The UK economy can unlock a £35bn productivity windfall, but only if businesses can bridge a widening “readiness gap” between basic and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) use. That’s the core message of Amazon Web Services’s Unlocking the UK’s AI potential report, unveiled this week at its AWS Summit event in London.
The research shows that while 64% of UK organisations have now adopted AI, the majority of users remain stalled at a rudimentary level. According to the report, a transition from basic tasks, such as document summarisation, to integration within core business processes could unlock £35bn in economic growth by 2030, a figure it said is roughly equivalent to the economy of Manchester.
That was the essence of views put across by Alison Kay, vice-president and managing director of AWS UK & Ireland, who addressed an audience of more than 20,000 in London on Wednesday. Kay said that while AI adoption is growing at a rate of one new UK business every 40 seconds, the depth of adoption often stalls at a basic level, with only 21% of organisations saying they feel prepared for advanced AI.
“AI is at a pivotal moment in the UK,” Kay said. “Organisations across the country are seeing tangible results from AI, from productivity gains to faster innovation. While this progress is encouraging to see, there’s still so much more to unlock, especially as we move from basic to advanced AI adoption.”
According to Kay, the AWS research shows that advanced AI users report efficiency gains of 68%, compared to just 40% among basic users: “Most organisations are still in the early stages of adoption, employing productivity, basic automation and experimentation. Our research shows that the UK could unlock £35bn of productivity gains by 2030 if basic adopters moved to advanced AI.”
However, this momentum is threatened by a critical shortage of skills. Nearly half (49%) of UK organisations cited a lack of digital skills as a primary barrier to AI transformation, an increase from 46% last year. The “skills gap” has become so acute that businesses are now reporting an average eight-month wait to fill digital roles, with many prepared to pay a 41% salary premium for AI-literate talent.
Kay pointed to AWS’s commitment to the Skills to Job Tech Alliance, which aims to train 100,000 UK learners by 2030. She said the company has already helped 60,000 students and contributed to a government-backed goal of equipping 10 million workers with AI skills over the next four years.
The summit keynote also featured a technical deep-dive from Francesca Vasquez, AWS vice-president of professional services and agentic AI, who argued that the industry is moving from simple “inline completion” to autonomous “agentic AI”.
Vasquez showcased Kiro, a Claude-powered AI agent-capable IDE designed to automate software engineering. Vasquez said AWS recently rebuilt the inference engine for its Bedrock AI platform using six engineers and AI agents in 76 days, a task it estimated would have required 40 engineers for a full year without agentic assistance.
Vasquez said: “Kiro gives developers structure and complete transparency. When you ask Kiro to build something, it thinks through the problem first. It gives you full user stories with acceptance criteria, technical design documents with architecture diagrams, sequence flows, discrete implementation tests, everything that you would normally spend hours documenting.”
The report also noted that 78% of businesses said they would be more likely to adopt AI if they saw the government lead by example. The report pointed to government research showing full digitisation of public services could realise more than £45bn per year in savings.
The report concludes that while the UK has the ingredients for leadership – including world-class research and a vibrant startup ecosystem – the transition to an AI-first economy requires a move away from “playing it safe”.
This means, it said, closing the digital skills gap by investing in training, public-private partnerships and AI literacy; helping organisations move from adoption to transformation; and scaling AI across public services so government leads by example.
AWS confirmed it is proceeding with an £8bn investment in UK datacentre infrastructure through 2028. This expansion is estimated to support 14,000 jobs annually and contribute £14bn to the UK’s GDP.
