Today, the UK’s Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has announced the formal launch of the ‘AI Opportunities Action Plan’, a wide-ranging State-backed effort to drive AI use and thus more economic growth. But, will the legal and legal tech sectors benefit from this?
First, what is it? In broad terms it’s an update on plans already shared back in July, but essentially it will focus on:
- ‘Helping to turbocharge growth and boost living standards,
- [Helping] the public sector to spend less time doing admin and more time delivering the services working people rely on,
- Dedicated AI Growth Zones to speed up planning for AI infrastructure, [ e.g. around speeding up development of UK-based data centres, which will be needed to support the growth of genAI needs.]
- ‘Increasing the public compute capacity by twentyfold to give us the processing power we need to fully embrace this new technology – this starts immediately with work starting on a brand-new supercomputer.
- A new team will be set up to seize the opportunities of AI and build the UK’s sovereign capabilities
- Creating a new National Data Library to safely and securely unlock the value of public data and support AI development
- A dedicated AI Energy Council chaired by the Science and Energy Secretaries will also be established, working with energy companies to understand the energy demands and challenges which will fuel the technology’s development – this will directly support the government’s mission to become a clean energy superpower by tapping into technologies like small modular reactors.
- Taken together, these measures (and others among a total of 50 measures) will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business.’