Achieving the UK’s AI ambitions

Nikolaz Foucaud at Coursera proposes ways for the UK to become a global leader in emerging technology

 

The UK is ambitious with its AI dreams. With bold plans announced by Keir Starmer at London Tech Week, and Rachel Reeves having outlined £86 billion in the Spending Review for tech funding, the UK is seeking to create a propitious, well-funded environment for AI growth.

 

But as the UK intensifies its efforts to attain AI leadership status, these efforts must be backed by investment in AI skills. For the UK to succeed alongside AI, institutional leaders must react to attract, develop, and retain AI-literate talent.

 

This is all the more important as the global race towards AI literacy is accelerating, among both businesses and enterprises. In 2025, 925 GenAI courses on Coursera have cumulatively averaged 12 enrolments per minute, a dramatic increase from 1 per minute in 2023, and 8 in 2024, and Coursera recently saw its ten millionth enrolment in GenAI courses, making GenAI the fastest-growing skill category on the platform.

 

It’s vital that this forward momentum is sustained, as a workforce equipped with the necessary skills will be critical to the future of technology and business in the UK.

 

 

The UK AI skills debate

On the global AI leaderboard, the UK’s rank, ahead of some major European peers (including Germany (14th), France (23rd), and Spain (28th)) and China, indicates that it is currently well-placed to become an AI leader. This is according to our inaugural AI Maturity Index, which measures a nation’s strength in AI research, innovation, and learning.

 

With this insight, we can see that while the UK is placed competitively – 13th out of 109 countries – it is still lagging behind European leaders and the United States. There is intense regional competition as nations strive to attain AI maturity – of the top ten in this Index, seven are European. The UK is having to vie with its close neighbours for AI superpower status. To achieve its ambitions, it must pair bold technological infrastructure investment with equally bold skills infrastructure development.

 

In 2023, in the wake of ChatGPT’s rise to prominence, the UK’s AI sector grew 30 times faster than the wider economy. We’re now operating in an AI-driven economy, with individual British learners seeking to meet a 99% surge in employer demand for AI and ML skills. This urgency is reflected in a 118% spike in GenAI course enrolments among UK learners on the Coursera platform, a solid leap, but still trailing the global average growth of 195%. The rest of the world is currently acquiring GenAI skills at a quicker rate than British learners. 

 

In addition, the distribution of AI skills remains uneven. Just 28% of GenAI learners in the UK are women, and only 35% of STEM enrolments are from female learners, risking a gender imbalance that could stall inclusive progress and universal product utility. Meanwhile, cyber-security, essential to safeguarding a digital AI-powered economy, saw only 6% growth in skills uptake, despite more than 25% of UK businesses having been hit by a cyber-attack in the last year, signalling an area needing immediate additional attention as the UK aims to lead in the digital economy.

 

 

Expanding the UK’s AI skills base

The UK’s ambition to become a global AI skills hub is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle: closing the digital skills gap that’s draining £63 billion from the UK economy every year. The surge in demand for AI innovation will only accelerate, and it must be matched by a comparable surge in talent supply if the UK wants to lead, not follow, in the AI race.

 

Any serious claim to AI superpower status relies upon raising AI proficiency across the entire UK workforce, not just a select few. To be an AI innovation leader, Britain must also be an AI skills leader. This requires fixing the AI gender skills gap, which already threatens to limit the potential of the sector before it reaches maturity. It means broadening our investment in digital skills, especially in fields like cyber-security, which are critical to supporting and protecting an AI-powered economy.

 

We also need to learn from peer nations that currently outperform the UK. Countries across Europe, including Estonia, Denmark, Switzerland and beyond, are making significant strides in closing their skills gaps and preparing their workforces for an AI-driven future. The UK should study and adapt these successes, ensuring we remain competitive and ready, and focus on leadership, driving education and skills development programmes, with three key steps focused on this goal.

 

 

Three core steps for the UK’s AI skills strategy

 

1 Ensure AI skills are integrated into lifelong learning 

Efforts to equip learners with AI literacy must begin early and continue throughout the lives of British learners. The UK should integrate AI, data, and computational thinking into primary and secondary curricula, expand vocational AI pathways, and partner with universities to scale practical, industry-aligned AI modules across disciplines. This builds a broad base of AI familiarity while nurturing deep expertise for advanced roles.

 

2 Motivate AI talent development across the workforce

Keir Starmer committed an extra £1 billion of funding to scale up our compute power by a factor of 20, but skills investment must accompany infrastructure investment. To close the immediate AI skills gap, the UK can introduce tax incentives and funding programmes encouraging employers to upskill workers in AI, machine learning, and complementary areas like cybersecurity and data ethics. Collaboration with industry to co-create AI bootcamps, apprenticeships, and micro-credential courses will ensure training aligns with real-world needs, empowering workers across sectors to confidently use and adapt to AI tools.

 

3 Promote diverse learning opportunities to help fix emerging skills gaps

Efforts to improve AI skills must go hand-in-hand with efforts to close gender and diversity gaps in tech. The UK should invest in targeted scholarships, mentorship schemes, and community-led programmes to encourage underrepresented groups to pursue AI learning. This ensures the UK’s AI workforce reflects the diversity of its population, unlocking a wider range of perspectives and strengthening the ethical, practical, and innovative use of AI across the economy.

 

 

Setting up the UK for AI success

While modern AI is still in an early stage, the UK’s ambitions to grow alongside AI will rise or fall upon our ability to accelerate skills development: can we empower our workforce with the necessary skills, at the right scale, at the right time?

 

This is the key challenge that both the public and private sectors must prepare to overcome. To become a global AI leader, the UK must be a force of AI-ready talent, ready to use AI responsibly while innovating and pushing its development towards new levels of positive impact and change. 

 

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Nikolaz Foucaud is Managing Director, EMEA at Coursera

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and MF3d