Civil Service: Artificial Intelligence Productivity Gains

Lord Londesborough Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. I have a full Question on sovereign AI on Wednesday, when I will answer that question in more detail, but in the meantime let me say that there is not a some inbuilt bias against that; it is just that many of the large language models are, of course, from US companies, and those are the ones that are available at the moment. However, the sovereign AI unit will use that £500 million specifically to stimulate UK companies as well.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords—

[Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms and Chief Whip (Lord Kennedy of Southwark) (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, we have time to hear from the Cross Benches.

[Lord Londesborough (CB)]

My Lords, while the results from the landmark Civil Service AI trial are clearly encouraging, does the Minister agree that it highlights the urgent need to train up public sector workers across all departments on the effective and appropriate use of generative AI? I suggest that such training and guidance apply in particular to us—by which I mean noble Lords on all sides of this Chamber.

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

It was interesting to see the report from MIT last week on the use of AI across companies, which noted that 95% of companies got very little benefit and 5% got massively disproportionate benefit. One of the reasons why you get much greater benefit is training people properly and allowing there to be proper disruption of existing workflows—so I completely agree with the question. What the noble Lord is talking about is an important part of this, which is why there is a series of schemes across the Civil Service, including the senior Civil Service, both to recruit people with AI skills and to train staff.