Clustering of AI firms in south and east of England will foil levelling up – report

Investments in new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are “profoundly skewed” towards the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London, and risk deepening existing regional inequalities in England, according to research.

Ministers have promised to level up the country, narrowing the gap between the best- and worst-performing areas, but the rapid rollout of generative AI and automation could cut against that aspiration, according to the Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW).

The authors find that both public and private sector investment has tended to follow a similar pattern – and the geographically concentrated nature of it had “tightened,” over the period they studied.

The lead author, Bertha Rohenkohl, said: “When you hear in the news that the UK has the highest levels of hi-tech investment in Europe and this sort of thing, maybe with a national average that might be true, but we know that these are only going to two, three, four places.”

From autonomous delivery robots bringing home shopping, to AI tools helping lawyers sift through reams of case law, automation and large language models such as Chat GPT are already transforming many roles.

Prof Philip McCann of the Productivity Institute at Manchester University said the research underlined the importance of government intervention to ensure that the benefits of this transformation were fairly shared.