The UK Government publishes the first deep study of the AI sector with glass.ai data.

With its potential to transform the economy, the UK Government identified Artificial Intelligence as one of four grand challenges within its Industrial Strategy more than 5 years ago. To better understand the sector and help with future policy decisions, they commissioned Perspective Economics, Ipsos and glass.ai to produce a baseline analysis of the AI sector in the UK.

We were delighted to see the results of the study published last week and demonstrate the breadth of AI activity and innovation across the UK. The research identified over 3,000 AI companies in the UK, generating more than £10bn in revenues and employing more than 50,000 people in AI-related roles.

glass.ai has been involved in AI sector studies in the UK and across the globe recently. However, an innovative aspect of this new study has been the identification of AI taking place within large diversified companies. One of the challenges of understanding a sector such as AI is that it cuts across many different industries, having an impact on the economy from healthcare to transportation, from manufacturing to climate change, and beyond. By applying a deep crawl across the UK economy, as represented through the online presence of each business, glass.ai was able to identify employees who were involved in AI-related roles and so find AI activity taking place at companies that wouldn’t otherwise be identified by analysis that just looked at the descriptions of their activities alone. Through this approach, the study split the results between dedicated AI companies and diversified businesses — where significant AI activity was taking place.

As well as mapping the online presence of the AI sector, glass.ai was able to match the businesses' online presence back to their official registrations on Companies House. This enabled the study to understand the growth of the sector over time and showed a peak of company registrations around the time that the government announced the AI Sector Deal and the creation of the Office for AI.

The methodology can be repeated for year-on-year comparisons and will allow the UK Government to benchmark progress and provide analytical insight into policy development. It will be interesting to watch how this evolves further and what the impact of the current media attention on AI and developments like ChatGPT will have on the sector as it develops.

Read the full report here.