across organisational boundaries.
These aren’t governance failures waiting for a regulatory audit. They’re attack surfaces waiting for an adversary. Compliance gaps carry the abstract risk of penalties. Security gaps carry the concrete certainty of compromise: data exfiltration, manipulated outputs, operational disruption. The difference is between a fine you can budget for and a breach you can’t predict.
The global report, which includes 15 predictions across data visibility, AI governance, third-party risk, and compliance automation, identifies “keystone capabilities” – unified audit trails and training-data recovery – that predict success across all other security metrics, showing a measurable advantage for organisations that have implemented them.
“The AI Act establishes what responsible AI governance looks like. The question for European organisations is whether they can secure what they’re governing,” added Klinkhamer. “By the end of 2026, the organisations that have closed the gap between AI policy and AI security through anomaly detection, training-data recovery, supply chain visibility, vendor incident coordination will be positioned for both compliance and resilience. Those still running AI workloads without detection capabilities will learn about their security gaps the hard way: from attackers, not auditors.”
Elon Musk’s xAI is coming under regulatory fire after reports show its Grok AI tool is being used to make “sexualised images of children” as well as abusive images of women.
Ofcom has directly reached out to the AI firm, with an EU Commission spokesperson calling the images “unlawful.”
“This is illegal. This is appalling. This is disgusting. This is how we see it, and this has no place in Europe,” Thomas Regnier said to reporters Monday.
An Ofcom spokesperson said it “made urgent contact with X and xAI to understand what steps they have taken to comply with their legal duties to protect users in the UK.”
Officials in India have also joined in the growing demands toward X over its AI image generation.
Reports from the BBC and Reuters, as well as other media outlets, showed that Grok was creating a myriad of images of women and children in inappropriately revealing clothing, in what the AI firm called ‘spicy mode’.
The mode does not enable users to fully nudify images, it does enable users to prompt for revealing clothing and sexualised poses. Researchers at French non-profit AI Forensics found manipulated images included people under the age of 18, including some under the age of five.
Ofcom has opened an investigation into Grok following concerns that it was producing undressed images of real people as well.
While Ofcom reached out to xAI on Monday, X released a warning on Sunday urging users to not use its AI tool Grok to generate illegal material.
Further, Musk warned that anyone found to have used xAI to generate illegal content would “suffer the same consequences” as if they had created the images themselves.
The illegal and controversial images appear to be in direct breach of X’s own policies, which state at Grok cannot be used to in “depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic matter.”
The creation or sharing of sexually explicit images of a person without their consent is considered illegal under the UK’s Online Safety Act, which says that firms should take “appropriate steps” to mitigate the issue.
Celebrities have reportedly been targeted in the onslaught of nude deepfakes generated by Grok users. A mother of one of Elon Musk’s children reportedly had an image of her at the age of 14 ‘declothed’ by the AI tool, according to the Guardian. Catherine, Princess of Wales, was also a victim of AI tool’s undressing, the BBC reported.
The UK government is implementing new measures to make online public services more secure and resilient in a bid to ensure people can use these essential services with confidence.
Backed by over £210 million, the Government Cyber Action Plan sets out how government will try to meet the growing range of online threats. Driven by a new Government Cyber Unit, the plan will rapidly improve cyber defences and digital resilience across government departments and the wider public sector, so people can trust that their data and services are protected.
It underpins UK Government plans to digitise public services. This will make more services accessible online, reduce time spent on phone queues and paperwork, and enable citizens to access support without repeating information across multiple departments.
However, realising these benefits depends on trust. As services move online, they must be secure and resilient. Cyber-attacks can take vital public services offline in minutes, disrupting lives and undermining confidence. The new plan addresses this challenge head-on.
Released as the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill has its Second Reading in the House of Commons, the Bill sets out clear expectations for firms providing services to government to boost their cyber resilience.
The plan aims to generate clearer visibility of cyber risks, build stronger central actions on difficult cyber challenges, create faster response times to threats, and boost better resilience across the government.
“Cyber-attacks can take vital public services offline in minutes – disrupting our digital services and our very way of life,” digital government minister Ian Murray said.
“This plan sets a new bar to bolster the defences of our public sector, putting cyber-criminals on warning that we are going further and faster to protect the UK’s businesses and public services alike.
“This is how we keep people safe, services running, and build a government the public can trust in the digital age.”
The plan is bolstered by further steps to take the UK’s cyber defences further, such as the new Software Security Ambassador Scheme which will help drive adoption of the Software Security Code of Practice, a voluntary project designed to reduce software supply chain attacks and disruption.
For the first time, the UK has set out a clear, evidence-based view of the capabilities of the most advanced AI systems – putting hard numbers behind a discussion often driven by speculation and a lack of rigorous evidence.
The AI Security Institute’s Frontier AI Trends Report, a public assessment of how the most advanced AI systems are evolving, draws on 2 years of testing AI capabilities in areas critical to innovation and security, including cyber, chemistry and biology.
It finds that safeguards – the protections in place to make sure AI behaves as intended – are improving, with the Institute continuing to work constructively with companies to strengthen them and ensure we can unlock the full potential of AI while keeping people safe. While every system tested remains vulnerable to some form of bypass and protection still varies across companies, huge strides are being made.
The time it took AISI red-teamers to find a “universal jailbreak” – a general way of getting round a model’s safety rules – for example, increased from minutes to several hours between model generations. That represents a roughly 40-fold improvement.
The report is not intended to make policy recommendations, but gives decision makers in the UK and across the world the clearest data yet of precisely what the most advanced AI systems can actually do. Now becoming a regular publication, it will help to improve transparency, and public understanding of what the technology can do – helping drive responsible conversations about its development as it is increasingly adopted across the economy.
The UK government says it will support that work by continuing to invest in evaluation and AI science, working with industry, researchers and international partners to ensure AI delivers growth, new jobs, improved public services, and national renewal for hardworking communities.
Its key findings show that the most advanced AI systems are improving at remarkable speed. In just a few years, they have gone from struggling with basic tasks to matching or surpassing human experts in some areas.
In terms of cybersecurity, success of apprentice-level tasks has risen from under 9% in 2023 to around 50% in 2025. For the first time in 2025, a model completed an expert level cyber task, requiring up to 10 years of experience.
Models can also now complete hour-long software engineering tasks more than 40% of the time, compared below 5% 2 years ago.
Systems are now outperforming PhD-level researchers on scientific knowledge tests and helping non-experts succeed at lab work that would previously have been out of reach.
The AI Security Institute also identified a pace of change, with the duration of some cyber tasks that AI systems can complete without human direction is roughly doubling every eight months.
“This report shows how seriously the UK takes the responsible development of AI. That means making sure protections are robust, and working directly with developers to test leading systems, find vulnerabilities and fix them before they are widely used,” AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said.
“Through the world-leading AI Security Institute, we are building scientific capability inside government to understand these systems as they evolve, not after the fact, and to raise standards across the sector.
“This report puts evidence, not speculation, at the heart of how we think about AI, so we can unlock its benefits for growth, better public services and national renewal while keeping trust and safety front and centre.”
The analysis also identifies early signs of capabilities linked to autonomy, but only in controlled experiments. No models in AISI’s tests showed harmful or spontaneous behaviour, but the report concludes that tracking these early signs now is essential as systems become more capable.
UK tech professionals are increasingly turning to unauthorised artificial intelligence (AI) tools at work to keep up with mounting pressures.
According to new data from STEM workforce consultancy SThree, four in five (81%) tech workers recognise the risks of using unapproved AI tools, yet half (50%) use them every week and almost a quarter (23%) are using it once a day.
The STEM Workforce Report, which surveyed over 5,000 professionals in key economies, reveals that two in five (39%) UK workers rely on these tools to speed up their work, with 17% admitting they would struggle to meet deadlines without them.
Businesses using unapproved AI tools pose serious or moderate threats to data privacy and security – something that the majority (79%) of UK tech professionals acknowledge. While over half (51%) believe the risks outweigh the rewards, many continue using them, fearing that official tools are too slow – with 22% describing approved systems as inefficient and 27% calling ‘shadow’ tools faster and simpler.
The findings come as governments and regulators move to tighten oversight of artificial intelligence – from the Alan Turing Institute’s new UK mission to strengthen cyber-resilience, to the EU’s landmark AI Act entering its final phase, and new US guidance addressing AI risks in critical infrastructure and national security.
Rakesh Patel, Managing Director – UK and Rest of Europe, SThree, said: “AI has become a double-edged sword for the UK’s tech workforce – vital for productivity, yet risky when used outside secure systems. The rise of ‘Shadow AI’ isn’t about carelessness but rather a response to pressure. When official tools are too slow or restrictive, people naturally look for faster ways to get the job done, putting companies at risk.
“The challenge for employers is to bridge that gap by giving teams access to secure, efficient AI that keeps pace with modern workloads. Productivity shouldn’t come at the expense of security – but right now, too many workers feel forced to choose between the two and there is real risk of more data breaches to come.”
As AI vendor race competition heats up, Gartner, Inc., has identified the Companies to Beat in nearly 30 AI technology races across five categories.
“The Company to Beat is determined by a methodology based on, but not limited to, six key criteria that differentiate top vendors in the space: technical capabilities, customer implementations, potential customer base, business model, key partnerships, and the broader surrounding ecosystem,” said Anthony Bradley, Group Vice President at Gartner.
“An assessment is performed by teams of expert analysts who analyse Gartner market data and collaborate to establish Gartner’s opinions. Analysts consider a variety of data and information sources, including, but not limited to, interactions with end-users and vendors, peer review, public data, Gartner proprietary data and analysts’ own explorations on the market,” said Bradley. “As these fast-moving AI Vendor Races evolve, Gartner’s coverage, assessment, insights, and advice on how to compete will evolve in concert, and different vendors can become the Company to Beat.”
The Companies to Beat in the AI Vendor Race segments are broken into five categories:
Data & Infrastructure: including leaders in AI data platforms, custom AI silicon, enterprise AI infrastructure services, and more
Model & Agentic: including leaders in agentic AI platforms, autonomous software engineering agents, AI LLM models, and more
Cybersecurity: including leaders in AI security platforms, Deepfake detection, AI-powered advanced cyber deception, and more
Solutions: including leaders in CRM AI, Earth intelligence, enterprisewide AI, and more
Industry: including leaders in manufacturing AI, AI in healthcare providers, AI in telecom mobile and networks and services, and more
Some of the Companies to Beat in highlighted AI segments include:
Google, Enterprise Agentic AI Platforms
Gartner analysts said that Google’s integrated AI agent tech stack (spanning advanced reasoning models, protocols and infrastructure), scalable enterprise adoption support, and use of Google Deepmind to invest in key AI disruptors make it the Company to Beat in enterprise agentic AI because it outpaces competition in vision and innovation.
Competitors can invest in model innovation and scalability features to future-proof offerings and close the gap. The next generation of AI agents will be ecosystems of expert agents providing deeply specialised automation.
Though Google will play a key role at the model level, it hasn’t taken major steps to build expert agents capable of solving specialised business problems. This presents an opportunity for enterprise application companies and domain-specialised AI agent startups to gain market share and agent deployment footprint within the enterprise.
Palo Alto Networkers, AI Security Platforms
Palo Alto Networks’ broad security portfolio, acquisition strategy (such as with Protect AI and the pending acquisition of CyberArk), extensive installed base and robust distribution channels make it the Company to Beat in the AI security platforms race.
Competitors can close the gap with AI innovation and AI services’ native controls. Palo Alto Networks has positioned itself as a significant contributor of AI security research by uniquely combining deep in-house expertise with crowdsourced and open-source avenues.
The AI security platform race competitors include vendors that provide a consolidated platform to secure both third-party AI applications and custom-built AI applications, including AI agents. This is a fast-moving race. Over the past year, venture capital investments, security startup pivots, adjacent-market entrants and M&A activities have intensified competition.
Microsoft’s partner and platform ecosystem, control of enterprise work surfaces, ability to capture enterprise data, extensible AI tools and the Microsoft Agent 365 governance platform make it the Company to Beat in Enterprisewide AI. The company’s extensive presence across enterprise applications and infrastructures allows it to more easily integrate AI across clients’ back and front ends.
Competitors with agentic orchestration, sovereign/edge AI, and outcome-based pricing models can catch up.
However, unlike other AI market segment races, enterprisewide AI is relatively less dynamic and more open to market behemoths over startups and smaller players. Competitors should establish strategic partnerships and participate in ecosystems up and down the AI stack, rather than just developing their own AI technology.
OpenAI, LLM Provider
OpenAI is the frontrunner in cutting-edge large language model (LLM) research, building on the momentum established by being first to market in the LLM-enabled AI race and focusing on reasoning and agentic AI development, thereby making it the Company to Beat in LLM providers.
OpenAI LLMs’ impact is enhanced by an unprecedented demand and adoption curve in its flagship consumer-based application, ChatGPT, with API access directly through OpenAI and Microsoft Azure cloud. It also benefits from extension in the enterprise market through embedding its GPT model family in the Microsoft applications suite.
Competitors can catch up by doubling down on enterprise-centric capabilities, wrapping their model offerings. They should focus on innovative research targeting model specialisation in areas like responsible and ethical AI, model-size, modality support and vertical domain to enable enterprises to apply GenAI to use cases with full context and trust.
Establish partnerships with ecosystem anchor vendors (hyperscalers, business process SaaS vendors, data management and application development platforms) interested in optimising their GenAI and agentic stacks to provide the best outcomes and optimal costs for target customers.
If 2025 sent imaginations running wild with AI’s potential, 2026 is the year organisations must take stock, adding the foundational building blocks to make those dreams reality. From infrastructure overhaul to talent nurturing, quantum internet and trust issues – Cisco CTOs look back to look ahead to understand what the next year in tech might look like…
1. An Infrastructure Inflection Point
A quiet but critical conflict hides beneath the glittering promise of the AI revolution: the collision of legacy “technical debt” with emerging “AI infrastructure debt.” In the race to deploy AI, many organisations are stacking quick fixes and scattered data on top of aging infrastructure. The result is a growing liability: smart systems running on foundations that were never built for today’s speed, scale or security demands. The result? Organisations risk stunting innovation and growth.
But this stark warning is also an opportunity. The year ahead will be defined by those who modernise their fundamental network infrastructure, and we may see those the furthest behind, with the most to upgrade, leapfrog their competition. Prioritising a “secure-by-design” overhaul today, will do more than pay off the debts of yesterday. It will build the resilient, AI-ready backbone to power a safer, faster, transformative future.
2. AI Moves to the Edge
Data fuels AI, but we’ve barely started to access what truly exists. With 22.4 billion IoT devices generating more than 90 zettabytes a year, 2026 will see organisations finally tap into the vast well of telemetry, machine, IoT and IIoT data. AI can analyse and combine these streams in ways humans can’t, by training domain-specific models that could reshape industries as dramatically as generative AI did. To enable these models, 2026 will bring a shift toward AI at the Edge – preserving privacy, critical in industrial environments.
Manufacturing, energy and logistics teams already use IIoT data to cut downtime and improve efficiency. This adoption will accelerate in 2026, marking the second phase of AI’s evolution. This shift is powered by advances in specialised AI chips, TinyML, for ultra-efficient on-device inference, while federated learning trains models across distributed edge devices without centralising sensitive data. Embedding security into the infrastructure will be essential to protect these workloads as they scale.
3. Digital Sovereignty in Practice
Digital sovereignty won’t slow innovation. It’ll redefine where and how it happens – shifting from theory to execution in 2026, as tighter data-localisation laws take hold. Nations and blocs will assert control over their infrastructure, data and technology stacks, reshaping the digital landscape. The push for sovereignty will extend to AI, accelerating investment in domestic capacity, sovereign compute and AI factories building models trained on sensitive regional data.
Demand for sovereign cloud solutions will rise, along with greater reliance on regional providers and renewed interest in on-premises or air-gapped data centers. A full overhaul of global infrastructure is unlikely, but selective migrations and diversified cloud strategies will become the norm, creating demand for local talent and skills.
4. Identity as the New Perimeter
Deepfakes, transparency gaps, bias and accountability issues have made trust a prerequisite for AI adoption. Critical systems – physical, digital and everything in between – need protections that scale with distributed workloads and a blended human–digital workforce. One path forward is embedding security and observability directly into the network, creating a safety layer that continuously monitors AI models and agents.
With 82% of EMEA organisations planning to deploy AI agents (Cisco AI Readiness Index 2025), identity management will become a defining trend. And with AI agents shifting roles instantly, traditional identity systems won’t cut it, raising the need for purpose-built identity frameworks to authenticate and trust an AI agent
While identity is integral, trust goes even further. As the line between humans and AI agents blurs, organisations must govern the human–agent pair: who’s in charge, what they can access, how is their behaviour monitored, and what happens when things go wrong?
On any single day, AI can be framed as both a job taker and an economic boom bringer. That binary focus hides a deeper problem: the workforce isn’t ready to realise AI’s potential. Companies race to deploy agents, yet their human systems – hiring, career paths, skills development – remain rooted in a pre-AI era. This isn’t a failure of people; it’s a failure of workforce infrastructure. To fuel innovation, organisations must reskill, retool and redesign the pathways and support systems their teams rely on.
2026 will demand more than basic AI literacy. Companies will need a full-stack curriculum spanning the whole career ladder – covering networking and cybersecurity fundamentals, to data science, vibe coding and advanced AI capabilities. Forward-looking organisations will focus on building skills internally, nurturing talent they already have. The leaders of the next decade will evolve beyond the “tech vs. non-tech” binary, creating hybrid experts who orchestrate intelligence rather than simply generate inputs. Democratising technical depth ensures that augmented employees become architects of the AI era.
6. Quantum in the Real World
Quantum computing is shifting from “can we really do this?” to “what can it unlock?”, with complex problems in medicine and physics among the primary targets. The race to quantum-safe infrastructure will intensify, with organisations investing in post-quantum cryptography and regional quantum innovation hubs.
In 2026, Cisco engineers will continue working on a network built on the unique behaviour of quantum particles, to connect quantum computers and share information securely. This year, Cisco introduced an entanglement-source chip that generates millions of entangled photon pairs per second, enabling quantum communication over existing fibre without specialised infrastructure.
A distributed, scalable quantum network could unlock a vast new computational space and support entire classes of emerging technologies. By the late 2030s, this work may culminate in a quantum internet connecting quantum computers, sensors, and other devices – opening possibilities such as ultra-secure communication and precise monitoring of climate, weather and seismic activity.
A cybersecurity boom appears imminent as businesses invest to defend against a new generation of sophisticated, AI-driven threats.
According to the 2025 KPMG Cybersecurity Survey, a staggering 99% of security leaders plan to increase their cybersecurity budgets over the next two to three years, signalling that cybersecurity is no longer just a priority but a critical business imperative.
The survey, which polled over 300 c-suite and senior security leaders, found that spending is already surging, with 98% confirming budget increases in the last 12 months.
This rush of investment comes as 83% of organizations report a rise in cyberattacks, including everything from phishing and ransomware to more advanced AI-powered social engineering schemes. The findings suggest that the escalating threat landscape is fuelling a market-wide expansion in cybersecurity spending, talent acquisition, and strategic partnerships.
“The data doesn’t just point to steady growth; it signals a potential boom. We’re seeing a major market pivot where cybersecurity is now a fundamental driver of business strategy,” said Michael Isensee, Cybersecurity & Tech Risk Leader, KPMG LLP.
“Leaders are moving beyond reactive defence and are actively investing to build a security posture that can withstand future shocks, especially from AI and other emerging technologies. This isn’t just about spending more; it’s about strategic investment in resilience.”
With 99% of companies planning to increase cyber budgets in the next few years, the vast majority (54%) are planning for significant increases of 6% to 10% as they brace for future threats. Even so, leaders still face hurdles in securing additional funding, with 52% citing competing priorities for budget allocation which include data security and privacy, IAM, and cloud security.
This signals a need for leaders to focus on managing this spend more strategically — turning to AI, unified security platforms, and Managed Services to create efficiencies, reduce overhead, and ensure every additional dollar strengthens their overall defence posture.
The rise of AI is a dual catalyst. While 38% of leaders see AI-powered attacks as a major challenge in the next two to three years, 70% of organizations are already dedicating more than 10% of their budgets to AI-related cyber initiatives.
They also reported that AI will have the greatest impact in proactively identifying and stopping threats with fraud prevention (57%), predictive analytics (56%) and enhanced detection (53%).
The boom is creating fierce competition for skilled professionals. 53% of leaders cite a lack of qualified candidates as a high-impact challenge, forcing them to increase compensation (49%), boost internal training (49%), and rely more on external partners (25%) including MSSPs to fill critical gaps.
Cybersecurity investment is increasingly centred on the controls that protect access and trust across the enterprise. The survey shows that 42% of leaders are making identity and access management a top budget priority over the next two to three years, closely following data security and privacy and cloud security.
This reflects a growing recognition that as organisations scale cloud and AI, stronger identity governance and access controls are critical to protecting sensitive data and systems and to building a more resilient security posture.
The convergence of increased investment, a talent gap, and the urgent need to out-innovate AI-driven threats is opening a new era where increased cybersecurity investments may become critical for survival and growth.
Restoration efforts on a Scottish loch have been boosted by experimental techniques using sea-going robotics that can identify the most suitable reintroduction sites.
Loch Melfort on the Kilchoan Estate, south of Oban, Argyll, has an ongoing oyster restoration project and is a sanctuary for the critically endangered flapper skate.
A collaboration involving scientists and robotics engineers from the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) Enterprise team, Unique Group and the University of Glasgow is currently planning a major survey of the loch, following a successful trial of autonomous surface vehicles.
The aim of the survey is to use the marine robotics to accurately survey the loch in order to build a habitat suitability model, which will inform the most effective site for reintroducing European flat oysters. The model will also indicate where flapper skate are most likely to lay their eggs.
Researchers on the project say a successful habitat suitability model for Loch Melfort, which has a shoreline measuring more than 22 kilometres, could pave the way for similar models to be built for similar habitats elsewhere.
Dr Phil Anderson, who heads up the Scientific Robotics Academy at SAMS Enterprise, said: “Marine and airborne robotic systems can completely transform the way we conduct and monitor restoration projects in Scotland.
“These systems can give us more coverage of an area, more quickly, collecting data that we’ve previously needed humans to record – such activity requires a lot of people over a long period of time.
“Although the potential of robotics is therefore clear to see, there is some hard work to be done in fine-tuning how that will be done. That’s what we are working on now with these Loch Melfort trials and we are fortunate to have a fantastic collaboration that draws on different expertise, covering engineering, physics and biology.”
Researchers will use sensors on board the robotics to measure the velocity, or speed, of the currents and sonar to help map the bathymetry of the loch. The survey is planned for early next year, with the data from the trial currently being examined to help inform the next steps.
Marnik van Cauter, Charity Director at Kilchoan Melfort Trust, said: “It is rewarding to see how our mission to restore the once-abundant native oyster population in Loch Melfort has brought together a network of expert organisations, helping to develop tools that will support marine restoration and conservation projects not only here at Kilchoan, but hopefully across Scotland.”
Unique Group Vice President for Survey Chris Blake said: “Unique Group is proud to support the Kilchoan Melfort Trust, SAMS and the University of Glasgow in advancing marine rewilding efforts at Loch Melfort. By deploying our fully electric Uni-Mini Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) with Ping DSP technology, we delivered high-resolution bathymetry in ultra-shallow and environmentally sensitive areas that are inaccessible to traditional vessels.
“This collaboration provided the detailed seabed insights needed to guide habitat suitability modelling and support the long-term restoration of native European flat oyster populations. We look forward to continuing our partnership on initiatives that enhance sustainability, protect marine ecosystems and drive positive environmental impact.”
Dr Anna McGregor, senior lecturer in Ecology & Environmental Change at University of Glasgow said: “Oysters require a specific set of conditions to grow well, and after supporting Kilchoan Estate’s excellent oyster restoration work for several years to collect data on some of the biological aspects, I’m very excited to be working together with SAMS Enterprise and Unique Group to take that work a step further.
“Having the additional data available from the survey capabilities brought together through this collaboration fills in several key parameters about the physical environment that should enable us to create a much more complete picture about where oysters grow best.”
Long-term optimism for the economic environment has dropped among Scotland employers in the last 12 months to 26%, compared to 31% in 2025.
This is higher than the rest of the UK where only 15% of employers are optimistic, compared to 34% UK-wide in 2025.
The research, from Hays recent Salary & Recruiting Trends guide for 2026, reports cautious optimism in the short-term as employers continue to hire, but pessimism in the long-term as employers respond to cost pressures, revisions to workforce strategy and the uncertain economic outlook.
Current priorities for organisations are operational efficiency (73%), revenue growth (62%) and customer experience (42%), with recruiting the right talent at 53% being the top recruitment challenge. Regardless of short and long-term challenges, Keith Mason, director at Hays Scotland, believes that employers are still not majoring enough on the employee proposition when attracting talent.
“There’s been quite a culture shift since the pandemic, and employers need to focus much more on their employee value proposition than they did before to differentiate their organisation,” he says.
“Yes, salary is important, especially as the cost of living is rising. But professionals are looking more closely at what they need from a role. Our research found that 57% of professionals in Scotland are planning to move jobs next year – this is a striking figure that signals a period of significant workforce mobility. This level of intent suggests that employees are increasingly reassessing their career paths, driven by factors such as better pay, improved work-life balance, and opportunities for growth.”
The research also shows that 74% of employers in Scotland are planning to hire in the next 12 months which is the same as in 2025. 70% plan to hire permanent staff, with 27% planning to hire contract, freelance, interim or temporary workers. And as the debate continues on the benefits or otherwise of hybrid working, Mason believes that this issue needs to be managed carefully.
“This discussion has to be based on productivity – not time,” he said. “The research shows that profit growth is a key priority for organisations, but this only comes with efficiency and productivity which shouldn’t be based on the time someone spends in an office or working from home. And an effective workplace culture can’t thrive if too many people are absent. Hybrid working therefore needs to be managed with care, striking a balance between organisational priorities and employee expectations.”
Skills shortages within current teams are also a challenge according to 51% of respondents, highlighting a need for employers to identify future managers and leaders.
“It’s important to remember that the notions of ‘talent’ and ‘skills’ are very different. You can teach people skills, but you can’t teach talent as this is a natural attribute in a person. Be mindful of hiring for potential, for example, identify today the people who will be able to lead tomorrow. Only 16% of employers said that applicants need a university degree – it’s the talent to go further that often matters more.”
Other expected challenges for employers in Scotland are the rising costs for businesses (48%), managing risk and cyber security (32%), keeping up with technology innovation (27%) and keeping up with, and implementing, new legislation (15%).
Sixty-five percent of employees said they are excited about using AI at work, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
While C-suite executives often attribute AI’s lack of added business value to workforce resistance to adopting AI tools, that isn’t the case.
According to a Gartner survey of 2,986 employees in July 2025, 37% of employees do not use AI even though they can because their co-workers are not using it.
Gartner research indicates that the root issue is often executive urgency leading to rushed implementations of AI with insufficient consideration of workforce implications.
“Often AI deployment decisions are being made without any involvement of HR,” said Eser Rizagolu, Senior Director, Analyst Gartner HR Practice. “This leads to poor adoption, misaligned expectations between employees and executives, and ultimately, organisations not realising significant business value from AI.”
To gain the desired value from AI investments, Gartner recommends CHROs take three actions to reimagine their organisation’s AI deployment strategy:
Reframe AI governance to focus not only on compliance and information security, but also on planning for impacts on the employee experience.
Identify digitally curious and collaborative employees to pilot AI tools with and target for AI learning.
Segment employees by their attitudes and behaviours toward AI to craft personalised learning journeys that create a culture with AI-forward work behaviours.
Co-Lead AI Governance to Secure Employee Trust and Stress-Test the Environment
As a result of HR being left out of AI strategy discussions, CHROs have to reactively manage the impacts of AI deployment. To avoid negative impacts of AI on the employee experience, CHROs need to collaborate with digital workplace, security, legal, and business units within enterprise-wide AI governance teams.
“To convince the C-suite of HR’s critical role in AI governance, CHROs should position AI as a workforce issue and communicate HR’s ability to detect risks while serving as a partner that ensures AI tools drive productivity, engagement, and retention,” said Rizagolu.
Prove AI Augmentation Value by Targeting Collaborative Work
While the governance team is stress-testing AI solutions, CHROs should be coordinating with HR business partners (HRBPs) and business leaders to identify which employees should be drafted to pilot AI solutions in the proof of value (POV) stage. The best options for the POV stage are the employees that not only collaborate easily with peers but are digitally curious.CHROs can identify employees who fall within four worker archetypes that can get the most benefit from AI:
Consumer: Ingests a large amount of data and information and needs to distill it to gain insights for informed decision making.
Communicator: Takes information and crafts messaging through offers, news, actions and other communications.
Coordinator: Organises and prioritises information from multiple sources to improve workflows.
Creator: Transforms data and information from one format to another.
Once CHROs have created one or more cohorts of employees with a mix of these four archetypes, they must enable them to collaborate, using AI to improve individual and team-based objectives.
Assess and Classify Employee Adoption Personas to Scale AI Impact
After AI use cases have been properly stress-tested and meet the requirements of the governance team and organisational value needs, they are ready to be scaled across the organisation. The CHRO should then survey POV employees and analyse AI usage data. This feedback can be used to assess if the quality and timeliness of deliverables are improved, compared to those without AI.
“To achieve high employee adoption and effective use of AI solutions, CHROs and their teams should segment employees by adoption attitudes and behaviors using surveys and usage data,” said Rizagolu.
Nearly one in four (24%) British employees under 35 would act on a suspicious message if they believed it came from a colleague or senior leader, highlighting a growing workplace risk as cyber-criminals use AI and deepfakes to impersonate trusted contacts, new Accenture research finds.
A survey of over 1,000 British employees found that 15% would share company data or make payments via messaging apps, without verifying the sender, if the message seemed to come from a leader or colleague. This rose to 24% of under-35s, suggesting that Millennial and Gen Z employees who use consumer messaging apps, like WhatsApp, to contact colleagues could be vulnerable to scams.
This vulnerability persists despite widespread cyber confidence: four in five employees (81%) believe they could spot a phishing attempt or AI-driven cyber-attack at work. Men were nearly twice as likely as women to say they were very confident in doing so (22% vs 12%). While cyber confidence is high, it did not translate into greater caution or change in workplace behaviour.
These findings will likely stoke organisational concerns: Accenture’s latest State of Cyber Resilience report found 56% of UK businesses are already worried about cyber threats driven by the accessibility of AI, and 23% rank deepfakes among their top concerns.
Despite concerns, a major preparedness gap remains. More than a third of UK workers (37%) have never received cybersecurity training, including 44% of over-55s.
Only one in five employees (20%) have been trained to recognise deepfakes or AI-generated phishing emails. The shortfall in training is more significant in smaller companies, where 79% of microbusinesses (less than 10 employees) and 55% of small firms (10-49 employees) offer no cybersecurity training at all.
These findings could prompt growing concerns about AI-powered cyber risks among smaller vendors in the supply chain.
“Recent cyber-attacks prove no organisation is untouchable, and these results show a growing threat from AI-driven social engineering where attackers target trust instead of technical flaws,” Kamran Ikram, Accenture’s Security lead in the UK & Ireland, said.
“With cyber-criminals weaponising information from social media to deceive people with realistic messages or calls, employees must make faster judgement calls on what’s real and what’s not. The workforce feels cyber confident – though its uneven among men and women – there remains a serious skills and training gap across the board.
“Being overconfident yet undertrained is a dangerous position to be in. Organisations must look to be resilient in every area of their operations and supply chain, which means ongoing education on cyber threats. Businesses can’t rely on patchy preparedness when attackers are advancing by the day.”
As companies introduce more AI at work, guidance on using it responsibly is not keeping pace. Half of employees in companies that provide cyber training (50%) have received no guidance on using AI safely – such as what data should not be shared with public tools or how to identify AI-enabled attacks.
This lack of training is reflected in employees’ awareness of attacks: one in five (17%) have no awareness of AI-driven cyber threats. Deepfake videos (61%) and AI-generated phishing emails (61%) are the best-known threats, followed by voice cloning (47%) and identity theft (45%).
Despite the risks, employees have a sense of collective responsibility. While a quarter (25%) of British employees believe that the IT/security department is most responsible for protecting a company against cyber threats, more than half (53%) accept that it is a joint responsibility across the organisation.
Ikram added, “AI is bringing immense opportunity to business, but it also is changing the risk landscape as criminals increasingly incorporate AI into their arsenal.
“Today, awareness of AI-enabled attacks is still uneven, and that gap is where the next wave of breaches will likely happen. But more than that – building a cyber-savvy workforce isn’t just about protecting your systems, it’s also what allows innovation and trust to scale together.”
A raft of new partnerships launched across Scotland’s academic ecosystem means that ‘collaborative innovation is the true winner’, according to an NHS Scotland partner.
Last week, it was announced that the University of Glasgow would be partnering with Glasgow Caledonian University to “enhance the two institutions’ capacity for entrepreneurship, innovation, and commercialisation” through what is being called the ‘Innovation Exchange’.
Earlier this month too, a consortium of seven institutions jointly launched the Shared Academic Knowledge Exchange Services (ShaKEs) initiative, bringing together Queen Margaret University (QMU), Abertay University, the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), Robert Gordon University, The Glasgow School of Art, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and Edinburgh College.
Their aim is to “strengthen commercialisation and innovation across Scotland’s modern and smaller universities and the college sector”.
Scotland’s National Innovation Week in September further saw the announcement of a new partnership between three Edinburgh further education institutions with their collective goal being “to support innovation and entrepreneurship”.
Edinburgh Napier University, Queen Margaret University, and Edinburgh College, said they expect the link-up in the capital will be “contributing to Scotland’s economic development, while benefitting our students, communities and industry partners”.
Formal NHS Scotland partner InnoScot Health believes the new partnerships are encouraging steps towards an ever more aligned triple helix of NHS, industry, and academia.
The organisation’s Innovation Commercialisation Manager, Fiona Schaefer said: “We have spoken for some time about the need for key institutions and enterprises to strengthen connections across Scotland for the benefit of all, and we’re now seeing that increasingly happening in academia.
“These are vital relationships that can help to underpin a healthier, more prosperous, and sustainable country. Collaborative support and the pooling of knowledge are essential to achieving that goal, so the forging of closer networks is a pleasing development.
“Scotland’s urgent need for more collaborative innovation is set to be the true winner here.”
The Innovation Exchange is a five-year pilot partnership between Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian Universities, supported by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC).
Central to the Exchange is the development of a robust pipeline of social and commercial enterprises with a shared commitment to progressive thinking.
The unifying of seven institutions as a result of the ShaKEs initiative will meanwhile allow the sharing of “specialist expertise and professional services to unlock new pathways for research impact, skills development, and economic growth”.
It aims to translate research into real-world impact for health and social care, amongst other sectors, by honing expertise in areas such as intellectual property that are required to commercialise projects.
Echoing those goals, the new partnership between Edinburgh Napier University, Queen Margaret University, and Edinburgh College, will support innovation and entrepreneurship in line with nationwide plans to boost Scotland’s economic development.
The agreement will enhance work towards ambitions laid out in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland Regional Innovation Action Plan and the Scottish Government’s National Innovation Strategy by strengthening entrepreneurial skills and networks.
InnoScot Health previously linked up with Edinburgh Napier University and Heriot-Watt University on an initiative – labelled a “first of its kind research collaboration” – which saw engineering and nursing students pooling capabilities and know-how to hone breakthrough healthcare ideas.
It is also a partner with Heriot-Watt University and University of Dundee in the Tay Health Tech collaborative programme which aims to break down barriers to healthcare and health inequalities through the development of technological solutions.
Fiona added: “It will be exciting to witness the acceleration of cutting-edge research and innovation which results from these many exciting new academic partnerships, no doubt positively impacting triple helix ambitions. We wish them well in those endeavours.”
The UK’s financial regulator is urging mortgage brokers to use AI and other transformative technologies to help them give better advice to those seeking financial advice.
This is part of the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) plans to reform the mortgage market for first time buyers, the self employed, and current homeowners.
Innovation and disclosure will be one of the FCA’s four key focus areas. The FCA will encourage the use of data and technology such as AI, to help brokers give enhanced advice while keeping a human touch.
The FCA will also seek ways to make advertising and disclosure rules simpler, so consumers can understand information online more easily.
As well as promoting technological advances, the FCA will prioritise simplifying mortgage rules to allow more flexible products that reflect different working patterns and income levels at different stages in life.
It will also focus on later-life lending by reviewing retirement interest-only requirements to make them more accessible. This involves exploring ways to improve advice to help people confidently plan for later life, conducting a focused market study to ensure the lifetime mortgage market can meet the changing needs of future customers.
The FCA will also seek to protect vulnerable consumers, working with partners to support people affected by financial abuse and help those using a mortgage to manage or consolidate debt.
“We have worked at pace this year to improve outcomes for customers wanting a mortgage. We’ll use insight from consumers and industry to drive further reforms and rebalance risk – helping to widen access to affordable mortgages to meet the needs of consumers today,” David Geale, executive director for payments and digital finance, said.
“Reforming the mortgage market can help address the fact that as a society we’re saving too little for later life, yet people have huge wealth tied up in property.”
The FCA will start to consult the public on proposed rule changes in the four areas from early 2026 and aim to have the first rule changes in place later that year.
The Internet plays a central role in both our personal and professional lives, and this year marked a notable shift in how much society depends on it – driven by significant growth and major technological changes.
Cloudflare‘s sixth annual Year in Review highlights the continually transformative nature of the Internet, providing a comprehensive view of how the Internet behaved in 2025.
The report – accompanied by a spotlight on the most popular Internet services – highlights the most significant Internet trends, traffic patterns, and security insights from the past year.
Global Internet traffic ballooned by 19% year-over-year, and we saw substantial changes and advanced capabilities introduced to AI.
At the same time, there were major milestones in security: post-quantum encryption now secures 52% of all human traffic to ensure Internet users are protected from future threats.
However, this growth also brought challenges, with a dramatic escalation in cyber warfare leading to more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks.
“The Internet isn’t just changing, it’s being fundamentally rewired. From AI, to more creative and sophisticated threat actors, everyday is different. While we celebrated several Internet milestones this year, we also blocked attacks that redefined what ‘scale’ means, and witnessed the traditional business model of online content creation face stark challenges,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder at Cloudflare.
“With a huge percentage of the Internet running through Cloudflare’s network every second of every day, we believe we have a unique responsibility to help navigate these changes and build a better Internet for everyone.”
The report found that Google and Meta have locked in their positions as the two most popular Internet services globally for the fourth consecutive year, while ChatGPT held onto the number one spot in the booming generative AI category.
Google’s crawling bot dwarfed activity from all other leading AI bots, making it the single biggest source of automated Internet traffic.
For the first time, civil society and non-profit organisations became the most attacked sector, likely due to the sensitive nature and potential financial value of their user data.
Nearly half of all major Internet disruptions observed globally were triggered by government actions, even as outages caused by cable cuts dropped nearly 50% of those linked to power failures doubled.
European countries dominated global connectivity metrics, achieving the highest average download speeds, with Spain securing the top spot worldwide for overall Internet quality.
The United Kingdom has solidified its position as a global leader in artificial intelligence research, ranking as the world’s third-largest producer of AI academic output.
A new study by Studocu which analysed AI publications from the top 500 computer science universities worldwide (2020–2024), highlights the UK’s significant contribution, with Scotland emerging as a key research hub within the nation.
The study analysed the top 500 computer science institutions worldwide, cross-referencing them with the Semantic Scholar database to assess AI research output from 2020–2024. It evaluated the volume of peer-reviewed AI papers and their citation impact to reveal the leading institutions.
Global AI Academic Output
The United States leads in total output with over 232,000 AI-related publications, followed by China (217,000) and the United Kingdom (109,000).
With 53 universities in the global top 500, the UK provides more leading AI research institutions than any country except the U.S., underscoring the depth of its academic capability.
The analysis highlights Scotland’s role within the UK’s success. Five Scottish universities rank within the UK’s top 30.
The University of Edinburgh leads nationally, placing 4th in the UK and 29th globally.
It is joined in the UK top 10 by the University of Glasgow (8th in the UK). The University of Aberdeen (15th), University of Strathclyde (20th), and Edinburgh Napier University (27th) further demonstrate the region’s concentrated research strength.
Top UK Universities for AI Research
The table below shows the UK’s top 10 universities, based on a weighted score factoring in computer science rankings, citation impact, total AI publications, and per-student output.
UK Rank
Global Rank
University
# of AI Publications
# of Citations
Overall Score (out of 100)
1
5
University of Oxford
198
6274
81.11
2
7
University of Cambridge
211
4218
79.34
3
17
Imperial College London
231
2434
74.50
4
29
University of Edinburgh
83
2289
69.23
5
30
University College London
7,789
2164
69.23
6
68
King’s College London
247
7789
59.54
7
70
University of Manchester
91
2150
59.39
8
106
University of Glasgow
78
6687
53.65
9
113
University of Warwick
79
1878
52.50
10
121
Newcastle University
10,756
1137
52.12
For students and professionals aiming to launch a career in AI, the findings provide a useful guide on where to study.
Universities like Edinburgh and Glasgow, both ranked in the UK’s top 10 for AI, provide not only cutting-edge technical curricula but also direct exposure to influential research environments, high-impact publications, and industry networks.
Specialised degrees in machine learning, data science, and AI ethics offered at these top-tier schools can equip graduates with the advanced skills and credibility needed to compete for roles in academia, tech innovation, and applied AI sectors.
As Dr Clare Walsh, Director of Education at the Institute of Analytics explains: “There are many different roles in AI but it is not easy to break into higher salary AI jobs without suitable training.
“While there are a number of ‘tools’ on CVs which can help you get ahead, the soft skills are not optional.
“In general, we recommend anyone working with AI to have minimal ethics training and an understanding of the different technologies. In fact, some of the biggest AI research centres have a PhD as a minimum job entry requirement.”
Ofcom has launched investigations into BT and Three following outages in the summer that resulted in UK-wide disruption to mobile call services, including to emergency services.
Mobile operators are required to take appropriate and proportionate measures to identify and reduce the risks and prepare for the occurrence of anything that compromises the availability, performance or functionality of their network or service.
Providers must also take appropriate and proportionate measures to prevent adverse effects arising from any such compromises. Where there is an adverse effect on the network or service, the provider must take appropriate and proportionate measures to remedy or mitigate that effect.
Companies are legally obliged to report outages to Ofcom above certain thresholds.
BT has notified Ofcom of a software issue that resulted in a UK-wide disruption to mobile call services interconnecting to and from the EE network on 24 and 25 July 2025. This resulted in BT and EE customers being unable to make or receive mobile calls to other networks and emergency services.
Separately, Three has notified Ofcom of an incident that resulted in a UK-wide disruption to call services on 25 June 2025, including customers’ ability to contact emergency services.
Ofcom’s investigations will seek to establish the facts surrounding these incidents and assess whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that BT and Three have failed to comply with their regulatory obligations.
Digital Xtra, the Scottish charity which inspires young people to become actively involved in tech, has awarded grants totalling nearly £120,000 to schools and community organisations across 17 local authorities as part of its tenth funding cycle.
The 27 grant recipients were selected from 103 applications after an in-depth evaluation process, with successful applicants demonstrating innovative and stimulating ways of engaging young people in computing and digital technologies.
Among the regions to receive multiple grants are Aberdeenshire with five supported initiatives, Dundee, Stirling and West Lothian each with four projects, while Clackmannanshire, Fife, Glasgow, and North Ayrshire were each successful with two grants apiece.
More than 2,000 young people across the country are projected to engage in a variety of meaningful and exciting tech activities throughout the current academic year as a result of the funding, which is aimed at closing the digital skills gap and producing Scotland’s next generation of digital innovators, leaders, and technologists.
Qualifying activities must teach young people skills such as coding, robotics, games design, data science and cyber security
The grants ranged from £1,930 to £5,000, with the criteria being the projects must be extracurricular, delivered in Scotland, focus on young people aged 16 and under, and be sustainable beyond the funding period.
Applicants had to clearly explain how participants will learn about, and innovate with, technology – not simply use it – as well as what digital and meta-skills they will gain.
Among the recipients are St Thomas Aquinas RC Secondary School in Glasgow which will create an all-girls code club, The STEMinists, to help increase uptake of computing science amongst female students and remove the stigma that it is boring or a ‘male subject.’
Participants will learn to code using platforms and devices like Sphero BOLT+, Scratch, and the BBC micro:bit V2. Learners will also develop skills such as logical and algorithmic thinking, testing and debugging, as well as teamwork and communication.
James Gillespie’s High School in Edinburgh was successful with its VEX Robotics Competition, which will see pupils design, build, and programme a robot, using block coding or python, to compete against other schools from across Scotland in a global competition designed by VEX Robotics based on the VEX V5 robotics platform.
The school will also engage with P6 and P7 pupils from its feeder primary schools creating an opportunity for them to learn about robotics before even starting high school.
The latest round of awards takes the total value of grants handed out since 2016 to £1,189,000, helping 210 extracurricular computing initiatives to engage nearly 60,000 young people across the country.
The fund is supported by a range of partners including Baillie Gifford, Skyscanner, Adobe, Cirrus Logic, CGI, as well as the Scottish Government.
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes said: “I am proud that the Scottish Government continues to support Digital Xtra in its mission to inspire and equip Scotland’s young people with the digital skills they need to thrive in the modern world.
“By backing innovative, inclusive extracurricular initiatives, we are helping to close the digital skills gap and ensure that every young person has the opportunity to explore and succeed.
“As technology continues to transform every sector, it is vital that our young people are not only users of technology, but creators and innovators. This is an investment in our people and our future economy.”
Kraig Brown, Digital Xtra’s Partnerships and Development Manager said: “As we begin our tenth grants cycle, we are extremely proud of what we have achieved and look forward to working with this year’s supported initiatives to build on these results.
“Since our establishment, there have been several skills plans and strategies put forth to help create opportunities for young people to learn critical digital skills. However, the ever-increasing need for these skills across multiple sectors means demand still unfortunately significantly outweighs supply.
“This ongoing skills deficit means engaging and upskilling young people through both formal and informal learning channels is more crucial than ever. As such, Digital Xtra will continue to advocate for digital skills for young people and drive growth of meaningful grassroots computing activities in communities across Scotland.”
In a first for the Scotch whisky industry, a new trial is exploring whether advanced robotics could help identify small but potentially expensive ethanol leaks in warehouses.
The National Manufacturing Institute Scotland (NMIS) is validating its own robotic sensing kit, developed at its Digital Process Manufacturing Centre (DPMC) in Irvine, on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot at the Bacardi-owned John Dewar & Sons maturation site near Glasgow. The initiative is also supported by the Scotch Whisky Research Institute (SWRI).
The system uses a sensor, held by a 3D-printed arm created by NMIS engineers, to detect ethanol vapour levels as the robot follows a defined path through the warehouse. As part of the collaboration, Bacardi helped design the experiment and led baseline testing ahead of the trial.
The early-stage trial explores how autonomous inspection could be applied across multiple industries – from whisky to chemicals and energy.
While the focus here is on whisky casks, the same sensing approach could also help improve efficiency on other routine inspection tasks in different manufacturing environments.
Ethanol evaporation is a natural part of the whisky maturation process, which happens as the liquid sits in the barrel to age for a minimum of three years before it legally becomes Scotch whisky.
This loss is known as the “angel’s share” and requires careful monitoring to ensure as much liquid as possible is kept in the barrel, as well as ensuring safety.
Traditional inspection involves significant manual handling and reliance on visual cues, which is time consuming and prone to inconsistency.
Robotics could offer a repeatable, data-driven alternative – though NMIS is clear this is an early-stage proof of concept rather than a live operational system.
The next step could see the similar sensor technology trialled in a different type of robot, this time embedded directly into the machine rather than mounted on an arm to deliver greater reliability and improved functionality.
Family-owned spirits company Bacardi has operated five distilleries across Scotland – Aultmore, Aberfeldy, Royal Brackla, Craigellachie, and Macduff – for more than 25 years, nurturing and respecting the heritage of each, while continuously innovating and embracing the latest technology to reduce environmental impact and increase efficiency and quality.
Most recently, the company added three new state-of-the-art aging warehouses at its 200-acre blending and maturation centre, Poniel in southeast Glasgow where these trials have taken place.
Angus Holmes, Whisky Category Director at Bacardi said: “Craftmanship and heritage remains at the heart of our production of DEWAR’S® Blended Scotch whisky and our portfolio of single malts, but there is also great potential for innovation and technology to support the industry to become more efficient and data-driven.
“We’re proud to be playing our part to pioneer this new technology in the whisky industry and look forward to progressing from these trials to developing a live system that can be used at our sites in the future. The team loved having the robot dog around so much we gave him his own Bacardi name – ‘Royal Bark-la’ in homage to our ROYAL BRACKLA® Single Malt.”
Andrew Hamilton Head of the Digital Process Manufacturing Centre (DPMC) added: “Our aim here is to validate our own sensing kit and see whether robots can take on this type of inspection work. The early results are promising, and it shows how manufacturing technologies being developed in Scotland are relevant across many sectors including the whisky industry. It’s been fantastic to work with Bacardi on this – a great example of a company embracing and contributing to innovative new approaches for the industry.”
Officially opened earlier in 2025, the DPMC, based in North Ayrshire, supports the process manufacturing industries with next-generation technologies, funded in part through the £251 million Ayrshire Growth Deal. Delivered by NMIS, which is operated by the University of Strathclyde and part of the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult, the DPMC is a partnership between NMIS, North Ayrshire Council, and CPI, working together to drive innovation and growth across Scotland’s process manufacturing sector
Electric vehicle salary sacrifice firm Loveelectric has been acquired by Perkbox for an undisclosed sum.
The deal will allow Perkbox to expand its benefits offerings with Loveelectric’s EV salary sacrifice and charging solutions, opening the service to thousands of organisations and employees already using Perkbox’s app.
Since Loveelectric’s launch in 2021, the Scottish firm has grown quickly, supporting 125,000 employees and 1,500 employers. The firm also recently acquired Bypass, a startup, in order to cut the cost of public charging.
Perkbox offers benefits, employee wellbeing, and engagement in a single app for employees and employers alike, with over four million employees using the service.
The acquisition of Loveelectric is an important step for Perkbox after the launch of its new unified employee experience platform in September of this year.
“I’ve long admired Perkbox, and I am thrilled that Loveelectric will now join a company whose mission and purpose align so closely with our own,” Steve Tigar, founder and CEO of Loveelectric, said.
“I’m incredibly proud of what the Loveelectric team has achieved including being named Scottish Fintech of the Year, and Scotland’s Fastest Growing Business in 2025.
“With access to over four million employees across the UK, Perkbox is the perfect partner for our next phase of growth.
“With Perkbox we can dramatically accelerate the adoption of electric cars by helping businesses offer a benefit that is both financially compelling and environmentally meaningful.”
Doug Butler, CEO of Perkbox said: “I am thrilled to the welcome Loveelectric to Perkbox and equally excited to add its impactful offerings to our unified platform.
“Steve and team have grown Loveelectric into a formidable business providing meaningful benefits to employees and the environment, and I know that their innovative and passionate culture will greatly contribute to Perkbox’s own mission to ensure that every employee is valued.”
A new survey shows that nearly two-thirds (63%) of Scottish companies believe AI will significantly reshape their sector within the next five years. Despite that, only two-in-five (40%) have formal policies in place to control how AI is used.
Most Scottish business leaders (56%) believe AI will improve efficiency and reduce costs in their business, but two-in-five (43%) agree it will lead to job losses in their sector. More than half see AI creating new opportunities for growth in their own business (54%) and a similar proportion (55%) believe their business is prepared to adapt to those changes.
The eleventh edition of the Understanding Business survey, designed and conducted by Diffley Partnership and Charlotte Street Partners, asked more than 500 senior decision-makers at Scottish firms about the prospects for their own organisation and the wider economy.
Its findings reveal that AI is most commonly deployed by companies to analyse data, with three-in-five firms (61%) using it for this purpose – whether that be some, most or all of the time. The other most popular uses are producing marketing content (58%), advertising content (54%) and writing new business proposals (53%).
Around half (47%) of respondents use AI to produce at least some of their internal communications and, of those who use AI for that purpose, one-in-10 report that communications to employees are generated entirely by AI.
David Gaffney, senior partner at Charlotte Street Partners, said: “It’s striking that while a majority of executives agree AI will transform their sector in the near-term, most firms don’t yet have policies in place to inform how the technology is used in their own workplace.
“This reflects the broad range of experiences we hear anecdotally from people leading businesses of various shapes and sizes across multiple sectors. Some are ahead of the pack, adopting – and adapting – quickly and accepting they’ll make mistakes as they find their way.
“Others are moving much more cautiously, which means progress is slower but feels safer. And a sizeable constituency are caught like rabbits in the headlights, uncertain which way to turn.
“Most surprising to me is that half of all firms are using AI to help them communicate with their own workforce and that one-in-10 of those companies admit that internal comms are generated entirely by AI.
“I’m curious to know if the employees receiving those messages notice any lack of a human touch – and whether it represents a change for the better or worse on previous missives.”
The latest survey covered the topic of business continuity too, revealing that one-in-five (18%) companies have no business resilience plans in place to inform their response to the most common operational risks. The most common business continuity plans are reported to be those covering cybersecurity, with more than half of firms owning one and 85% of those saying the plan is well known among staff.
This wave of the survey asked business leaders where they get their news, with four-in-10 looking to social media for Scotland-specific business news each day, outstripping all other information channels. Around half (46%) say they would be willing to pay for high-quality journalism focused on Scottish business, but less than one-third (29%) currently subscribe to paid-for news sources.
When looking at the perspective of business leaders on the state of the economy, this wave finds an increase in pessimism with regards to general economic conditions. More than half (51%) of businesses that express an opinion now believe the economy is worse than it was a year ago, up six percentage points from September. Similarly, nearly half (45%) believe that the economy will be worse in a year, also up six percentage points from September.
Perceptions of government support have also weakened slightly. While more respondents continue to see the Scottish Government as concerned with the needs of Scottish businesses (51% agree) compared to the UK Government (35% agree), this wave saw a deterioration in both, with agreement falling by three percentage points for the Scottish Government and four percentage points for the UK Government.
When it comes to the proportion of businesses agreeing that each government is taking action to address business concerns, four-in-10 (40%) agree that the Scottish Government is taking such action, compared to just over a quarter (28%) who say the same about the UK Government. However, significant drops were seen in the proportion agreeing that each government is taking action, with a decline of six percentage points for the Scottish Government and seven percentage points for the UK Government on this measure since September.
Scott Edgar, Senior Research Manager at Diffley Partnership said: “This wave of the survey paints a picture of growing uncertainty for Scottish businesses following the recent budget. Confidence in the economy has weakened and perceptions of government support have slipped, with fewer leaders believing either the Scottish or UK Government are taking action to address business concerns.
“Against that uncertainty, firms see AI as a major source of opportunity and change, even though many are only beginning to put policies and plans in place to manage its impact and harness its potential.”
Cloud computing titan Oracle has seen its shares plummet over 10% in after-hours trading following the firm’s revenues coming short of analyst predictions.
Oracle’s revenue was reported as $16.1bn for the three months before November, while Wall Street predicted the company would achieve $16.2bn in the same time span.
Despite falling short of expectations, the firm saw overall revenue growth of 14%, with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, its AI service, seeing sales rocket 68% in the period.
Oracle saw its shares peak three months ago, but has since experienced a 40% decrease in value.
The firm signed a contract with OpenAI, which bought $300bn in computing power from the cloud provider over the next five years.
The company’s AI infrastructure is highly sought after as firms look to expand their AI capabilities, requiring vast amounts of compute power and data to enable the advancing tech.
“There are going to be a lot of changes in AI technology over the next few years and we must remain agile in response to those changes,” Oracle CTO and chairman Larry Ellison said in a statement following the share loss.
Oracle’s drop in share price spells worry for the entire AI ecosystem, which has experienced a ‘bubble’ in shares and ‘circular financing’ between top players.
Oracle supplies cloud infrastructure, firms like Nvidia provide AI-enabled chips, and firms like OpenAI provide the foundational models – with other players in the mix, AI infrastructure firms are building a web of megadeals and rising shares. But shareholders are increasingly worried this bubble will pop.
Oracle’s plunge affected wider tech stocks, with the Nasdaq 100 down 1%, and S&P 500 down by 0.78% on the New York Stock Exchange.
While Oracle performed well overall with a rise in revenue, and the decrease in stock may be down to great expectations, investors remain concerned about the firm racking up debt as it focuses on building more data centres to fuel the AI boom. The firm’s capital expenditure for the 2026 financial year is projected to be 40% higher than previously anticipated, rising fears among investors.
As Oracle focuses its spend on supplying data centres for its AI clients, shareholders are concerned that the firm’s emphasis on the deal may leave it exposed to shortfalls on returns as other cloud players, like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, make their own deals.
Another aspect affecting the overall AI market is Oracle’s announcement of chip neutrality: Ellison said that while the firm will still rely on Nvidia’s AI-enabled GPUs, the firm must “be prepared and able to deploy whatever chips our customers want to buy.”
While Nvidia has largely cornered the AI chip market, making itself the most valuable company in the world, the firm saw its stock down by 1.58% in pre-market trading.
Chief financial officers (CFOs) are grappling with a tension between short-term cost-cutting imperatives and long-term growth investments for their 2026 top priorities and challenges, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc.
“CFOs are navigating a complex, volatile environment where they need to keep tight control over costs and be more agile with financial forecasting,” said Dennis Gannon, Vice President Analyst in the Gartner Finance practice.
“Financially conservative themes focused on improving financial strength and downside risk mitigation are the most common among top 5 priorities for CFOs heading into 2026.”
The survey of more than 200 CFOs, taken during August 2025, showed that 56% of CFOs rank achieving enterprise-wide cost optimisation targets in their top five, while 51% of respondents rank improving financial forecast accuracy and quality in their top five.
Nearly half (47%) rank allocating capital to new growth opportunities, in their top five, while the same amount also rank improving efficiency of finance processes in the top five.
Optimising working capital was ranked in the top five by 46%, while 42% ranked improving usability of data in their top five.
Accelerating AI use (39%), improved board communication (38%), and improving scenario planning (37%) were also concerns ranked in the top five by some CFOs.
Others ranked driving AI impact (33%), modernising ERP (28%), mitigating the effect of supply chain disruptions (19%), and hiring and retaining digital finance workers (18%) in their top five.
“The strain between the competing priorities of cost and growth is clear in the results: a major subset of CFOs report that allocating capital to new growth opportunities is at the top of their priority list,” said Gannon.
“Although being cited as a top five priority by less than half of all CFOs, capital allocation for growth had more CFOs ranking it as their number one priority than any other item, showing a bifurcation between some CFOs hyper focused on growth and a majority acting conservatively.”
Gartner research has shown the emphasis on cost optimisation presents some notable risks for CFOs. Investors often view cost reductions sceptically, recognising that unsustainable cuts can negatively impact stock prices.
CFOs who achieve lasting cost optimisation set their organisations apart by cultivating a cost-conscious culture that prioritises transparency, ownership, and financial acumen among decision makers.
These leaders tend to take a strategic approach, directing more resources toward areas that differentiate the business, while reducing spending in areas that competitors can easily replicate.
The report also revealed growing concerns about AI, and finance digital transformation and talent. Only 36% of CFOs express confidence in their ability to drive enterprise AI impact, despite increasing investments in AI across corporate functions. This presents a significant risk to future financial performance. Similarly, just 44% of CFOs feel confident about accelerating the use of AI in finance, and only 42% are confident in their ability to hire and retain digital talent for finance roles.
“The low confidence in driving value from AI and digitalising finance talent is a wake-up call,” said Gannon. “CFOs must adopt a dual-path approach—leveraging embedded AI in vendor software for immediate gains while building the culture, governance, and skills needed for long-term success.”
Gartner analysts advise that CFOs should not focus their transformation plans on process and technology while expecting digitally skilled finance employees to materialise in the interim. Instead, they must create clear targets and a plan of action for finance to reach desired digital talent levels by connecting talent targets to their transformation objectives.
Since Ofcom introduced mandatory age verification for adult sites this summer under the Online Safety Act, UK-based traffic to porn websites has plummeted.
This is according to the media and communications regulator’s annual national review of online trends, which revealed that traffic to some of the most popular porn sites dropped sharply when mandatory age checks came into effect on 25 July.
These age checks required a number of different measures to ensure under-18s could not access the websites, from checking IDs to providing credit card information.
The most visited adult content website in the UK, Pornhub, saw a 1.5 million drop year-on-year in August, with 9.8 million viewers compared to August 2024’s 11.3 million.
According to Ofcom, the first month alone saw Pornhub’s visits drop by 31%, with xHamaster, another site, dropping by 28% and xvideos falling by 24% between July and August.
Seemingly in tandem, Ofcom noted the rise of VPN (virtual private network) usage after the age check requirements came into place. UK daily use of VPNs just about doubled from 65,000 users in July, reaching over 1.4 million by the middle of August this year. Usage steadily declined, however, reaching 900,000 in November.
VPNs allow users to access sites as if they are in a different geographic location, which can allow them to log into regionally-restricted accounts or access sites that would otherwise be blocked in their country. The use of a VPN would allow users to bypass the age verification requirements needed in the UK if they used a VPN routed in a different country without such mandates.
While Ofcom’s annual review of internet usage does not delineate VPN usage by age, critics of the Online Safety Act’s age check mandates have said that children would be easily able to sidestep the new mandate by using a VPN.
Research from Childnet showed that around one in four (24%) of young people have begun to use a VPN in just the past three months, up from around a fifth from a year ago (21%).
Young people cited various reasons for their use of VPNs, from improved privacy and security, as well as bypassing parental controls and seeing content they knew they should not be exposed to.
Childnet’s research however did not see a marked increase in children using VPNs after the age checks came into effect.
GenAI adoption accelerated across the app ecosystem, according to analysis from Apps Flyer, with installs up 16% and category spend reaching $824M across iOS and Android.
GenAI apps ranked among the fastest-growing categories of the year, no.1 in Android and no.4 in iOS, reflecting their expanding role in creative, productivity, and AI assistant experiences.
AppsFlyer also analysed AI agent usage for the first time, identifying how marketers are integrating AI into their performance workflows. The data shows that 57% of agent deployments focused on technical automation such as configuration and data-integrity checks, while 32% supported business optimisation.
Distinct usage patterns emerged across verticals. Gaming marketers used agents to improve efficiency and protect margins, while retail and fintech teams relied on them to scale traffic and volume. These trends point to an early but meaningful shift toward supervised automation, where AI supports decision-making while marketers maintain strategic oversight.
“Many marketers say they are still struggling to measure clear ROI from AI, yet the adoption curve tells a different story,” said Inna Weiner, VP Product, Data and AI, AppsFlyer.
“GenAI apps are accelerating in consumer adoption, and behind the scenes marketers are increasingly deploying agents to simplify workflows and improve efficiency. AppsFlyer remains committed to helping teams navigate this rapidly evolving landscape with the clarity and confidence they need to grow.”
Beyond the rise of AI in both apps and marketing workflows, the report outlines several broader trends shaping the app economy in 2025.
UK app install spend increased 92% year-on-year, the research revealed. The growth was supported by substantial non-gaming and shopping investment. Globally, iOS user acquisition spend grew 35% while Android remains flat. Non-gaming spend increased by nearly fifth (18%) to $53bn, while gaming grew only 3% to $25bn.
The UK captured 35% more of Europe’s app marketing spend in 2025, reflecting strong gains in shopping and iOS-led growth.
Remarketing – a tactic which shows ads to people who have previously visited an app or website – spend grew a significant 37%to $31.3bn, now representing 29% of all app marketing investment (up from 25% in 2024). iOS remarketing rose 71% with notable gains in transportation (+362%), travel (+145%), and finance (+135%).
The analysis posits that shopping has reshaped global app install spend distribution. Shopping investment to acquire new users rose 70% overall and 123% on iOS, driven by China-based ecommerce budgets that materially shifted category and regional share.
Platform performance diverges sharply across markets: iOS paid installs increased 40-85% across Western markets, while Android saw declines in key regions (-30% in the US, -13% in the UK), but strong growth in major emerging markets.
“The UK saw exceptional momentum in 2025, led by strong non-gaming growth and continued iOS expansion. Marketers here are prioritising value, engagement, and long-term performance as the market matures,” Weiner added.
The UK government is rolling out free digital training and support to get more people online across every region of the country.
The minister for digital inclusion, Liz Lloyd, is unveiling 90 local schemes receiving backing from the £11.7 million Digital Inclusion Innovation Fund.
The fund is set to support projects in communities across the UK, helping people at risk of being left behind get the access, skills and confidence they need to get online, improve their living standards, and access vital services on the web.
Research suggests there are currently eight million adults in the UK who lack basic digital skills, according to the UK government, and 1.6 million who live offline altogether.
This prevents them from accessing convenient digital government services online, managing their finances on their phone, or searching for job opportunities.
This not only blocks opportunities, but can also make services more expensive, with people without internet access paying on average 25% more than consumers who are online.
Schemes and projects will range in reach and scope, with young people learning new digital skills through e-sports, elder people learning how to use the NHS app, and unhoused people accessing devices and data to get online to access essential services.
The success of the projects will be used to inform future initiatives to help get more people online.
“This government is tearing down the barriers to success and making the future work for all, not just the fortunate,” minister for digital inclusion, Liz Lloyd, said.
“Being online is something many of us take for granted, but for millions it could mean a new job opportunity, quicker access to healthcare or a lifeline to the local community.
“This fund will both empower community organisations to help those most at risk of being left behind get the skills, access and confidence they need – while also informing how we can help even more people in the future.”
Portions of the fund will go toward community organisations, while some has been allocated to devolved governments. Scotland will receive £746,020 from the fund.
Final approval for the most advanced hospital in Scotland will provide ‘fertile ground for bedding in the country’s innovation ambitions and inspiring a more efficient health service’.
Plans to build the New University Hospital Monklands in Lanarkshire are now to go before the Scottish Government – the last step prior to construction which is expected to start on farmland at Wester Moffat in Airdrie next year, with a targeted opening of 2031.
Formal NHS Scotland partner InnoScot Health believes it is a key step towards a more self-sustaining health service with the new hospital’s facilities pointing the way for a more innovative future.
The new facility – replacing the current Monklands hospital in Airdrie – has been called Scotland’s ‘first fully digital, net-zero carbon hospital’.
Head of Innovation at InnoScot Health, Robert Rea said: “Once complete, this will be a best-in-class centre of innovation – both in terms of facilities offered immediately upon its opening, and for continuously inspiring forward-thinkers with its progressive ambitions.
“From day one, New University Hospital Monklands will be a true showcase for the power of digital healthcare systems and sustainable design – Scotland’s first major acute hospital delivered to net zero standards for both construction and operation.
“It is a meaningful step towards meeting NHS Scotland’s net zero target for 2040 and embracing the benefits of nature with its site layout planned to maximise the green surroundings, aiding faster recovery.”
Designers say New University Hospital Monklands will use cutting-edge technology for real-time patient monitoring and integrate advanced operational command systems, laying the foundations for a future-proofed facility complete with an intuitive layout for better flow.
Rea added: “I am in no doubt that it will help to increase efficiency and wellbeing for staff and of course deliver improved health outcomes as part of a more patient-centred approach.
“Importantly, the hospital also represents fertile ground for bedding in the country’s collaborative innovation drive, drawing on a range of expertise, and inspiring a more agile health service by example.”
Last week, NHS Lanarkshire’s board approved the business case for the project, describing it as a “revolutionary blueprint” for healthcare in the region.
Specialist services throughout Lanarkshire will all be based at the hospital, including cancer care, infectious disease medicine, renal medicine, urology surgery, and ear, nose and throat surgery.
Chair of NHS Lanarkshire, Martin Hill, said: “This is the most important decision by the board in recent memory and marks a significant milestone for the people of Lanarkshire.”
InnoScot Health’s Sustainability Innovation Call encourages sustainable, forward-thinking ideas from health and social care collaborators in a bid to help support NHS Scotland to adapt, develop, and strengthen in response to climate change.
More than half (54%) of supply chain leaders report that leadership turnover has moderately to completely disrupted their function’s ability to operate over the past three years, according to a survey from Gartner, Inc.
This disruption, combined with the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and the evolving nature of work, is exposing weaknesses in legacy supply chain leadership development strategies and forcing chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) to take a more proactive role in building a viable bench of future-ready leaders.
Gartner surveyed 227 supply chain leaders in June 2025 across industries and regions, aimed at identifying leadership development strategies that enable CSCOs to have employees fully capable and prepared to assume head of function roles.
“Effective supply chain leadership has to shift from an overreliance on individual superstars, who our research has found are less collaborative, to leaders who are motivated and equipped to amplify the performance of their teams and organisations,” said Tess Frenzel, Senior Principal Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice.
“CSCOs who are able to adapt their leadership strategies to build these types of leaders and design the roles and development programs to help them succeed will improve supply chain performance, despite the disruption inside and outside of their organisations.”
Only 22% of supply chain leaders exhibit collectively motivated behaviours that correlate to stronger organisational business outcomes, with the majority exhibiting individually motivated performance.
Supply chain leadership positions continue to expand in responsibility and scope, with 59% reporting positions at their organisations require a broad range of skills and competencies.
Less than half (49%) of leadership development programmes are rated as effective, highlighting a need for more dynamic, tailored approaches that keep pace with the rate of technological change.
Additionally, supply chain leaders have a negative view of the path required for higher leadership positions, with few reporting work-life balance as part of the path to leadership (31%) and less than half (37%) agreeing that the process for promotions is transparent.
As AI transforms how individual tasks are completed, and future work trends emphasise new competencies, the ability to collaborate, adapt, and lead collectively becomes the greatest differentiator.
CSCOs who break from legacy-driven processes and proactively recalibrate their leadership development strategies around these imperatives will build stronger, more resilient teams prepared to drive performance and innovation in an era of constant disruption.
Gartner’s research on supply chain leadership development identified three critical shifts for CSCOs seeking to build a future-ready leadership bench:
Develop and Reward Collectively Motivated Leaders: High turnover and siloed incentives undermine continuity and collaboration. CSCOs must shift to rewarding leaders who amplify team and cross-functional performance and not just deliver individual results.
Combat Role Overexpansion: Overly broad leadership roles erode effectiveness and increase disruption risk. Clearly defined, scoped roles aligned to strategic priorities and work-life balance are essential for sustainable performance.
Unlock Agile Leadership Development: Traditional, static development programs are failing to keep pace with change. CSCOs must leverage new technologies, partnerships, and embedded learning to accelerate leadership growth and adaptability.
People in the UK are spending an average of four and a half hours online a day, according to figures from Ofcom, which is a ten minute increase from last year.
The online regulator’s annual review of UK online consumption found an increase in screen time, though the market is narrowing on how people spend their time online.
Two major tech firms – Alphabet and Meta – now account for more than half of the time people in the UK spend online.
YouTube is the most used Alphabet-owned service, used by 94% of adults. Time on YouTube is increasing, reaching an average of 51 minutes a day, not including the TV.
The combination of Facebook and Messenger (93%) is the most widely used Meta service, followed by WhatsApp (90% of adults).
AI’s Impact on Search
The report also found that Google Search continues to be the most used search service in the UK, with four in five (82%) of adults using the service.
However, AI is changing the UK search experience. About 30% of searches now show AI overview, and more than half (53%) of adults say they see these summaries often. In most cases, users are not seeking these out but rather finding them automatically included in their search services
Generative AI services are gaining traction, with more people actively seeking them out. ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in same period of 2024.
Mixed Feelings
While adults may be using the internet more, they do not necessarily feel good bout it.
This year, only a third of adults (33%) said they feel the internet is good for society – down from 40% last year. And while nearly two-thirds (65%) of adults believe the personal benefits of being online outweigh the risks, this figure has declined steadily from 71% two years ago.
Fewer adults feel freer to be themselves online than offline this year (25%, down from 30% last year), and only 35% feel they can share opinions more easily online than offline.
What About the Children?
When it comes to younger Gen Z and the eldest Gen Alphas, mobiles and videos dominate their screen time. Children aged 8 to 14 spend almost three hours online daily, rising to four hours for 13-14 year olds, and about two hours for eight- to nine-year-olds. This only counts time spend of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and computers – not games consoles.
YouTube and Snapchat lead the way when it comes to screen time. Across 8–14s, children spend about 48 minutes a day on YouTube and 45 minutes on Snapchat – together making up around half of their total online time. Almost all 8-14-year-olds use YouTube (96%) and Google Search (95%). WhatsApp (63%) and TikTok (58%) also rank highly.
Late-night scrolling is common. Across four of the main services used by children – YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and WhatsApp – 15-24% of the time spent for the whole 8-14 age range happens between 9pm and 5am. 4–10% of usage happens after 11pm, depending on the platform.
Are The Kids Alright?
Unlike adults, most children (91%) aged 8-17 say they are happy with the things they do online.
Teenagers say they use social media and messaging apps to stay connected. Almost three-quarters (72%) of 13-17s who use these platforms say they help them feel closer to friends. Girls aged 13-17 are more likely than boys of the same age to see being online as good for helping to build and maintain friendships (71% vs 60%).
Overall, seven in ten (69%) 13–17-year-olds go online to support their wellbeing, mainly to relax (45%) or lift their mood (32%). Nearly eight in ten (78%) say the internet helps with schoolwork, and more than half (55%) use it to learn new skills.
Still, despite listing the positives of being online, many children were aware of the internet’s negative effects. Some of the children reflected on the negative impact of “doomscrolling” where users spend too much time scrolling through seemingly endless content that hurts their mental health.
They used the term “brain rot” to describe both the type of content and the feeling it leaves behind. This content is fast-paced, chaotic, and often nonsensical and can leave viewers overstimulated and disoriented.
With this awareness does come action, Ofcom found, with Gen Z being more likely to act when they see harmful content online.
While we found that seven in ten 11-17 year olds had seen or heard harmful content online in the last four weeks, we also found that nearly two-thirds (64%) of them had taken action after encountering such content.
Actions included using platform tools like the ‘dislike’ button (15%), reporting content (11%), blocking the person who posted the content (10%), or telling an adult (10%).
Online Spending
When it comes to purchases, children are commonly running into marketing encouraging to spend across different platforms.
Almost six in ten (58%) children aged 8-17 said they had spent money online in the past month, whether on social media sites, video-sharing platforms, or while they were gaming.
Children tell us that they were encouraged to spend money in various ways online, including character customisation (30%), adverts (27%), recommendations from friends or family (23%) and influencer content (22%).
But a third of children (32%) regretted the purchases they’d made in-game, and 43% regretted purchases made on social media. While 42% were unclear on what they even were buying in games.
A new report has shown that business investment in Scotland has risen to a 20-year high – in contrast to a fall across the UK.
Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes today helped to launch the annual CBI–Addleshaw Goddard Scottish Productivity Index, showing a rise in business investment to more than 10% of GDP for the first time in 20 years.
The Index confirms Scotland leads the UK in higher-level qualifications with 53.7% of the working-age population educated to this level. It also highlights key progress in patenting activity, internet speeds, and the expansion of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
“This report shows the strength of Scotland’s economy, and that real progress is being made in areas in which the Scottish Government holds full powers, including educational attainment and business investment,” deputy first minister Forbes said.
“While our economy is held back by a low-growth UK Government model and damaging decisions on matters like employers national insurance increases, we will always be working with one hand tied behind our back.
“But I am encouraged to see these figures reveal business investment reaching its highest level in 20 years, showing that industry recognises Scotland’s real strengths as highlighted in the Index – one of the UK’s most highly educated workforces, globally significant energy assets, and improving digital and green infrastructure.
“The report highlights there is still work to be done on productivity – which is the foundation of higher wages, sustainable growth, and strong public services. If we want rising living standards and resilient public finances, it must be central to our economic decisions so our focus will continue to be on turning our strengths into higher productivity.
“Scotland has huge economic strengths. From being at the forefront of the energy transition to rapidly emerging cutting-edge technologies, we have an enormous opportunity, and will continue to work as hard as we can to bring investment to Scotland, resulting in more high quality jobs across the country.”
The International Network of AI Safety Institutes, a consortium of different national AI safety organisations, is reconfiguring its focus onto AI model measurements and evaluation.
The international coalition is spearheaded by the UK AI Security Institute, and includes Australia, Canada, the EU, France, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, Singapore, and the US.
With its change in focus, the coalition will now be known as the International Network for Advanced AI Measurement Evaluation and Science.
The transition shows the group’s shift in priority toward ensuring that the science of evaluating and measuring AI – key metrics in ensuring its safety and responsible deployment – continues to keep pace with the technology’s advancements.
“Trust in AI isn’t optional – it’s critical. That’s what the work of the Network and our new role as its co-ordinator will help drive,” Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s AI Minister, said.
“By uniting nations on evaluation and research, we’ll lead from the front, shape the future and unlock AI’s benefits for everyone.”
The UK’s AI Security Institute will take on the role of network coordinator, aiming to improve the coalition’s scientific measurements of AI.
“Advanced AI systems are being developed and deployed globally, so our approach to evaluating them has to be global too. That is why this Network is so important,” Adam Beaumont, interim director of the AI Security Institute, said.
“Our focus will be on supporting partners to develop rigorous, practical ways of testing advanced AI.”
Since its founding in 2024, the UK’s own institute for AI safety has gone through its own rebrand. In February of this year, it changes its name from the AI Safety Institute to the AI Security Institute as it shifted its focus on national security.
The European Union has launched an investigation into Google’s use of online content of publishers and creators for its AI systems which may have breached EU competition laws.
The European Commission will investigate if the Gemini creator owned by tech giant Alphabet is using its dominance to put other AI firms at a “disadvantage”.
The concern stems largely from Alphabet’s ownership of Google Search and YouTube, and will see if Google has been training its AI models on content creators and publishers without due compensation.
“The investigation will notably examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thereby placing developers of rival AI models at a disadvantage,” the EU Commission said.
The Commission will also investigate if Google used publisher or creator content to train its AI models without giving creators or content owners the right to refuse and still have their content published across Google’s platforms.
While YouTube creators are obligated to allow Google to use their content and data for a number of purposes as determined by Google’s terms and conditions, including AI training, content creators are not being compensated by Google for this. Further, other AI rivals and developers are barred from using the same content in their training by YouTube’s policies.
“We use content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers across YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI applications,” YouTube said to content creators in September.
Since its introduction, Google’s AI Overviews, which appear automatically at the top of the page following a Google Search and cannot be switched off via Google settings, has come under fire from publishers and content creators. The overviews rely on outsourced information from publishers which are not compensated for their work, and often mean that many Google Search queries do not end in a link click that would take a user from Google’s platform and onto a different website. This can significantly affect a website’s revenue streams.
“This complaint risks stifling innovation in a market that is more competitive than ever. Europeans deserve to benefit from the latest technologies and we will continue to work closely with the news and creative industries as they transition to the AI era,” a Google spokesperson said.
Wikipedia, which often had a portion of its content appear on a Google Search page prior to the deployment of AI Overviews, says it saw a 8% year-on-year drop in traffic as users turn to AI search overviews or use AI chatbots directly for information queries.
When it comes to fraud, open banking is behind the curve – in a good way. Fraud linked to open banking payments are well below the banking industry average, new research from Open Banking Limited (OBL) found.
This is despite the increasing use of open banking services across the UK, as well as the rise of scam and fraud cases.
Fraud targeting these transactions amounted to just 0.013% of transactions by volume from March 2024 to September 2025. This is compared to the 0.045% average of the wider payments sector over the same period.
The value of fraud routed in open banking payments was also lower than the industry average (0.020% versus 0.027%), the research found.
OBL also found that while fraud increased in the wider industry since the December 2024 report (from 0.037% to 0.045%) the open banking sector saw a decrease in fraud cases over the period (from 0.021% to 0.013%).
The industry did see a marked increase in authorised push payment (APP) scams, which the report noted as the most common type of fraud being employed in the UK. APP was noted as a driver in the uptick of fraud witnessed in the sector from June 2025 to September 2025.
This type of fraud relies on manipulating victims to authorise a payment to a scammer often using social engineering to convince a victim the payment is genuine.
“Open banking remains resilient against fraud, with rates consistently below industry benchmarks,” said Christian Delesalle, head of participant support at OBL.
“While we are seeing a slight increase in APP fraud, this is a sector-wide challenge and not unique to open banking. Our data-driven approach and industry partnerships are key to maintaining robust defences as adoption grows.”
The Financial Conduct Authority is launching a new set of measures to build a stronger investment culture in the UK, supporting firms to innovate and make investing more engaging for consumers.
The measures aim to empower retail investment, reinforce wholesale markets, and maintain the UK’s position as a world-leading financial centre.
The FCA is seeking view to ensure regulation supports consumers to invest with confidence.
Proposals to enhance how firms classify their clients will give confidence to firms when they deal with professional investors, drawing a line so wholesale markets can remain agile and innovative.
The regulator has worked closely with industry and consumer groups in an effort to deliver practical policy that moves the dial on risk.
“Today’s measures support investment risk culture right along the spectrum,” Simon Walls, executive director of markets at the FCA said.
“They ensure that firms can compete to give retail customers material that informs and engages them. They also draw a brighter line for professional markets, defined by contracting parties, informed consent and regulation that is proportionate to that.”
Under the measures, the FCA will make a decisive shift away from prescriptive and complex templates that consumers don’t find useful. This gives firms more freedom to put the consumer first, innovate, and help their customers understand potential returns as well as costs and risks.
The FCA is also seeking views on how longer-term regulation can keep up with the evolving retail investment landscape and help shift the dial on risk appetite, to give consumers confidence to access investments that meet their needs and benefit from the potential returns.
As part of the measures, the FCA is setting a clearer boundary between retail and professional investors, allowing firms to deal with professional investors with confidence operating outside retail regulations. This will free up firms to innovate and offer a more diverse range of products to truly experienced clients with the resources to bear more of the risks.
The threshold to qualify as a professional investor will remain high, so only those with experience, advice, or the ability to bear risk are taken out of retail protections, such as the Consumer Duty, that they don’t need. High standards in classification mean that wholesale regulation remains proportionate and firms are freed from unnecessary guardrails.
Proposals remove some arbitrary tests and give firms more responsibility to get it right. This includes a new way for wealthy and experienced individuals to opt out of retail protections and streamline how firms assess professional investors.
Six Scottish academic and arts institutions have launched an initiative aimed at boosting commercialisation and innovation across Scotland’s modern universities and the college sector.
The Shared Academic Knowledge Exchange Services (ShaKEs) initiative will make it easier for universities to turn research into real-world solutions – improving lives, strengthening Scotland’s key industries, and transforming public services. Backed by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council, the initiative is designed to help the sector deliver greater impact.
The consortium includes Abertay University, Queen Margaret University, the University of the Highlands and Islands, Robert Gordon University, The Glasgow School of Art, and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, alongside Edinburgh College.
Together, these institutions will pool specialist expertise and professional services to create new opportunities for research impact, skills development, and economic growth.
While these universities are smaller in size, collectively they represent a third of Scotland’s higher education institutions and employ around 1,500 academic staff. Their contribution to Scotland’s innovation ecosystem is already significant—generating 4% of the sector’s total Knowledge Exchange income, 1.5% of consultancy income, and 5% of new spin-outs and staff start-ups in 2023–24.
The new shared ShaKEs service model will develop, test, and evaluate a sustainable shared model for commercialisation and Knowledge Exchange (KE) by:
Connecting skills with innovation to strengthen Scotland’s innovation ecosystem.
Creating sustainable pathways to commercialisation through shared professional services.
Embedding Community Wealth Building principles, ensuring social and environmental outcomes alongside economic benefits.
Ensuring innovation reaches communities across Scotland.
If the pilot is successful, the service could be rolled out more widely across Scotland’s university and college sector, helping to boost economic growth, strengthen innovation, and ensure that research delivers tangible benefits for society and the economy.
“It is excellent to see this new initiative commencing, which is a very welcome development and should help strengthen the commercialisation and innovation processes involved, by sharing best practice, expertise and professional services,” minister for Higher and Further Education Ben Macpherson MSP said.
“I commend all of those involved in this partnership and look forward to seeing the positive difference working together will make. The extraordinary performance of research and innovation in Scotland is one of the great strengths of our university sector.
“Research undertaken here in Scotland is genuinely world-leading – especially when it comes to collaboration – addressing key global challenges and making positive and meaningful social, economic, and environmental impact, both locally and internationally.”
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has shared critical insights cautioning cybersecurity professionals against comparing prompt injection and more classical application vulnerabilities classed as SQL injection.
A new blog advises that, contrary to first impressions, prompt injection attacks against generative artificial intelligence applications may never be totally mitigated in the way SQL injection attacks can be.
Unlike SQL mitigation techniques, which hinge on enforcing a clear separation between data and instructions, prompt injection exploits the inability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to distinguish between the two.
Without action addressing this misconception, the NCSC warns, websites risk falling victim to data breaches exceeding those seen from SQL injection attacks in the 2010s, impacting UK businesses and citizens into the next decade.
Backing proactive adoption of cyber risk management standards, the NCSC challenges claims that prompt injections can be ‘stopped’.
Instead, it suggests efforts should turn to reducing the risk and impact of prompt injection and driving up resilience across AI supply chains.
As AI technologies become embedded in more UK business operations, the NCSC calls on AI system designers, builders and operators to take control of manageable variables, acknowledging that LLM systems are “inherently confusable” and their risks managed in different ways.
“Confused deputy vulnerabilities are where a system can be coerced to perform a function that benefits the attacker, typically where a privileged component is coerced into making a privileged request on behalf of a less-privileged attacker,” the blog says.
These cannot be mitigated, but can be reduced by secure design principles, developer and organisational awareness, appropriate data marking, and better monitoring.
The blog discussed many techniques in making it harder for an LLM to act on instructions that are included within data, such as marking data sections to be separate from instructions.
Developers can also block commonly used injection phrases like “ignore previous instructions,” though this is limited in scope as LLM prompts can be so varied.
As developers and organisations seek solutions, the NCSC warns to veer away from vendors and services that say they can ‘stop’ prompt injection, and opt for those that can explain how they can ‘reduce’ the risk.
By 2029, only 5% of automakers will maintain strong AI investment growth, a decline from over 95% today, predicts Gartner, Inc.
“The automotive sector is currently experiencing a period of AI euphoria, where many companies want to achieve disruptive value even before building strong AI foundations,” said Pedro Pacheco, VP Analyst at Gartner.
“This euphoria will eventually turn into disappointment as these organizations are not able to achieve the ambitious goals they set for AI.”
Gartner predicts that only a handful of automotive companies will maintain ambitious AI initiatives after the next five years. Organisations with strong software foundations, tech-savvy leadership, and a consistent very long-term focus on AI will pull ahead from the rest, creating a competitive AI divide.
“Software and data are the cornerstones of AI,” said Pacheco.
“Companies with advanced maturity in these areas have a natural head start. In addition, automotive companies led by execs with strong tech know-how are more likely to make AI their top priority instead of sticking to the traditional priorities of an automotive company.”
Fully-automated Vehicle Assembly Predicted by 2030
The automotive industry is also heading for radical operational efficiency. As automakers rapidly integrate advanced robotics into their assembly lines, Gartner predicts that by 2030, at least one automaker will achieve fully automated vehicle assembly, marking a historic shift in the automotive sector.
“The race toward full automation is accelerating, with nearly half of the world’s top automakers (12 out of 25) already piloting advanced robotics in their factories,” said Marco Sandrone, VP Analyst at Gartner. “Automated vehicle assembly helps automakers reduce labor costs, improve quality, and shorten production cycle times. For consumers, this means better vehicles at potentially lower prices.”
While it may reduce the direct need for human labor in vehicle assembly, new roles in AI oversight, robotics maintenance and software development could offset losses if reskilling programs are prioritised.
Barclays Eagle Labs and Sustainable Ventures have partnered to launch The National Climate Tech Accelerator (NCTA), a new programme designed to rapidly scale high-potential climate tech startups across the UK.
The initiative unites the UK’s leading growth partner for climate tech startups, Sustainable Ventures, with one of the UK’s largest entrepreneurial networks, Barclays Eagle Labs, to deliver an ecosystem unmatched in the UK.
This programme is built to support UK-registered businesses with climate or sustainability at their core and a clear aspiration to grow and scale their impact.
Founders participating in the accelerator programme will benefit from a blended package of commercial and technical support, including access to the Sustainable Ventures Digital Learning Platform, the Eagle Labs Entrepreneur Academy, and up to $250,000 in Google Cloud credits.
Barclays customers will additionally unlock premium, high-impact acceleration tools including funded 1:1 mentoring, pitch events with climate tech investors, dedicated workspace access across the Eagle Labs network or at Sustainable Ventures and enhanced national visibility through the Barclays Entrepreneur Awards and the NCTA Pitch Competition.
Established in 2011, Sustainable Ventures has built one of Europe’s climate tech startup communities. Located in key regions across the UK, its programmes have supported 1000+ startups, achieving a leading success rate of 80% (compared to the industry average of <60%), generated 7000 plus green jobs and provided £1.2bn in funding.
“This programme will provide hundreds of climate tech companies with advice and support, giving them an unfair business advantage that will help them scale faster from idea to exit,” Andrew Wordsworth, CEO and founder of Sustainable Ventures, said.
“This partnership with Barclays Eagle Labs will scale up our award winning model of expert advice, networks, and hubs to reach more companies across the nation. These climate tech companies will play a vital role in helping the UK meet its net zero targets.”
Abdul Qureshi, head of Business Banking at Barclays said: “At Barclays, we recognise the critical role that scaling climate tech is going to play in accelerating the UK’s transition, and in achieving our ambition to become a net zero bank by 2050.
“Supporting UK founders as they work to grow their businesses from idea through to IPO is central to the mission of Barclays Innovation Banking, and scaling climate tech in particular requires integrated support that brings capital and expertise together in one place.
“By partnering with Sustainable Ventures to deliver The National Climate Tech Accelerator, we are strengthening that support. Together, we are creating a platform that helps ambitious UK climate start-ups to overcome the barriers to growth and become the market-leading businesses that the transition demands.”
X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been fined £105m by the EU over its ‘blue tick’ verified profile badges.
Since Elon Musk took over the social media firm, X has allowed users to purchase a ‘blue tick’ to verify their profile rather than go through a ‘verified’ process by ensuring their identity and any associated expertise.
The European Commission said that allowing users to purchase a ‘blue tick’ verification actually “deceives users” as the platform is not “meaningfully verifying” the account.
The EU regulator said that “this deception exposes users to scams, including impersonation frauds, as well as other forms of manipulation by malicious actors.”
Further to this, the EU said that X also failed to provide researchers access to public data or provide adequate transparency on its advertisements.
X must pay the fine and inform the Commission on how it will remedy the failures, or face further penalties.
“The fine issued today was calculated taking into account the nature of these infringements, their gravity in terms of affected EU users, and their duration,” it said.
The fine marks the first decision by the EU Commission under its Digital Services Act (DSA), which regulates how online platforms manage their data, advertising, and content.
“Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU,” Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy.
“The DSA protects users. The DSA gives researchers the way to uncover potential threats. The DSA restores trust in the online environment.
“With the DSA’s first non-compliance decision, we are holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability.”
BT has announced it is launching a new platform to deliver digital sovereignty services for the UK private and public sector as concerns over data providence mounts.
Digital sovereignty is a growing priority for organisations of all sizes, as they look to enhance their resilience in the face of growing geopolitical instability.
The platform will underpin the roll out of new sovereign voice, cloud and AI services over the coming months in the UK, aiming to offer organisations a range of sovereignty options for their operations.
As part of its sovereign offering, BT will ensure that its UK infrastructure platform will be supported exclusively by UK-based staff where required, which would be key to ensuring trust with critical national infrastructure operators wary of storing data in foreign centres.
When it comes to AI, data, and cloud, calls from industry and government are growing for sovereign options as data protection and security risks becoming increasing concerns.
A recent survey from Pulsant found that the uptick in AI adoption is driving cloud sovereignty projects as firms look to be in control of their data across all of its transfers to ensure better compliance and data protection.
Businesses in the UK and Ireland are increasingly concerned about data sovereignty as updates in data protection laws uncover layers of uncertainty in where business data is consistently stored and transferred to.
The UK’s designation of data centres as critical national infrastructure shows that data sovereignty is a growing priority for the UK government, but infrastructure and tools are needed to better ensure data sovereignty is possible.
“Sovereignty isn’t simply a matter of compliance or risk management – it’s key to unleashing the potential of AI, and ensuring resilient operations in an increasingly uncertain world,” Jon James, CEO of BT Business said.
“Our pioneering launch reflects BT’s unique position as the digital backbone of the UK, and the only provider with the scale, capabilities and experience to enable true UK sovereign solutions.
“Organisations are increasingly looking for sovereignty in their services and it’s up to us to make sure we deliver for our customers. That means making sure we’re offering the right sovereign solutions that ensure data and operations remain secure, compliant, resilient and future-proofed.”
While AI can generate detailed arguments and data in a matter of seconds, is it mastering the art of persuasion?
This is the question that formed the basis of new research published in Science from the AI Security Institute, which probed 19 AI models with 700 political issues to determine what factors increased the persuasiveness of their answers, and how this persuasion affected model accuracy.
As AI is continually turned to not just for basic queries but to answer quandaries ranging from the medical to the moral, understanding the persuasive nature of AI models is becoming increasingly important to understand the risks of users being maliciously or accidentally swayed by the algorithm’s answers.
While AI models have been known to answer queries with confidence – even if they are incorrect – persuasion takes this a step further, with the AI Security Institute prompting the AI models to convince users of 707 issue stances using various rhetorical strategies.
Users were asked to rate their agreement with a stance before and after their AI interaction to assess the persuasiveness of the model, relative to the interactions of a control group that did not have a persuasive element to their AI conversation.
The research revealed that arguments that relied on information density tended to be more persuasive than AI models that used personalisation or ‘microtargeting’ – this is the use of data to create personalised or tailored content directly to an individual.
Models that were told to emphasise evidence and facts saw their persuasiveness increase by 27% relative to the basic “be persuasive” prompt used in a different experiment group. Information density also trumped traditional rhetoric strategies like moral reframing, storytelling, or deep canvassing.
However, AI models appear to be willing to issue fact and fiction in order to persuade users with information.
Information-focused prompting, as well as persuasion reward modelling, systematically decreased the factual accuracy of the AI models.
The AI Security Institute noted that its findings do not imply that inaccurate claims are more persuasive than false claims. Rather, the AI models prompted to douse users in information may run out of reliable sources, and rely on less accurate material to produce enough persuasive information. It does remain unclear in the study if the models ‘hallucinated’ or randomly produced inaccurate claims or merely relied on weak sources or inaccurate claims already made.
Importantly, the Institute found that post-training made the largest difference when it came to persuasiveness of AI models, meaning that without specific prompting to be persuasive, the LLMs used were not nearly as persuasive in their answers to users. This was consistent across model scale, meaning that gains in persuasiveness are more likely to derive from post-training rather than an increase in model size.
Cloudflare faced another outage just weeks following a major disruption that disabled several of the world’s major platforms.
The network and security platform underpinning the safety features of a swath of websites large and small appeared to be down across various websites
DownDetector, the internet and website outage tracker, had also been taken out due to Cloudflare’s outage. Following fixes to the issue, the outage website had around 3,000 people report issues with Cloudflare at around 9:04, minutes before Cloudflare announced it had issued a fix for the problem.
Users trying to access that platform or others that rely on Cloudflare were met this morning with a 500 Internal Server Error, with Cloudflare printed underneath the error message.
Cloudflare did issue a status update at 8:56 am, saying that it is “investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs.
“Customers using the Dashboard / Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed.”
An update at 9:09 am says the firm is still investigating the issue.
Following this, Cloudflare says a fix had been issued and it is monitoring results.
Cloudflare’s previous outage, which took place less than a month ago, was caused by “an overly large configuration file used to manage threat traffic, which triggered a crash in Cloudflare’s software systems” according to the Financial Times.
Its current status page says there was scheduled maintenance for two of its data centres – one in Chicago and one in Detroit. Cloudflare warned that critical national infrastructure relying on Cloudflare’s services from these data centres may face disruptions or increased latency issues.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a reprimand to the Post Office following a data breach that exposed the personal information of hundreds of postmasters involved in the Horizon IT scandal.
The breach occurred when the Post Office’s communications team mistakenly published an unredacted version of a legal settlement document on its corporate website. The document contained the names, home addresses and postmaster status of 502 people who were part of a group litigation against the organisation.
It remained publicly accessible from 25 April to 19 June 2024, before being removed following notification from an external law firm.
When investigating the circumstances of this data breach, the ICO found that the Post Office failed to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect people’s information. The data regulator found there to be a lack of documented policies or quality assurance processes for publishing documents on the corporate website, as well as insufficient staff training, with no specific guidance on information sensitivity or publishing practices.
“The people affected by this breach had already endured significant hardship and distress as a result of the Horizon IT scandal. They deserved much better than this,” Sally Anne Poole, head of investigations at the ICO, said.
“The postmasters have once again been let down by the Post Office. Our investigation highlighted that this data breach was entirely preventable and stemmed from a mistake that could have been avoided had the correct procedures been in place.
“Other organisations should take notice of this reprimand and apply its learnings, so they don’t find themselves making the same mistake. Data protection by design must be embedded into everyday operations so people’s information is handled appropriately.”
The ICO nearly issued the Post Office a fine of up to £1.094 million, but reconsidered, as it did not find the infringements to be so egregious under its public sector approach, which aims to mitigate fines in favour of engagement and reprimands.
Upon discovering the breach, the Post Office did offer compensation to affected individuals, as well as providing identity protection services. It also established an emergency working group to review the incident, and ensured that cached versions of the document were removed from archives.
Skills shortages are the top concern among cybersecurity professionals, surpassing concerns about headcount this year, according to ISC2’s 2025 Cybersecurity Workforce Study.
Conducted by the leading non-profit member organisation for cybersecurity professionals, 16,029 cyber workers were surveyed on their leading concerns, top lessons learns, and challenges they anticipate for the next year.
The previous year saw a surge in layoffs, budget cuts, and hiring and promotion freezes.
However, the 2025 data revealed that economic conditions that affect cybersecurity teams showed signs of levelling off, with reports of budget cuts (36%), and layoffs (24%) decreasing by one percentage point in 2025.
Strained cybersecurity workforce budgets remain a key driver of staff shortages, according to the study. 33% of respondents stated their organisations do not have the resources to adequately staff their teams, while 29% said they cannot afford to hire staff with the skills they need to adequately secure their organisations. Consequently, 72% of respondents agree that reducing security personnel significantly increases the risk of a breach in their organisations.
Skills Shortages Beat Headcount as Top Concern
The study highlights that while staffing shortages remain, professionals are more concerned about critical skills needs than staffing numbers. Nearly nine in ten respondents (88%) have experienced at least one significant cybersecurity incident in their organisation because of a skills shortage, and 69% have experienced more than one.
The majority of respondents (95%) reported that they have at least one skill need (a 5% increase from 2024), and 59% cited critical or significant skill needs (a 15% increase from 2024).
“A shift is happening. This year’s data makes it clear that the most pressing concern for cybersecurity teams isn’t headcount but skills,” said ISC2 Acting CEO and CFO Debra Taylor, CC.
“Skills deficits raise cybersecurity risk levels and challenge business resilience. At the same time, we are seeing emerging technologies like AI are perceived as less of a threat to the workforce than anticipated.
“Instead, many cybersecurity professionals view AI as an opportunity for career advancement. They are using AI tools to automate tasks, and they are investing their time to learn more and demonstrate their expertise in using and securing AI systems.”
The AI Effect
The research found that AI adoption is progressing among cybersecurity professionals with 28% of respondents having already integrated AI tools into their operations. In total, 69% are engaged in adoption activities – whether through integration, active testing, or early evaluation.
Data also suggests that cybersecurity professionals believe AI will create a need for new skills and perspectives within the cybersecurity workplace.
Nearly three in four (73%) believe AI will create more specialised cybersecurity skills, with about the same amount (72%) saying AI will create the need for more strategic cybersecurity mindsets. Two-thirds (66%) say AI will require broader skillsets across the workforce.
AI remains one of the top skills needed for the second consecutive year. This year, 41% of respondents cited AI as a top skill needed followed by cloud security (36%).
Nearly half (48%) of respondents are already working to gain more generalised AI knowledge and skills, while others are educating themselves on AI solutions at risk to better understand vulnerabilities and exploits (35%).
Although economic uncertainty and workplace pressures continue, cybersecurity professionals remain positive about their role in the industry.
Just under nine in ten (87%) of cyber professionals believe there will always be a need for their profession, with 81% confident the profession will remain strong.
While eight in ten (80%) are passionate about their work, 68% are satisfied in their current job, an increase of two percentage points from 2024.
Three quarters (75%) are likely to stay in their current organisation for the next 12 months, dropping to 66% when asked about their outlook over the next two years.
However, the report also indicates that cybersecurity professionals are experiencing job stress and burnout. Almost half (48%) of respondents feel exhausted from trying to stay current on the latest cybersecurity threats and emerging technologies and 47% feel overwhelmed by the workload.
The study finds that opportunities for career growth and recognition are important factors for professionals in the industry. Nearly one-third (31%) of participants view advancement opportunities and 23% view unplanned financial or benefit rewards (such as spot bonuses for performance, extra paid day off) as key factors for their workforce engagement.
Almost one billion early-stage cyber-attacks and attempts to access scam websites have been blocked by a new government cyber service in less than a year, according to the National Cyber Security Centre and BT.
The Share and Defend service, developed by the NCSC, works to disrupt online crime by sharing near real-time data on known fraudulent and malicious websites with internet service providers, which can then prevent customers from clicking through.
Online content such as fake shops, phishing sites and malicious links, including from emails reported to the NCSC by the public, are being blocked automatically providing better protection at scale.
“I am very pleased that the cutting-edge Share and Defend service has blocked almost a billion attempts to access malicious content,” Dan Jarvis, security minister, said at the Cyber Resilience Summit 2025.
“It shows we are making Britain a hard target for cyber criminals by protecting businesses and citizens on a daily basis.
“The government will continue to use technology and to build strong partnerships across industry to secure our nation against threats and boost economic growth.”
Share and Defend partners also include the Cyber Defence Alliance, TalkTalk, PXC, Vodafone, and Jisc, the UK’s National Research and Education Network Operator and the NCSC is looking to onboard new partners to extend the reach, so more citizens and businesses from across the UK can benefit from protection.
It supports the Government’s work to step up cooperation with businesses to protect the public through the Stop! Think Fraud campaign at a time of year when more people are shopping online.
The services aims to proactively prevent access to malicious websites as well as automatically block online threats directly via internet service providers.
It relies on the collection of threat intelligence such as harmful or malicious domains and URLs, often from cyber reports and security firms.
The data is shared with internet service providers which then block the websites automatically even if an unsuspecting user clicks on a link to these malicious sites.
“At a time when we are all increasingly dependent on technology to run our lives, the NCSC’s Share and Defend service is helping to protect the British public at an unprecedented scale,” Dr Richard Horne, CEO of the NCSC, said.
“As one of our Active Cyber Defence services, this capability demonstrates the impact that we can have when we intervene to block malicious activity, working alongside industry partners.
“Collaboration is essential for proactively countering the threat, and we look forward to extending the success of the programme driving up our national cyber resilience.”
Coffee shops and critical national infrastructure providers alike have been tasked by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to protect themselves against online harms.
It comes as the NCSC Annual Review 2025 found ‘highly significant’ attacks to seriously impact central government, UK services, the public or economy have grown 50% – a rise for the third year.
To prevent this, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and innovation and growth company Plexal have launched the Cyber Runway CNI programme.
Funded by DSIT and delivered by Plexal, Cyber Runway CNI has welcomed six SMEs to contribute capabilities towards strengthening the UK’s critical national infrastructure (CNI) against evolving cyber threats. The CNI programme will bridge the gap between cutting-edge UK cyber innovation and the urgent security needs of sectors such as energy, water, telecoms, transportation and data centres.
Plexal and DSIT have also sourced CNI representatives holding roles such as CISO to provide direct first-hand perspectives of challenges they’re facing. CISOs will benefit from access to vetted SME solutions, understanding how they can be applied to their problem areas.
This cross-sector collaboration will provide clarity to all parties, covering a range of themes. SMEs will have access to CNI buyers, investment valuations, growth strategies and more, while CNI peers will receive innovation discovery, regulatory awareness, supply chain resilience and beyond.
Diane Gilbert, Senior Innovation Lead for Programmes at Plexal, said: “At Plexal, we understand there’s an abundance of UK cyber businesses developing powerful solutions to combat online threats but finding a route to market – especially involving large firms – isn’t straightforward. On the other side, we’ve seen so many high-profile industry attacks throughout this year, the NCSC has declared ‘cyber risk is no longer just an IT issue, it’s a boardroom priority’.
“Cyber Runway CNI is positioned to improve the resilience of organisations that are critical to a functioning British society. We’re working together with cyber SMEs and critical operations to build sovereign cyber capability. We’ll achieve this by accelerating the adoption of British security solutions across CNI sectors to enhance resilience, regulatory readiness and supply chain integrity.“
APIContext provides an API monitoring and governance platform to help enterprises ensure performance, security and compliance across mission-critical APIs. By combining real-time visibility with automated conformance checks, APIContext empowers organisations to deliver reliable, standards-compliant APIs that build customer trust.
CloudPeek’s AI-native cloud security platform is designed to protect high-consequence organisations across government, defence and critical infrastructure. By combining agentic AI, contextual risk analysis and automated remediation, CloudPeek supports teams to detect vulnerabilities, reduce exposure and maintain compliance with speed.
Goldilock’s FireBreak cybersecurity solution delivers instant, remote and physical network isolation without relying on internet-based controls. By enabling organisations to proactively disconnect critical systems on demand, FireBreak eliminates attack surfaces and stops ransomware to drive cyber resilience across IT, OT and critical infrastructure.
Hacktonics introduces cybersecurity training tailored for industrial control systems, empowering critical infrastructure sectors to defend against evolving threats. With hands-on courses and bespoke programmes, Hacktonics connects theory and practice, ensuring resilience for water, energy and transportation networks.
KETS Quantum Security provides chip-based quantum-safe solutions, including quantum key distribution and quantum random number generators (QRNG). Designed to protect critical infrastructure, telecoms and defence against quantum-era threats, KETS delivers scalable, ultra-secure encryption systems that ensure resilience and trust in an evolving digital world.
Praeferre’s AI-powered compliance and data privacy platform simplifies regulatory governance and secure digital ecosystems for enterprises worldwide. By integrating blockchain-based consent management, real-time policy enforcement and zero-trust data flows, Praeferre empowers organisations to adopt AI safely, prevent cyber-attacks and build trust through transparent, ethical data practices.
New research reveals changing digital infrastructure priorities as UK businesses reject public cloud.
The growing impact of AI is set to make compliance the key driver behind cloud repatriation projects, according to research by digital infrastructure firm Pulsant.
It reveals digital infrastructure investment is the top priority for businesses seeking to maintain confidence in their data strategies.
The independent research, commissioned by Pulsant and carried out by Vanson Bourne, shows that 97% of respondents are confident their current organisational data strategy will remain fit for purpose for the next two years.
However, this self-assurance comes at a cost as nine-tenths of organisations (90%) predict an increase in their technology investment over the same period. This follows 78% reporting that they have increased investment over the past two years.
When asked how businesses will distribute this capital spending, the number one response was to invest in digital infrastructure – with 37% of businesses prioritising the area.
AI and Data Sovereignty
When it comes to the drivers behind this shift, over three-quarters (78%) ranked AI in the top three changes to have the biggest impact on data strategy. Data sovereignty or residency concerns were a substantial second with more than half (55%).
Nearly four-fifths of organisations (79%) said that sovereignty and residency considerations influenced their digital infrastructure investment. On average, those organisations plan to invest 13% more over the next two years.
Steve Fearon, Chief Commercial Officer at Pulsant, said: “Whilst repatriation was initially based on countering the increased costs of public cloud, this current second wave is being driven by AI and concerns around sovereignty. We expect that compliance will soon become the dominant factor.
“Digital investment and enhanced compliance measures are now critical levers for organisations seeking to safeguard sensitive data, optimise performance, and control costs.”
Organisations are not only planning to invest more, but also intend to redirect that spend substantially. Over four-fifths (87%) of respondents plan to partially or fully move away from the public cloud over the next two years.
Among those repatriating, more than half are considering a move to a private cloud provider (54%), whilst 38% said they are exploring an increased reliance on their own data centres, and 36% are assessing co-location.
“One inevitable conclusion of these numbers is that UK businesses have hit peak public cloud,” continued Fearon. “Despite huge marketing investment by the hyperscale and public cloud giants, the UK – especially the midmarket – has pushed back. The questions now are what shape that market will take and what will drive those changes. Our research shines a light on both.
“Based on what we see in this research, we anticipate just over half of UK businesses leading their data strategies with private cloud in the next two years. Around a further third will prioritise going on-premise or co-locating. The remainder will likely be focused on the public cloud. This will be the hybrid shape of the UK data infrastructure market.”
While there is widespread speculation that AI will drastically reduce customer service headcount, currently only 20% of leaders have reduced agent staffing due to AI, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc.
A Gartner survey of 321 customer service and support leaders conducted in October 2025 reveals a more nuanced reality to these often overwhelming AI fears.
Just over half (55%) report stable staffing levels while handling higher customer volumes—underscoring AI’s role in boosting efficiency rather than eliminating jobs. In this sense, AI is augmenting customer service offerings rather than outright replacing workers – at least, for now.
“Customer service and support leaders should avoid framing AI initiatives solely around headcount reduction,” said Melissa Fletcher, Senior Principal, Research in the Gartner Customer Service & Support practice.
“Instead, focus on incremental transformation and workforce augmentation. Leaders should plan for new roles, leverage central resources, and communicate transparently about AI’s impact to manage expectations effectively.”
The survey also found that 42% of organisations are hiring specialised roles—including AI strategists, conversational AI designers, and automation analysts—to support AI deployment and management. Time will tell, however, how long these managerial and AI deployment roles will stick around as AI becomes commonplace.
Looking ahead, Gartner forecasts that by 2027, half of organisations anticipating major AI-driven workforce cuts will abandon those plans as the vision of ‘agentless’ service proves elusive.
While customer service roles may not be fully replaced by AI, many of the world’s top tech firms are shedding staff as they prep for further AI investment. While these roles may not be directly replaced by AI, the technology is still ushering in major strategic shifts when it comes to business structure and recruitment trends.
The UK media and telecoms regulator has fined a pornography website firm £1 million for not having robust enough age verification checks in place as required under the Online Safety Act.
AVA Group Ltd, which runs 18 websites with adult content, has been issued the £1m fine, as well as £50,000 for failing to respond to information requests from the regulator Ofcom.
Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, sites that host 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, Ofcom launched investigations into the providers of dozens of adult sites, including AVS Group Ltd. With millions of monthly UK visitors, these websites were prioritised based on their user numbers and the risk of harm they posed.
While AVS said it implemented age verification checks, Ofcom has not designated it to be highly effective, and have fined the company £1m.
AVS will also be required to implement highly effective age assurance checks within 72 hours of Ofcom’s decision, which was made on 4 December, or face a daily penalty of £1,000 a day.
For not responding to Ofcom’s legally binding information request, AVS is being fined £300 per day until it responds, on top of the initial £50,000 penalty.
The ruling comes along with new research from Ofcom which delves into the evolving world of online safety.
The research found that six in ten (58%) parents think the measures in the updated codes are already improving children’s online safety in the UK, with 67% feeling the measures will make aa difference in the future. More than a third (36%) have already noticed a potential impact on their child’s online activity.
“Since the enforcement of the Online Safety Act, platforms have finally started taking responsibility for protecting children and removing illegal and hateful content,” technology secretary Liz Kendall said.
“Ofcom has the government’s full backing to use all its powers to ensure that services put users’ safety first. Keeping children safe online is this government’s and my personal priority.”
Ofcom has noted its progress with age checks, as it’s new research found that nearly half (47%) of children ages 8 to 17 have run into age checks when trying to access age-restricted material online, compared to 30% before the July age check deadline.
However, the age check verification method of keeping children away from age restricted content has come under fire from online privacy advocates as well as for being relatively easy to outmanoeuvre.
Upon the July deadline, VPN downloads in the UK shot up across major VPN providers, which would allow users to bypass UK online safety checks by allowing users to appear to access websites in a different country.
Further, privacy and cybersecurity advocates have said that the age checks, which often require person information such as IDs, biometrics, or credit card information, is a privacy infringement for adults as well as a data protection risk, which was exemplified by a recent breach of ID images from online platform Discord.
Welcome to Novembers 2025’s edition of Movers & Shakers.
As the year continues to wind down, the Scottish tech scene shows no signs of hibernation. Last month saw a pristine award ceremony, major appointments for a top cyber firm, and a range of international and domestic partnerships.
Be it home or abroad, the tech industry continues to heat up as we all turn our heating on.
All that and more coming up.
Partnerships
Exabeam and Recorded Future
Exabeam, a global leader in intelligence and automation that powers security operations, and Recorded Future, the world’s leader in intelligence, today announced an expansion of their strategic technology partnership. The partnership integrates the Exabeam New-Scale Security Operations Platform with Recorded Future Intelligence Platform to deliver intelligence-led operations for faster, more accurate threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR).
By integrating Recorded Future’s comprehensive, real-time threat intelligence directly into the Exabeam New-Scale Platform, customers can now enrich every security event with external intelligence, turning raw data into actionable insight and enabling automated responses that significantly reduce investigation time.
The partnership enhances key Exabeam solutions, including New-Scale SIEM, New-Scale Analytics, and Exabeam Nova, which guide teams on what data to ingest and how to optimise detection strategies.
Borders Distillery and Catalyst ERP
The Borders Distillery has introduced the revolutionary, cloud based technology, Bottle ERP, in a move that will allow it to achieve its growth ambitions ahead of the release of its first single malt Scotch whisky.
Partnering with premier consulting firm Catalyst ERP, the distillery has implemented Bottle ERP, a comprehensive spirit management solution designed to streamline business and operational efficiencies.
Powered by NetSuite’s world-leading cloud platform, Bottle ERP equips the team to track the journey from field to glass with greater clarity and control, while strengthening quality assurance, customer engagement and cask management. The platform also includes the fully integrated warehouse management solution, WMS Go.
Scottish National Investment Bank, National Wealth Fund, & Great British Energy
The Scottish National Investment Bank has joined the UK’s National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy in making a significant investment towards a major floating offshore wind project, supporting the country’s clean energy ambitions and bolstering energy security.
Each investor has secured an initial stake in the Pentland Floating Offshore Wind Farm, located off the coast of Dounreay, with the option to invest up to £50 million as the project progresses.
“The offshore wind potential in Scotland is considerable both as a source of energy and, particularly with floating, to export our supply chain,” said Mark Munro, chief investment officer for the SNIB.
The NHS has partnered with Multiverse, an edtech firm, and tech giant Palantir to upskill its staff in AI and data.
The two tech firms will help health staff in their adoption and use of the NHS Federated Data Platform, which is supplied by Palantir.
The data platform connects data is a centralised platform that takes information from separate systems, allowing staff faster access to patient data. Palantir claims that the platform can optimise patient care across the 77 NHS Trusts that are using the service.
Multiverse has signed onto the partnership to support the digital skills training of NHS staff.
The apprenticeship company will work with Palantir to outfit a range of apprenticeship programmes centred on the NHS data platform, with the earliest cohorts set for this coming February.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is partnering with the financial authority of Singapore to support safe and responsible AI innovation across finance.
This partnership aims to enable innovative firms in the UK and Singapore to scale and operate across markets more effectively.
For the first time, the FCA will also establish a presence in Singapore with the appointment of an FCA Financial Services Attaché based at the British High Commission, forming part of a wider plan to establish a presence in other priority markets next year.
A key element of the partnership will be the joint testing of AI solutions, exchange of regulatory insights, and collaborative events to spotlight best-in-class approaches.
Microsoft is teaming up with NVIDIA and WeTransact to support UK startups in their agentic AI ambitions.
The Agentic Launchpad is designed to accelerate the UK’s and Ireland’s AI economy by helping pioneering software companies build intelligent, next-generation AI platforms.
The programme offers startups and scale-ups the opportunity to work with the latest technologies, access to expert guidance, and the potential for global scaling opportunities.
The Launchpad offers participating firms the chance to work directly with Microsoft and Nvidia experts. Firms can receive credits through Microsoft programmes to support their development journey.
Edinburgh-headquartered cybersecurity company Quorum Cyber has made a series of appointments to its senior leadership team to meet its strategic goals.
John Bruce has joined the Microsoft-only company as chief information security officer (CISO), Mike LaPeters as chief revenue officer (CRO), Stacey Sweeney as chief marketing officer (CMO), and Melissa Webb as vice president – Microsoft Partnership.
“Quorum Cyber is entering a new phase of global expansion, and that requires bold leadership,” said Federico Charosky, founder and CEO of Quorum Cyber.
“We are hyper-focused on building a senior team that not only understands the complexity of modern cyber risk but can help us scale our mission worldwide. These leaders bring deep Microsoft expertise, proven operational excellence and an unwavering commitment to help good people win. And there’s much more to come in the near future.”
SOLASTA® Bio, specialising in the next generation of green insecticides, has relocated to purpose-built facilities at the West of Scotland Science Park, marking a major milestone in the company’s growth journey since 2021.
The move from the University of Glasgow campus to the Helix Building at Kelvin Campus provides SOLASTA® Bio with its first dedicated, standalone facility, occupying over 4,000 square feet of custom-fitted laboratory and office space. The new premises house specialised facilities for R&D, including a dedicated insectary, plant and tissue culture rooms, as well as expanded office space and collaborative working areas for the company’s growing 26-person team.
The relocation reflects SOLASTA® Bio’s rapid progress as a University of Glasgow spinout in 2021 that has evolved from an early-stage research company into a commercially focused biotech business. Since securing an oversubscribed $14 million Series A funding round in September 2024, the company has achieved significant technical and regulatory milestones, including its first patent grants and a favourable biochemical-like classification from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its lead peptide candidates.
Awards
Scotland Women in Tech Awards
A hairstylist turned tech entrepreneur was the wildcard winner at tonight’s spectacular Scotland Women in Technology (SWiT) 2025 Awards.
Tracey Aitken, co-founder of HairTracker, a digital record card app that allows salon professionals to document a client’s hair journey and details resulting in stronger customer relationships, took home the Career Changer of the Year award.
Silka Patel, Founder and Chair of Scotland Women in Technology said: “Our winners this year are truly inspirational; bringing fresh perspectives from new sectors, supporting a wealth of peers across the UK, and creating supportive environments for diversity to flourish.”
The traditional CV is losing its grip on hiring decisions, with just four-in-ten employers now rating them among the most reliable indicators of talent in an age of AI-generated applications, according to a new global study from candidate screening platform Willo.
The Hiring Trends Report 2026, published today by Glasgow-founded global recruitment technology firm Willo – which works with some of the biggest employers in the world, including Toyota, easyJet, DPD Group and the NHS – shows that while CVs remain the starting point for most hiring processes, their dominance is weakening fast.
The study found just 37% of employers rate credentials and learning history – as typically outlined in CVs – among the most reliable indicators of talent. Four-in-ten (41%) respondents are actively moving away from CV-first hiring, while 10% of respondents said they have largely replaced CVs with skills-based and scenario-driven assessments. Around 15% of respondents said they are exploring alternatives to CVs.
The annual report, now in its third edition, tracks how hiring attitudes have shifted each year. In 2024, the CV was still the unquestioned default, while by 2025, its credibility had begun to erode with employers as AI-assisted CV became more common. However, the 2026 report has shown a significant shift, with employers now increasingly favouring behavioural interviews, skills tests, and assessments over polished written submissions.
Drawing on responses from more than 100 hiring professionals worldwide, alongside insights from 2.5 million candidate interviews on Willo’s platform, and analysis from hiring experts at major employers including Toyota (GB) and Microsoft, the study has become a widely watched barometer for hiring and talent trends.
“The CV used to tell a story of effort, experience, and aptitude, now it often tells us how well someone can prompt a large language model,” Willo’s CEO and Co-founder Euan Cameron believes the shift in attitudes towards the CVs reflects growing scepticism about what the documents now represent.
“Great candidates are getting lost in a wall of near identical applications, and the best hiring teams are catching on to that. AI is not the end of hiring, what it does mean is the end of hiring based on summaries of experience alone. Employers are looking for real signals of capability, which means moving beyond a single document into skills, scenarios and verified credentials.”
