Scanning New Horizons: Have we taken the first step of the technological revolution?

I have been to more conferences than I care to count in my career. Tepid coffee, body-numbing seating, convoluted sales pitches guised as expert panels are all par for the course. The Future of Britain 2024 event hosted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change claimed to be an initiative conference which “sets out a policy agenda for this new era of invention and innovation, with technology as the driving force.” This time, I’m pleased to confirm, it was an agenda they delivered.

As the CEO of a tech company that puts modelling and simulation into the hands of our leaders so that they can make better decisions, I crave debates like this. The line up of past and present political leaders in attendance added serious weight to the discussions and was an encouraging sign that governments are taking seriously the power and potential of technology as a force for good.

As Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, points out:

“We are on the brink of a technological revolution that could jumpstart productivity, boost global growth, and raise incomes around the world.”

The Secretary of State for Health & Social Care Rt Hon Wes Streeting MPand Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden, along with former Italian and Finnish Prime Ministers Matteo Renzi and Sanna Marin, respectively, all pressed the impetus of this increasingly urgent agenda. It is clear that we are at an inflection point on how decisions, policies, and insights are going to be made moving forward, and that technology is the catalyst of this change across every major industry, both in the UK and abroad.

I think this spark of change is brought about by the improved pairing of humans and machines like never before. We are putting more energy into driving innovation across healthcare, net zero, infrastructure, government, and so much more for the future of our children and generations to come. AI, unsurprisingly, was the focus topic of this step change in human and machine pairing – but AI is spoken of so broadly, and I was excited to hear how many of the examples directly aligned with modelling and simulation which, yes, often uses AI technologies.

I think the real key to why this conference was so successful was that each conversation, panel, or presentation married the truth about where we are failing, with the rather exciting fact that we do actually have the tools to fix the cracks we’re slipping into.

We, as a collective of conference attendees, seemed quite comfortable admitting that the status quo when it comes to using data effectively to make better decisions isn’t working. A study of 16,000 large projects from 20 fields, 136 countries, since 1910 shows:

• 91.5% of large projects go over budget, over schedule, or both
• < 1% of projects are on time, to schedule, and deliver promised benefits
• 18% of IT projects over-run in cost at greater than 50%; of those, the average over-run is 447%

The fact is, we are failing our decision makers by not providing them with the means to make long-term decisions in today’s complex environment. There is too much data to handle. Too much complexity to parse through. Too little experimentation that can be done safely. And too many interconnected systems of systems to understand. This means that decisions are being made without attending to the second, third, fourth order effects that follow, or having enough visibility to course correct when a plan gets off track. It’s an uphill battle and if you can’t get to the top of the hill, how will you ever be able to scan over the mountaintops, into the horizon, and see where we need to go next?

That’s why it was a welcome relief to hear the TBI speakers credit breakthrough technologies and call for investment that will give decision makers the incredible power to climb that hill and help them plan for a more prosperous, digitally enabled future. In fact, the TBI pointed out that conventional policies that embrace emerging technologies could boost the UK’s growth by up to 0.5%, helping to deliver the Office for Budget Responsibility’s optimistic forecast and return growth to 2% overall.

For Skyral, a UK-headquartered technology company, these projections are exciting, and the UK’s position in the AI race is strong – ranking around third globally. We have the third largest number of top-tier AI researchers (MarcoPolo 2022), we are in the top three global destinations for AI venture capital (OECD 2023), and we are home to the third largest number of AI unicorns in the world (Global AI index 2023). As exciting as that is, to achieve the ambitions presented at this conference and to get to that brighter tomorrow, we need to harness and support this advantage both domestically and internationally.

It is my hope that our new government encourages and shapes their future industrial strategy around the investment, uptake and export of novel technologies, such as AI, and advances modelling and simulation. The outputs and recommendations, which I heard from the stellar panel of experts at the TBI conference, would be a good place to start. Growth does not happen without the might of good policy-making to back it. The options are wide-ranging and touch every government department’s interests. From investing in high-performance computing and digital infrastructure, and expanding the availability of capital for deep-tech ventures, through to investment reforms which establish a national programme for digital skills so we can attract the top tech talent. The stage is primed to harness emerging technologies more than ever before.

We can choose to stick with the status quo or we can embrace the change we need. For the folks that gathered at The Future of Britain 2024, the choice for change was crystal clear.