Independent report

AI Champions' Adoption Plans: Summaries

Published 8 June 2026

AI Champion Adoption Plan: Advanced Manufacturing

The UK has a major opportunity to turn its strengths in advanced manufacturing, engineering and artificial intelligence into higher productivity, stronger resilience and better-quality jobs. But while AI capability is progressing quickly, deployment across manufacturing remains patchy, especially in operational environments where systems are complex, safety-critical and capital-intensive. Too many firms, particularly SMEs, still struggle to move from promising pilots to confident, sustained adoption at scale. This paper argues that the challenge is no longer invention but deployment. Competitor countries are moving rapidly to embed AI across factories and supply chains, and the UK risks falling behind unless it creates a clearer, practical route from innovation to widespread industrial use.

This plan proposes a simple national pathway – Scan, Pilot, Scale – to help manufacturers identify opportunities, test solutions in realistic settings and expand proven applications across production systems and supply chains. The plan builds on existing strengths and delivery infrastructure, including Made Smarter, Innovate UK, BridgeAI, HVM Catapult and regional innovation networks, rather than creating new institutions. It also takes a strongly pro-worker approach, recognising that successful adoption depends on leadership, workforce capability, trust and organisational readiness as much as on technology. With phased co-investment, practical support and a focus on repeatable deployment, the UK can convert industrial AI from isolated experimentation into a broad-based source of competitiveness, resilience and long-term industrial advantage.

Find out more about the Advanced Manufacturing Adoption Plan.

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AI Champion Adoption Plan: Clean Energy

The energy system is undergoing a structural shift. The growing penetration of weather dependent generation, electrification of transport and heating, and the rise of distributed assets are increasing the complexity of system operation. Artificial intelligence has the potential to play a significant role in addressing this challenge and, over time, to fundamentally reshape how the energy system functions.

AI is already being deployed across the electricity system to improve forecasting, optimise asset performance, and support system planning. Emerging capabilities including probabilistic network management, greater decentralisation, and autonomous operation could deliver a more efficient system, lower costs, reduce emissions and cut bills for households and businesses.

However, a consistent set of challenges is constraining adoption: gaps in data quality and observability; difficulties scaling from pilot to operational deployment; uncertainty around governance, assurance and trust; and limitations in workforce capability and institutional readiness.

In December 2025, the government commissioned an independent AI Champion for Clean Energy to review opportunities for AI deployment in the electricity networks. The review is primarily focused on the potential to realise a long term system transformation. Drawing on over 80 survey responses, four multi stakeholder roundtables and more than 40 expert interviews, the Champion’s review, due to report in Summer 2026, will set out recommendations to government, regulators and industry on safe and effective pathways to scale. Government intends to respond to these recommendations as part of a broader strategy for AI in Clean Energy, to be published before the end of the year.

Find out more about the interim Clean Energy Adoption Plan.

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AI Champion Adoption Plan: Creative Industries

This plan sets out an augmentation-first approach to AI adoption to ensure AI enhances human creativity and productivity, rather than displacing it. The creative industries are already ahead of the national average in adopting AI, with 51% of businesses using AI technologies, but adoption remains uneven, with smaller businesses often facing greater barriers than larger organisations.

The main challenges to wider and more responsible adoption include skills, confidence and access to the right infrastructure, alongside concerns around intellectual property, data security, cost and the impact on the future skills pipeline. The plan sets out eight recommendations to help address these challenges and support the sector in adopting AI with confidence.

The UK’s creative industries are already embracing AI, so the focus must be on ensuring adoption happens responsibly. We must listen to the sector, build confidence and champion approaches that support both innovation and creativity. By doing so, the UK can become a global leader and trusted hub for AI and createch for the creative industries.

AI adoption in the creative industries should not be something that happens to the sector. It should be something the sector shapes.

Find out more about the Creative Industries Adoption Plan.

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AI Champion Adoption Plan: Digital and Technologies

The Digital and Technologies sector has a dual role to play in ensuring the benefits of AI are captured across the economy. It is both the producer of many of the tools the wider economy will adopt and a leading adopter in its own right.

AI adoption in the sector is already ahead of the national average, with 39% of firms using at least one AI technology compared with 25% across the economy. The challenge now is less about adoption than integration: embedding AI into workflows, products and services in ways that raise productivity, support innovation and help create good jobs in all parts of the UK.

Businesses consistently highlight barriers around skills and management capability, identifying high-value use cases, trust, governance, security and the pace of technological change. In response, the plan sets out three practical actions: establishing an Early Careers Jobs Alliance to reimagine routes into the sector for the AI era; creating a sector-led programme to identify and spread the AI use cases with the greatest productivity potential; and developing a practical AI Adoption Framework to help firms deploy AI confidently and responsibly.

The plan is designed to build on the expertise that already exists across leading businesses in the Digital and Technologies sector and to share that learning with firms that are earlier in their adoption journey in the sector and across the economy. Businesses and workers across the sector are invited to help shape and support this work.

Find out more about the Digital and Technologies Adoption Plan.

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AI Champion Adoption Plan: Life Sciences

AI is set to transform life sciences by making it easier and safer to discover new medicines and run clinical trials, helping life-changing treatments to reach patients faster. AI has the potential to help us to diagnose diseases earlier and reduce the admin burdens on healthcare staff, giving them more time to spend with patients.

AI is already being used in areas like medicine discovery, but progress is limited by poor access to high-quality health data, shortages in the computing power needed to run AI, and a lack of AI training amongst the workforce. Public trust is also vital, and there is ongoing concern about AI use within healthcare. It’s essential that patients remain at the heart of decision making, ensuring that the AI used in healthcare brings the greatest benefits to patients, the workforce, and the public, whilst maintaining the highest standards of safety, honesty and openness.

This plan aims to provide solutions to some of these barriers, complimenting existing work that is taking place within this area. This includes proposals to improve:

• the use of AI within the Life Sciences:
  • giving researchers increased access to the high-performance computers needed to run AI models
  • encouraging organisations to increase their use of simpler AI tools to reduce time lost to administrative tasks
• how the workforce interacts with AI:
  • championing frameworks that protect workers
  • creating a framework that ensures that the final decision in important processes will always be made by a human
• the benefits for the public, patients and the UK:
  • utilising AI to support reducing the use of animal testing in research
  • using NHS-linked secure data environments to allow trusted and verified researchers to run models on NHS data without the data ever leaving the secure environment - these tools could unlock huge discoveries in our understanding of diseases and treatments, whilst maintaining the highest level of data security.

Find out more about the Life Sciences Adoption Plan.

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AI Champion Adoption Plan: Professional and Business Services

Artificial intelligence and digital technologies are fundamentally reshaping how businesses operate, transforming business models, workforce dynamics and the delivery of professional services. These changes have particularly significant implications for the UK’s Professional and Business Services (PBS) sector, where economic value is built on expertise, judgement and trust.

As a major contributor to the UK economy and a critical enabler of activity across all sectors, PBS is central to future productivity, competitiveness and growth. Its position at the heart of the economy means that accelerating innovation and digital adoption within the sector has a multiplier effect, driving improvements across the wider business base.

This Professional and Business Services AI Champion Workplan sets out the case for accelerating AI adoption across PBS. It highlights the opportunity to augment professional expertise, improve service quality, reduce low-value activity and enable new advisory models, supporting a shift towards higher-value, more productive work.

The workplan assesses the current landscape of adoption, recognising that progress remains uneven and fragmented. Firms continue to face barriers including limited in-house capability, investment constraints, concerns around safety and transparency, and challenges in scaling high-impact use cases.  It also identifies a disconnect gap between bottom-up experimentation and slower firm-wide transformation. While employees are rapidly adopting AI tools, organisational change led by senior management has not kept pace.

Against this backdrop, the workplan defines the role of the PBS AI Champion and sets out four priorities to accelerate adoption, strengthen capability, and support sustained productivity growth and long-term economic value.

Find out more about the Professional and Business Services Adoption Plan.