UK organisations are embracing AI at a solid pace – nearly two-thirds (64%) now use the technology, up from 52% last year and the equivalent of one new business adopting every 40 seconds.
Yet for the vast majority, AI remains little more than a fancy productivity hack.
More than half of adopters (58%) are still stuck at the most basic level: using off-the-shelf chatbots, scheduling assistants, or tools to summarise documents and draft emails. It’s the corporate equivalent of owning a smartphone and only ever using it to make phone calls.
More than half (58%) of AI-adopting organisations are still stuck at the most basic level by using off-the-shelf chatbots, scheduling assistants, or tools to summarise documents and draft emails.
That’s the central finding of new research from AWS and Strand Partners, based on a survey of 1,000 UK business leaders and a nationally representative poll of consumers. While adoption is surging, the depth of use is barely budging.
Advanced AI users, those combining multiple models, building custom systems, or deploying agentic AI that can plan and execute multi-step tasks autonomously, report average efficiency gains of 68%, Amazon said.
Only 24% of UK AI adopters have reached that advanced stage, a mere one-percentage-point increase from last year. At the current pace, it would take until 2102 for every adopter to get there.
The report estimates £35 billion in additional productivity gains by 2030 if basic users moved to advanced applications, roughly the entire annual economic output of Manchester.
Startups and the public sector are showing the way
The organisations moving fastest are startups, with some 88% of UK startups using AI.
Surprisingly, the public sector is also punching above its weight on advanced use. Some 58% of public bodies have adopted AI, and 31% of those have reached the most advanced stage, higher than the private-sector average.
Use cases go well beyond basic chatbots and include analysing large administrative datasets (61%), fraud detection (43%), and predictive analytics (38%).
The Department for Work and Pensions, for example, used generative AI to triage 25,000 daily letters and spot vulnerable cases on the same day, achieving a 91% success rate.
Yet only 19% of public organisations have a formal AI strategy, and 58% lack a dedicated AI or digital transformation budget.
Skills shortages
Across the board, 49% of organisations cite shortages of AI and digital skills as their single biggest challenge, up from 46% last year.
Only 17% say they currently have a strong AI skillset, even though 84% expect those skills to be critical in the next five years.
67% of workers say they want to learn new AI skills, with 41% calling it urgent. But 36% don’t know where to start, and more than half have never received formal AI training from their employer.
Organisations are already feeling the pain in the labour market. It now takes an average of eight months to fill digital roles (up 45% in a year), and companies are willing to pay a 41% salary premium for strong AI talent.
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