Practical thinking on AI skills, adoption and regional growth.
Notes from the room - what we learn running hands-on AI labs with communities, small businesses and universities.
AI money is coming to the regions
The Budget put the government's AI package at over £700m. One line mattered for us in Yorkshire: £30m to kickstart local AI partnerships, with West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, and York and North Yorkshire all named.
The Weekly Lab Report: 2–8 November 2026
Four stories from last week, and what they mean if you are running a UK business, starting a career, or building AI capability in Yorkshire.
The entry-level jobs aren't disappearing. They're moving.
Dario Amodei warned this week that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Those roles will change, but old entry points closing is what happens every time tech moves on. The real question is whether the people coming into the job market have the skills to step into what opens up.
We are brilliant at starting things. Now we need to keep them.
The UK is very good at starting companies. Where we fall down is keeping them, scaling them and backing them with our own money. Notes from the Innovation Nation Summit in Manchester, and three fixes that would change where the money flows.
What I took from the UK Credit and Collections Conference
The credit and collections sector is going tool-first with AI, more so than the rest of financial services. The blocker isn't technology or regulation, it's that nobody owns the work. Notes from a day at the UK Credit and Collections Conference.
The One Per Cent Problem
UK businesses have never been more aware of AI. Almost none of them have scaled it, governed it, or measured what it returned. Thousands of people have completed awareness courses. Confidence in AI terminology is up. And yet only 1% of organisations have reached the point where AI is actually delivering value at scale. That distance: between knowing what AI is and knowing what to do with it, is where the value is being lost. And it is not a skills problem.
Awareness is not employability
87% of employers expect AI to reshape entry-level roles. At the same time, competition for graduate jobs has hit record levels. A certificate saying students attended an AI awareness session does very little in that market — because so did everyone else.