By Katie Gallagher OBE
I have been meaning to write this since I got back from London Tech Week, but today is my first opportunity to properly reflect on a week that was full of roundtables, summits, meetings and a significant flurry of policy announcements.
On Monday 8 June the government published AI Adoption Plans from all eight AI Champions at the AI Adoption Summit at the Science Museum, alongside the AI Hardware Plan and a number of other significant announcements. I wrote the Digital and Technologies sector plan in my role as AI Champion for the sector - you can read it in full here. You can find the full set of announcements from the week on GOV.UK here.
Any document about AI written in 2026 is going to age quickly, and I knew that going in. What I tried to do was focus on the things I believe will remain true regardless of which tools are dominant in two years, that skills, governance, culture and the challenge of moving from experimenting with AI to genuinely integrating it are where the real difficulty lives for most businesses. The thing I felt most strongly about was writing it with regional businesses genuinely in mind, not the large enterprise with a dedicated AI function, but the kind of company that makes up the majority of the sector outside London and the South East, working out where to start and learning from peers because there is no internal expert to ask.
The Early Careers Jobs Alliance was also announced at the Summit, a partnership between businesses and trade unions to protect and redesign entry-level work as AI changes the nature of junior roles, which I am co-chairing alongside Mike Clancy from the Prospect trade union. The data underpinning it is uncomfortable: the number of 16 to 24 year olds in computer programming fell 44% in a single year, and only one in ten young people believe the benefits of AI will be shared fairly. This is one of the most important things we can be working on right now, and I intend to keep pushing it forward rather than treating the announcement as the end of the story.
The additional investment into AI Growth Zones, Tech Towns and the expansion of Bridge AI are all things I particularly welcome, because the consistent theme I hear from businesses across Greater Manchester is that national ambition needs to be matched by genuine support for businesses and places outside the major clusters, and these are meaningful steps in that direction.
The following morning the UK Tech Cluster Group had a really useful conversation with Emran Mian, the Permanent Secretary of DSIT, which gave us the opportunity to dig into some of the week's announcements and have an honest discussion about the relationship between national tech strategy and local devolution, and the role that regional cluster organisations like ours play in making sure that ambition translates into something real on the ground. I came away feeling that there is genuine appetite in the department to get this right, which is an encouraging foundation to build on.
Our job now is to make sure these ambitions land well in Greater Manchester, keeping a close eye on how some of these policy announcements develop and influencing how they are delivered. In practical terms it also means making sure that our members and the broader tech sector here have the knowledge and connections to take full advantage of what is on offer. If you are already a member and would like to be more involved in these conversations, please get in touch with the membership team. And if you are not yet a member, we would love you to consider joining and supporting our work.
