Salesforce: Labour’s AI plan won’t work without skills push
The UK could fall short of its economic growth ambitions unless it accelerates investment in workforce skills to match the rapid expansion of AI technologies, Salesforce has warned.
This statement comes following the UK government and leading tech firms unveil major plans to enhance the country’s AI capabilities.
At the opening of London Tech Week on Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang launched the UK’s first sovereign AI industry forum.
“This is a huge vote of confidence for the UK”, Starmer announced at the event. “AI and take make us more human, and it’s making a huge difference for working people”.
Infrastructure rises, but skills still lag
While efforts to boost hardware and industrial capacity are gaining momentum, business leaders and analysts are highlighting a critical gap in AI skills.
Salesforce, alongside other UK employers, is supporting a government-led commitment to train 7.5m workers in AI skills in the next five years.
The initiative aims to equip workers for a fast changing job market where AI is expected to fundamentally reshape roles and workflows.
The warning reflects a wider concern across the economy, as a growing number of UK firms are deploying agentic AI – systems capable of carrying out complex tasks with limited human input – to drive productivity.
Salesforce’s chief executive of UKI, Zahra Bahrololoumi CBE, told City AM: “Agentic AI represents a new economic model reshaping UK businesses.”
“By adopting AI agents early, UK companies of all sizes are driving significant productivity gains and enabling human workers to focus on more high-value areas across their business”, she added.
But without widespread skills development, many firms risk being left behind.
According to a recent Salesforce survey of UK execs, shared exclusively with City AM, 78 per cent of firms are already using AI agents, with expectations of a 26 per cent productivity uplift.
Yet the ability to scale such tools across industries will depend heavily on whether the workforce is ready to adopt them.
A national approach
The UK government’s AI strategy has so far focused heavily on research, regulation and and attracting global investment.
The formation of the sovereign AI forum is a positive step towards reducing reliance on foreign infrastructure and establishing leadership in the field.
But training the workforce to match this ambition remains a critical challenge, with analysts noting that while high-profile investments are key, the benefits of AI will be unevenly distributed without parallel effforts in reskilling.
“There’s clear momentum around infrastructure”, said Dr Priya Choudhury, a senior researcher at the Institute for Public Policy Research.
“But to avoid a widening gap between AI-ready firms and those left behind, we need mass-scale skills programmes that are easy to access, especially for smaller businesses and lower-income workers”.
Business leaders are advocating for a national digital skills platform to coordinate training efforts, and with more than 80 per cent of senior leaders in the UK and Ireland planning to train their teams on AI in the next year, the deamdn for high quality training is only expected to grow.