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A bright double-decker bus, a click and collect, and a patient queue. I was standing in the latter, waiting to descend onto the main floor at London Tech Week, overlooking the others.
The conference, now in its 12th year, welcomed over 30,000 people. I say hello to an investor I know as we pass by one another. Later, a different VC intersects my line of sight and waves from across the room. I was in the middle of an interview, my train of thought then lost like that bus from its fleet.
The dominant theme? AI, AI, AI. The startup and venture capital ecosystem does often live in its own bubble, but AI has undoubtebly pierced the public consciousness. At 7.30am in a central London cafe on Tuesday, a 5.7 mile drive from London Tech Week’s Olympia event space, I overheard the same topic of conversation again and again.
It is no surprise, then, that AI was “substantively” featured around half of the sessions, panels, and workshops — at least according to AI analysis of the conference programme. The AI Arena was the biggest and busiest stage, welcoming Dr Lisa Su, the CEO of semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD; Microsoft’s UK and Ireland chief executive Darren Hardman; and startup founders such as ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski and Lovable’s Fabian Hedin.
Huge sums of capital were announced by British politicians this week. For example, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a £1.1 billion AI compute strategy including £400 million for specialist AI chips, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan committed £12 million for helping the capital’s small businesses adopt AI.
While there was international representation across the agenda and on the conference floor, there was no getting away from the Great Britain and Northern Ireland branding in the main space. “Where future tech meets real world progress,” one banner read, next a to neon Union Jack.
Companies made pledges too. AMD announced £2 billion over five years to fund high performance computing with Cambridge University, including a Sovereign AI Innovation Lab in partnership with Dell. It will also invest in R&D with Imperial College, and cut cheques to UK startups. Meanwhile, AI cloud provider Nebius committed £1.7 billion to expand AI capacity.
Quantum computing, autonomous vehicles, and deep tech had a decent showing. It was the first year of a new Deep Tech Stage, which also covered space, robotics, and life sciences.
With vast amounts of cash sloshing around for AI, the conference was soaked in optimism. It felt noticeably busier and more vibrant than last year. The AI Arena always seemed full, while there were pockets of conversation and debate all throughout the exhibition hall with mini-stages at some larger stands.
For Deliverance AI CEO Mick McNeil, the agenda served as evidence that AI is real and urgent for enterprises. He also saw it as a sign the UK is leaning in but says it still has work to do.
“This AI thing isn’t conceptual anymore — it’s real, and therefore it’s a race for every company to embrace it before their competitors do,” he tells me in the speakers’ lounge. “The government is increasingly leaning in to support the growth of AI capabilities, but the UK is still playing catch up because France, the UAE, the US and China are all a couple of years ahead.”
Capitalising on the buzz, Deliverance AI emerged from stealth this week with £6 million ARR, more than 30 employees and six enterprise customers — all within three months of incorporation. The startup is building what McNeil calls an “agentic operating system” to govern AI workflows and model across an organisation. It handles security, compliance, and budgets while a library of tools and agents automate internal processes to either cut costs or increase revenue.
It reminds me of a conversation with an investor a few weeks back. He questioned why companies were so focused on making efficiencies with AI, rather than improving profits with it. That gap is what Deliverance AI is hoping to tap into by showing the return on investment of AI tools. One of its features compares the cost of agent execution with the cost of a human doing the same work.
Another AI executive was impressed with the coverage of AI in regulated industries, he tells me on the sidelines. Conversations around policy and risk were rich, as were those focused on AI in finance and public services, he says. Many of them focused on implementation.
At an event at the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday evening, I wondered: should AI become the next heavily regulated industry? I’m sure the tech bros and CEOs I left behind in Kensington would disagree, but it seems the British public think so. I took a seat in a committee room and listened to an Aussie present his research into the UK’s perception of AI. Most people aren’t against it, he found, they just reckon it should be regulated.
Brits are also concerned with Silicon Valley’s concentration of power and the few billionaires who are building this next generation of technology. How their values are embedded into AI ,and the UK’s dependency on it, lead to questions of culture and identity.
These findings reinforce a dominant narrative coming out of Westminster: the need for Sovereign AI.
As GCHQ’s Anne Keast-Bulter describes on stage to the BBC’s Zoe Kleinman back at London Tech Week, the UK is setting its own rules, standards, and oversight for AI. It is protecting critical national infrastructure and supply chains and aims to strike a balance between state powers, privacy, and child protection. The country’s position, she says, is “partnering for good”.
“The UK benefits from the AI security institute, which is really world leading in its ability to evaluate models and provide advice,” Keast-Bulter adds.
Perhaps I missed it, having slid into the hall a little late, but there was no mention of Palantir’s controversial contract with the NHS.
Not all problems can be fixed by throwing money at them, though that is the first step in competing against deep-pocketed peers across the Atlantic and one Europe has long failed to do.
For Ekaterina Almasque, a founding partner at BlankPage Capital, limited datasets, talent retention and a lack of interdisciplinary work are also key challenges to AI and deeptech in the UK.
The investor’s argument is that “we are losing a lot of talent” because startups in the UK are not capitalised well enough to pass that on to employees, which is why people head Stateside.
McNeil, an Irishman, says one of the lures of London is its talent. It is the case with many founders I speak with, inside and outside of conferences. The British capital’s proximity to Deliverance AI’s potential customers — large telcos, financial services, government — is also a win. McNeil calls London an “easy choice” as a market for growth on these merits.
“I think that it’s underestimated how my teams still need to learn how to work together. Even if you have a very good AI team and very good biology team, they usually don’t speak the same language, and sometimes there is a resistance to try to learn the language of another,” Almasque adds.
AI is limited by the amount of compute that’s available, according to Lumai’s head of product Phillip Burr.
“They look at the road maps that silicon suppliers are providing, and they look at their demand that they are forecasting, and the two things are massively different, and so they are actively looking at new technology to try and solve this problem,” Burr says of AI and frontier labs.
Lumai has built what it says is the first optical computing system capable of running billion-parameter LLMs in real time.
But as countries go all-in on AI, the shine may well be dull for those observing from the sidelines. US economists talk about a K-shaped economy, where one portion of society grows while the other declines. The most stark example of this is in San Francisco.
In Dublin, a housing crisis often attributed to Big Tech’s inflated salaries pushed locals into the periphery, while Lisbon’s reputation as a digital nomad hotspot inflated costs for everyone. Britain is infamous for its class divide, so it must be thoughtful in how this technology is scaled as companies ramp up compensation to keep talent on home turf.
Almasque is cautiously optimistic about generating wealth and keeping it in Britain.
“The more we generate wealth in the UK, the more it will spread across different areas,” she says. “You create infrastructure, you create everything, and create the future for society.”
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