London Tech Week’s House of Lords AI Summit Warns “Skill Cliff Edge” Threats Britain’s competitive future
The summit held in the House of Lords during London Tech Week raised an alarm on the looming “skill cliff edge” of the British workforce as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape the economy and redefine the work roles of the industry as a whole.
The summit was hosted by Steven George-Hilley, founder of Centropy PR, bringing together thought leaders from the technology, law, finance and cybersecurity sectors to conduct extensive discussions on the challenges and opportunities posed by AI.
consensus? The UK has the potential to lag behind international competitors unless it urgently accelerates efforts to build an AI-Literate workforce, protect data integrity and adopt ethical guardrails in AI deployments.
ACHI LEWIS-DHALIWAL, AVP UK, EMEA and India warn in absolute security that AI has greatly escalated the scale and complexity of cyber threats, especially for data-rich areas such as financial services.
“The financial services industry has a lot of sensitive data that is constantly threatened by malicious cyber actors, especially with the rise of AI-driven attacks,” he said. “If we are on the UK’s critical infrastructure in the future, these discussions must be based on real-world cyber risk scenarios.”
Leigh Allen, a strategic advisor at Cellebrite, highlighted how AI’s proof in digital forensics proves transformative, saying: “AI is a key enabler to unlock digital evidence and significantly reduce investigation time, greatly helping the police force and combating national security threats.”
She added that combining AI with ethical access to digital evidence is key to building a safer community and a stronger digital justice system.
James Tuttiett, UK sales director and EMEA sales director at FDM Group, pointed out the strategic disconnect in the UK industry: “There is a lack of a joint vision and strategy in terms of AI.
He stressed that as automation reshapes careers, more focus is needed to teach “how to ask the right questions for AI, rather than accepting answers.” He added that understanding timely engineering is essential to prepare for a flexible and agile workforce.
Arkadiy Ukolov, founder of ULLA Technology, tagged data privacy risks around popular AI tools that send user data to third-party providers for model training.
“This creates a serious risk of data leakage when it comes to sensitive conference discussions or customer information. If we want to serve society rather than destroy society’s AI, then ethics must be in the House of Lords Discussion Center.”
Stuart Harvey, CEO of Belfast-based analytics firm Datactics, urges decision makers to focus not only on AI adoption, but also on the data quality itself.
“In the rush to adopt AI tools, many organizations ignore the underlying issues of dispersed or inaccurate data. Without high-quality, reliable data sets, AI models will produce unreliable and even harmful output.”
Chris Davison, CEO of Navlive, demonstrates active applications of AI, such as using real-time 2D and 3D architectural modeling to achieve sustainable architecture.
“By creating accurate real-time spatial data throughout the life cycle of a building, architects, engineers and construction professionals can save a lot of time and money,” he said. “This is where AI can power real economic growth.”
