Digital Leaders

When AI regulation comes up in a room full of digital leaders, it tends to get discussed like the weather. Something that happens to you. You forecast it, you grumble about it, but there’s little you can do besides carry an umbrella or a sun hat. The unspoken model is that regulation is a brake, your job is to make progress despite it, and the best you can hope for is that the brake is applied gently. I want to argue that this thinking is dangerously upside down.

What value do Customer Principles bring? Customer Principles ensure decisions focus on the needs of the customers rather than personal preference. They give everyone in the organisation a shared understanding of how it should feel to interact with their brand, services and products. This can be especially important when the organisation is going through a lot of change and want to maintain consistent quality in customer experiences.

There is a lot of excitement in local government about AI, automation and predictive insight. Understandably so. Councils are under pressure to meet rising demand with shrinking budgets, and better use of innovative technology is one of the few levers available. But in my view, the more urgent question is not whether councils are ready for AI. It is whether their data is ready to support better decisions at all.

The UK has made its ambitions clear. It wants to be a global leader in artificial intelligence. It is investing in AI infrastructure, advanced computing, regional growth and sovereign capability. Businesses are adopting AI at pace, while public-sector leaders are considering how the technology can improve services, productivity and decision-making. But there is a question at the centre of this agenda that still receives too little attention.

Britain has no AI law and arguing over whether to pass one misses the point. What protects people and drives growth is the same: capability and the freedom to switch suppliers. In a recent conversation with a group of senior business leaders, one of them asked me whether the UK needs its own AI bill. When I told them that was the wrong question, my answer caused a stir. Let me explain. The instinct behind the question is a fair one.

Lately, headlines dominated by AI-driven zero-day vulnerabilities have raised a question: Is open source software becoming too risky for the enterprise? With open source comprising more than three-quarters of the average enterprise codebase, the question matters. But the answer is clear: open source software remains inherently safe, structurally resilient, and fundamentally secure.

That’s understandable. But it’s important to make a clear distinction between the two because applying the same assumptions and approaches can lead to the wrong decisions and missed opportunities. AI transformation is different in important ways. The technology behaves differently, the risks are less predictable and the leadership challenge asks something new. At the same time, organisations are not starting from scratch.

Last time I wrote that successful Leaders will be the ones who embrace AI as both an operational tool and a strategic capability. And that this will require new skills, new ways of thinking, and a willingness to engage directly with the technology. Technology alone does not create transformation. The organisations with Leaders who understand their new role will be the ones that successfully harness AI.

The civil servant handling your case may not be able to independently verify why this has happened. Not because they’re being evasive, but because the system that produced the recommendation is operated by a commercial vendor, running on infrastructure the department doesn’t control, using a model that may have changed since it was last audited. This is the logical consequence of how government has been buying artificial intelligence. To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2013.

The NHS is under constant pressure to do more with less, but this pressure is keenly felt in departments that siat the intersection of multiple services, such as Continuing Healthcare (CHC)Coordinating care across hospitals, community services, local authorities, and private providers is resource-intensive, and even small inefficiencies can ripple into significant delays, costs, and staff frustration.