By Sarah Luxford – Partner, Digital, Data & Technology – GatenbySanderson
London Tech Week always carries a certain charge, and the 2026 edition was no exception. As an event it has its London bias, and I’ll happily own mine, but the energy across Olympia was genuinely palpable. A new conversation every few minutes, old colleagues turning up exactly where you’d hope, and a clear sense that the UK is not only talking about technology leadership but committing serious capital to it.
The capital was certainly the headline. The Prime Minister opened proceedings with a £400 million sovereign compute strategy and a now-familiar challenge: that Britain should shape the AI revolution rather than be shaped by it. Microsoft’s Darren Hardman pointed to a $30 billion commitment to UK AI infrastructure and skills. AWS reaffirmed £8 billion of investment. The Mayor of London announced a £12 million programme to help SMEs adopt AI, citing $12 billion of tech investment into the capital this year and twelve new unicorns. The Office for Quantum confirmed a £2 billion package, more than doubling the UK’s annual quantum investment.
By any measure, that is a remarkable show of confidence in UK technology. Yet the thing I found most thought-provoking all day was not a number with a pound sign in front of it. It was a question hidden inside one.
The 64/24 question
AWS’s Alison Kay put a single statistic on screen that, for me, reframed the whole morning. Nearly two-thirds of UK businesses, some 64%, have now adopted AI. But only 24% are using it for anything advanced. Most remain at the level of chatbots and document summaries. As one speaker memorably put it, half of organisations are owning a smartphone but using it only for phone calls.
What struck me is that this gap shows up everywhere, across every sector, public and private alike. And the barrier to closing it was named explicitly throughout the day. It was not money, and it was not compute. It was skills. Almost half of UK businesses cited the skills gap as the single largest obstacle to AI progress. The encouraging counterpoint, and there is a strong one, is that 67% of workers say they want to develop AI skills. The appetite is there well ahead of the capability.
This is the quiet truth beneath all the investment announcements. The capital is becoming the easy part. The harder, more interesting question is whether organisations have the people, and the leadership, to turn any of it into transformed services and the £35 billion in productivity gains AWS estimated is on the table.
From information work to intelligence work
What makes this a leadership question, rather than only a training-budget question, came through clearly in two of the day’s standout sessions.
Microsoft’s Darren Hardman described a shift from information work to intelligence work: a move away from task execution towards directing and managing AI-enabled processes, with AI acting as a collaborator rather than simply a tool. Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity offered the metaphor that stayed with me most. In an age where AI orchestrates many models, tools and contexts at once, the human role becomes that of the conductor, with the AI models as the musicians. Baroness Martha Lane Fox captured the optimism running through it all when she said the possibility to have agency has never been stronger.
There is a lovely thread connecting those ideas. An orchestra of brilliant musicians still needs a conductor to make music rather than noise. Agency only becomes outcome when someone provides direction. And in any organisation, the person who decides what gets played, to what end, and within what guardrails, is its leadership.
That is why I came away thinking of this less as a technology story and more as a leadership one. AWS framed five areas leaders are now being asked to hold together: ethics, cost management, security and governance, workforce skills, and business model reinvention. Reading that list, it struck me as close to a description of the modern Chief Digital and Information Officer role. What seems to separate the organisations using AI in advanced ways from those still finding their feet is rarely the size of the compute budget. More often it is whether someone is genuinely holding all five of those threads at once.
A simple framework worth sharing
I offer the five areas below less as a measure of how far along anyone is, and more as a set of questions I think are useful for all of us to sit with. They work well as prompts for a board or leadership team conversation:
- Ethics and trust: Who owns the question of whether our use of AI is fair, explainable and defensible to the people we serve?
- Cost and value: Are we making deliberate investment choices, or gradually accumulating pilots that never quite scale? (With 89% of organisations expecting AI-related IT spend to rise, the direction of travel matters.)
- Security and governance: As AI moves from generating insights towards taking actions of its own, who is accountable for what it does?
- Workforce and skills: Are our people supported to move from basic use towards genuine intelligence work, and who is leading that shift?
- Service reinvention: Are we using AI to do familiar things a little faster, or to rethink how a service could work?
None of these has an easy answer, and most organisations are still working them out in real time. The value is in naming them clearly and deciding, together, who holds each one.
The public sector’s particular context
These questions land differently depending on where you sit, and the public sector navigates a context that others often do not even see.
Procurement is one example. As the quantum discussions acknowledged, public procurement has historically been difficult, which is exactly why initiatives like ProQure matter. Capability that a private company can buy and deploy quickly often has to travel a more considered path into a public body. Legacy technology estates, built over decades and carrying critical national functions, cannot be replaced on a whim. Decisions are made under public scrutiny and against a standard of accountability that the private sector rarely faces. Pay frameworks mean public organisations are competing for scarce DDaT talent against private salaries they cannot match.
I see these not as failings but as the genuinely complex conditions public leaders work within, often with great skill. They are also what makes the right leadership appointment so valuable. A public sector DDaT leader needs more than technical fluency. They need the judgement to prioritise within real constraints, the credibility to bring sceptical boards and the public along with them, the governance instinct to deploy AI safely where the stakes are highest, and the ability to attract and keep talent on something other than pay alone.
Those are rare qualities, and they carry real weight in this setting. A strong appointment can mean a transformed hospital pathway, a modernised service, or a deeper sense of public trust. That is why getting it right is worth so much care.
A word on the talent itself
One reflection that sits alongside all of this. It was wonderful to see an overflowing EQL:Lounge, a sign of real momentum on inclusion in tech. A full room is an encouragement rather than a finish line, and as AI reshapes who gets access to opportunity, keeping a steady focus on gender balance and diversity matters more, not less. I was delighted to see Mark Martin’s work helping to create a national AI day for schools, giving young people across the country the chance to be inspired and included from the start. As Microsoft observed, talent is distributed evenly across the UK even where opportunity is not, and helping to close that gap is leadership work too.
It is worth adding that this pattern is not unique to AI. The UK’s quantum strategy, second in the world for quantum companies and investment and backed by that £2 billion package, names the same priorities: skills, workforce, infrastructure. The Government is funding more PhDs, technicians and engineers because, here too, people are the constraint that matters most. The wave after this one will pose a similar leadership question, and organisations that build the habit of answering it now will be ready twice over.
What I took away
The Prime Minister’s framing, shape it or be shaped by it, is a good one. For any organisation, shaping the AI transformation seems to begin with a deceptively simple question: do we have the people who can direct it?
The capital has arrived. The tools are extraordinary and increasingly within reach. The variable that now seems to matter most is leadership capability, and that, more than any compute budget, feels likely to determine which organisations move from early adoption towards genuine transformation.
How GatenbySanderson can help
This is the work we do every day. As specialists in Digital, Data and Technology leadership across the public sector, we help organisations think through what kind of DDaT leader the moment genuinely calls for: not a generic technologist, but a leader who can hold ethics, governance, skills, cost and service reinvention together, within the realities of public service.
In practice that means helping boards shape the brief before a search begins, reaching senior DDaT talent well beyond those who happen to be looking, assessing candidates against the leadership qualities this era asks for rather than a checklist of technical credentials, and advising on how to attract and retain people when pay alone will not be the deciding factor. We also try to keep a clear view of where DDaT leadership demand is heading next, including the emerging quantum and deep tech waves, so the leaders appointed today are ready for what comes tomorrow.
If the questions in this piece were useful, or if you are thinking about DDaT leadership in your own organisation, I would genuinely welcome the conversation.
Sarah Luxford is a Partner at GatenbySanderson specialising in Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) leadership appointments across the public sector. To discuss DDaT leadership for your organisation, contact the team at ddat@gatenbysanderson.com.