{"text":[[{"start":5.96,"text":"The writer is the UK government’s former chief digital and data officer and a founding partner at Public Digital"}],[{"start":14.04,"text":"The UK is starting the race for digital sovereignty in the artificial intelligence era from a weakened position. After decades of outsourcing our data, skills and capacity, we have an unwieldy, expensive state that is reliant on a spaghetti of monopoly and oligopoly overseas supply chains. Big IT contracts have put up barriers to national innovation while services struggle to serve, let alone innovate — just ask the sub-postmasters."}],[{"start":45.84,"text":"This means we are now at risk of relinquishing control of an important new technology to monopolist international platforms. The Treasury’s approach to tech contracts has traditionally been limited to a narrow selection of big deals with chosen suppliers. This has throttled opportunities to support domestic start-up growth. Despite a laudable commitment to a 10-year infrastructure investment and the development of AI zones, the UK may end up building the foundations for other countries’ successful technologies."}],[{"start":79.64,"text":"Healthcare is a salutary example of how the country squandered the opportunity to shape a sovereign tech system. The now abolished NHS England management body failed to create a competitive ecosystem. It has taken more than five years since the NHS app’s launch, and a decade of vendor haggling before that, for basic GP records to be made widely available. Primary care is left with a duopoly of providers and little room for competition. In secondary care, the UK spent a decade attempting to reverse-fit US billing systems to run our hospital trusts. The subsequent adoption of US tech company Palantir’s health data platform looks likely to inhibit the growth of a UK AI health market that might compete with it."}],[{"start":130.36,"text":"Europe is more proactive. Denmark is noisily ejecting Microsoft from its public space, Germany is investing into Helsing, its national AI defence company, while President Emmanuel Macron is often seen with the founders of Mistral, France’s AI national champion. Europe is also backing the 28th regime: a legal framework aimed at start-ups that will help to make a single market out of the region’s 450mn population."}],[{"start":160.64,"text":"Elsewhere in the world, India’s 1.4bn domestic users are now offered Bhashini, a domestic AI language translation service. Singapore is using AI in its Singpass identity system to combat fraud. The US hyperscalers’ argument that they are the only option besides Chinese providers is being disproved, and in places without legacy technology."}],[{"start":185.04,"text":"Yet the current UK public sector choice for AI adoption, which involves government agreements penned with international AI start-ups like Canada’s Cohere and OpenAI in the US, does little for domestic companies. We are takers, not makers."}],[{"start":201.52,"text":"None of this was inevitable. The digitisation of public services should have raised up a new group of UK tech market companies. Instead, British talent has been snapped up by overseas tech giants. The sale of AI company DeepMind to Google is now regretted in Whitehall. But there is too little interest in creating and supporting the next DeepMind."}],[{"start":224.92,"text":"UK AI founders rightly question the deals being made with national AI favourites of other nations. Backing our own sovereign AI companies by giving them capital, access to public investment, ringfenced public markets and throwing large public policy issues at them to solve would be a start."}],[{"start":244.04,"text":"We need to define the AI market we want. State-backed digital infrastructure, like the Pix payment engine in Brazil, is challenging dominant tech companies. If we see AI through our existing outdated approach to public sector contracts, it will go the same way as the rest of our sovereign tech industry: limited access to public funds, lacking scale and capital, foreign owned."}],[{"start":270.26,"text":"We have the leaders, innovators and the engineering skills. We just need to back them."}],[{"start":276.2,"text":"Letter in response to this comment:"}],[{"start":278.44,"text":"How Britons shake off the DeepMind Success Paradox / From Seena Rejal, Chief Commercial Officer, NetMind.AI, London EC4, UK"}],[{"start":293.2,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftmailbox.cn/album/a_1758257463_8542.mp3"}