Neil Lawrence told the Business and Trade Select Committee that UK AI policy is strong on supply and weak on demand — and set the argument out in AI Policy’s Missing Half.
On 14 April 2026 Neil Lawrence gave oral evidence to the House of Commons Business and Trade Select Committee, opening its inquiry into Artificial Intelligence, business and the future of the workforce. He appeared alongside Dame Wendy Hall in the first public session; the session record is on Parliament’s site.
Asked to place the UK in a global AI race, Neil argued that compute targets, hyperscale partnerships and frontier-model stories are supply-side reflexes that mistake inputs for outcomes. What is missing is a demand-side strategy: how nurses, teachers, SMEs, councils and hospitals adopt and adapt tools in their own workflows. A pro-innovation agenda, he told the Committee, is not the same as a pro-big-tech agenda — and powers already available under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act should keep markets contestable for UK entrants.
On 28 April he developed the same case in AI Policy’s Missing Half for ai@cam, including the South Cambridgeshire planning collaboration and the idea of Campus UK — using the country’s dense research geography to share lessons of useful deployment. The argument sits with the group’s AI Adoption programme and with the later FT letter on workflow-by-workflow deployment.
