Some companies are “stuck in neutral” in their approach to artificial intelligence, according to Microsoft’s UK boss, who said a significant number of private and public sector organisations lack any formal AI strategy.
A Microsoft survey of nearly 1,500 UK senior leaders across public and private sectors, as well as 1,440 employees, found that more than half of executives feel their organisation has no official AI plan. Roughly the same proportion report a growing gap in productivity – a measure of economic efficiency – between employees who use AI and those who do not.
“Some organisations appear to be stuck in neutral, caught in the experimentation phase, rather than in the deployment [of AI],” said Darren Hardman, the tech company’s UK chief executive.
Microsoft, the biggest financial backer of the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI, has been pushing AI’s deployment in the workplace through autonomous AI agents – tools that can carry out tasks without human intervention. Early adopters of Microsoft’s Copilot Studio product, which deploys bots, include the blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey, which is using agents to carry out tasks such as scheduling meetings with prospective clients.
The Tony Blair Institute, a thinktank, has estimated AI could displace up to 3m jobs in the UK, although it expects the net loss to be in the low hundreds of thousands as the technology creates new roles. Speaking to the Guardian, Hardman said AI agents would remove the “digital drudgery” of people’s jobs and allow them to focus on the “creative aspects” of their jobs, potentially creating new roles as the first wave of the internet did for the retail sector.
Referring to the creation of new roles in retail such as data analysts, web designers and social media managers, he said: “The nature of that industry changed with the onset of the internet. And I think the creation of an agentic workplace is going to do the same.”
Hardman said proposed reforms to UK copyright law, which are fiercely opposed by Britain’s creative industries, would provide “wider economic growth for the UK”.
He said: “We think it’s going to provide clarity. We think it’s going to support AI development.”
The UK government is proposing to allow tech companies such as Microsoft to use copyright-protected work without permission in order to train their models. Critics of the proposals have described them as a “wholesale” transfer of wealth from the creative industries to the tech sector.
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Separately, the former chief executive of BP Bernard Looney has been appointed the chair of the UK technology startup ExpectAI. Looney left the oil and gas company in 2023 after admitting he had failed to fully disclose a series of personal relationships with his colleagues to the board.
He has been appointed to help accelerate the expansion of ExpectAI, which uses data to help small and medium-sized businesses cut costs and reduce emissions.
