London Mayor Sadiq Khan will spend £12 million to help businesses adopt AI
Key Points
- London Mayor Sadiq Khan has announced a £12-million investment in improving AI adoption in London.
- The funds will be used to improve education around AI and help with implementation, focusing specifically on small- and medium-sized companies.
- Khan noted that while most London companies believe they need AI to compete, just 16% have integrated the technology into their operations.
- This comes as the UK government backs a sovereign frontier AI, trained and operated entirely on British soil using the country's most powerful supercomputer.
Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan has announced a massive new investment in furthering the adoption of AI among businesses in the capital.
The Mayor has unveiled a £12-million investment programme, which will spend £4 million every year for the next three years on accelerating AI adoption. Funding will be specifically directed at small- to medium-sized businesses with the goal of unlocking new economic growth opportunities for London.
Khan made the announcement at London Tech Week, where he said his goal was to make London the go-to launchpad for start-ups, scale-ups, and established companies that are using AI.
He said this increased funding would also help to improve the adoption and learning around AI in the capital, pointing to research that found only 16% of SMEs currently use AI as part of their operations.
This is despite almost two-thirds of these businesses believing that AI will be critical to their ability to remain competitive in the future. Research suggests the biggest obstacles to improving AI adoption are a lack of expertise and concerns around the cost of implementation – challenges which the Mayor’s new fund aims to address.
The funding will be used to provide AI mentoring, workshops, and guidance to small businesses, support their confidence in using and integrating AI tools, and help them to use these tools to improve their efficiency.
“We want every business to benefit from the opportunities AI can unlock,” Khan said.
“This investment will help thousands of SMEs adopt new technologies, boost productivity, create better jobs and drive growth across the capital.”
“By backing businesses to innovate and equipping Londoners with the skills they need for the future, we can help build a fairer, more prosperous city for everyone.”
National investment in home-grown AI
This announcement from the Mayor of London comes as a coalition of companies has been formed to design a fully sovereign frontier AI model in Britain.
Called Lumen Sovereign, the model’s development will be driven by £500 million in funding from the government’s Sovereign AI programme and will be trained using Isambard-AI, the UK’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer.
Headed by AI firm Cosine, the coalition includes BAE Systems, Babcock International Group, BT, Lloyds Banking Group, and The Alan Turing Institute.
This sovereign AI model will not rely on any foreign infrastructure, improving its resilience to geopolitical or trade pressures while ensuring data is stored and controlled domestically.
It will not pre-train a new model, but instead will upcycle and existing open-weight model using the sovereign compute allocated to it.
The deployment of Lumen Sovereign is expected by late 2026.
