UK businesses must be given more guardrails around AI, the director of a data and AI consultancy recently invited to 10 Downing Street has asserted.
Purple Frog Systems‘ Holly Whittles was one of around 150 people to attend a VIP reception led by the Prime Minister behind the famous black door last month.
It came a year after Sir Kier Starmer promised to “mainline AI into the veins of the UK” as he unveiled the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan.
In the intervening 12 months, the government claims it has met its commitments against 38 of the 50 actions contained in the plan.
“I was heartened”
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Whittles said she was “heartened” by what she heard from the Prime Minister during the event, which was held on 16 February.
“It surprised me how positive he was about it, because a lot of the news is about the negative side of AI. But he was very much, ‘no, we’re doing this; we’re going to be world leaders’.
“I was also heartened by the fact they had full representation from corporates all the way down to micro businesses.”
Whittles was there to represent The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). She also recently created a Data & AI Guidebook for channel trade association the GTIA, for which she is Vice Chair of the UK & Ireland Executive Council.
“[The FSB] invited the CEO, and he wasn’t free, so they asked me to go. My business does data and AI, so they were like, ‘you’re the best fit to go’,” she said.
“There needs to be more guard rails”
Since it launched its AI Opportunity Action Plan, the government claims it has worked with industry to deliver over one million AI courses towards its goal of upskilling 10 million workers by 2030.
Asked what her message back to the government is following the event, Whittles urged it to do as much on AI governance as it is on AI skills, saying, “I’m not seeing enough of that”.
“I think there definitely needs to be more guard rails,” she said.
“I think businesses are completely unaware of how to use AI responsibly.
“For example, people are just using free versions of ChatGPT and then uploading customer spreadsheets because they want to model something – and they don’t know that means that data’s now left the UK and the EU and is being used to train AI agents somewhere.
“They have no idea what they’re doing, and there needs to be more communication around that side of things. For me, it’s not just about AI skills; it’s about that whole governance piece.”
Whittles also criticised the Innovate UK campaign for being too focused on “looking for the next Dyson” rather than spreading its budget among services-based firms.
“They’re looking for a unicorn. And I’m like, ‘but you could help small businesses innovate, and they could adopt Copilot or do a lot of machine learning projects’.
“I went to a civil servant round table and one of them came up to me afterwards and said, ‘I think we’ve forgotten about the service-based businesses’.”
Purple Frog is “seeing demand for AI, but not necessarily the budget for it”, Whittles said.
“Because of the way the UK economy is at the moment, businesses are a bit reluctant to spend money,” she explained.
“My one aim”
Did Whittles meet Larry the cat?
“I did meet the cat and that was my one aim,” she responded.
“I saw him at the end – he was having a big clean-up session by the front door.
“It’s huge,” Whittles added of the famous residence.
“You go in, and then you have to turn your phone off and there are little pigeonholes they go in – and then you’re just led through room after room after room.
“The stairs look exactly like Love, Actually, with the Hugh Grant dancing thing, and you end up in these big ballrooms. It was just beautiful.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
