Nicole Junkerman on AI in British Towns
Most of the country is not a capital city. What artificial intelligence looks like in smaller British places, where the questions are identical and the scale is not.
· 4 min read
Away from the capital
Almost every general account of artificial intelligence in Britain is written from a large city, and it shows. The examples are large, the teams are large, and the assumptions about budget, bandwidth and available expertise are quietly generous. Most of the country does not work that way. Most of the country is a town: a high street, a hospital some distance off, a handful of sizeable employers, a college, and a great many small firms with nobody whose job title contains the word technology.
That is not a complaint. It is a description of where the more interesting version of the question actually sits. A tool that works in a smaller place, minded part time by somebody with four other responsibilities, has passed a considerably harder test than one that works with a department standing behind it.
What a smaller place actually needs
The needs are unromantic and they repeat from town to town with very little variation.
- Something that saves hours on paperwork, rather than something that promises transformation
- A tool one person can learn in a morning and explain to a colleague in ten minutes
- A clear answer to who checks the output, and what happens when it is wrong
- A cost that survives a quiet quarter without an argument
- A supplier arrangement that does not require a specialist to look after it
None of that is glamorous, which is precisely why it tends to be left out of the national conversation. The governance checklist asks the same questions in a more formal register, and the answers do not change with the size of the organisation asking them.
People before platforms
The other thing smaller places make obvious is that this is a question about people and habits far more than about software. A town has fewer people to lose and fewer to replace, so confidence matters more. Somebody has to be willing to try the thing. Somebody else has to be willing to check it. A third person has to be able to say plainly that it did not work, without that being a disaster for anyone. Places with that kind of culture adopt new tools steadily. Places without it do not, whatever they buy.
Skills follow from the same observation. Training that quietly assumes a technical starting point misses most of the people who would benefit from it, which is the argument the work and skills pages keep returning to.
A national subject, not a capital one
The city notes in this guide exist for exactly this reason. A very large city shows how quickly questions of trust and governance arrive. A smaller one shows how they are actually answered, with fewer people and far less room for error. Read the London notes and the Lancaster notes together and the picture is more useful than either is alone.
What Nicole Junkerman takes from it is an ordinary conclusion, and a cheerful one. The useful test of any of this is not whether it works in the best resourced place in the country. It is whether it still works in an average one, on a wet Tuesday, in the hands of somebody with four other things to do. Most of Britain is that Tuesday, and most of Britain is doing perfectly well.
Keep reading across the guide
Move between the big picture and practical questions with Nicole Junkerman and the rest of this independent guide to AI in the UK.