IT Essentials: Budget? What Budget?

Tech leaders could be forgiven for forgetting the-Budget-that-wasn't

Labour’s first Budget since 2010 was a mixed bag for most, but an empty one for tech.

Over the last 14 years – and certainly the last two – the IT industry has become used to a certain amount of space being reserved for it in Budget announcements. Few Conservative Chancellors dared take the podium without suggesting that quantum computing or AI would pull us out the hole we’d inevitably and inexplicably fallen further down since the last Budget.

Not so in the Labour camp. Despite the many, many canned statements from tech vendors flooding my inbox, this was not a Budget that bowed at the altar of IT.

The focus instead was on raising funds and restoring growth, which unfortunately means higher taxes. But isn’t that just a short-term solution?

Every government oversees huge wastage, and though the inefficiencies are rarely on purpose they still drain available resources. Ironically, fixing them is also expensive and time-consuming.

An admittedly small bright spot that stood out to me was one of the few mentions of tech, when Reeves suggested that investment would help boost public sector productivity.

Not only could that signal a boom for IT services firms, it might also mean that – at last – the public sector will see some of the time and money savings the private sector has enjoyed for years.

Still, I won’t hold my breath for that happening any time soon. A week, after all, is a long time in politics.

Lastly, a note of thanks to everyone who reached out after last week’s editorial.

On the subject of efficiency, John Leonard has talked to an engineer who thinks he can make AI itself more efficient. BitEnergy AI’s Hongyin Luo believes a relatively simple change in the mathematics of AI could slash power consumption by up to 30%.

That change could be a great boon to those who work at the edge, like wind farm servicing firm Beam. By focusing on the results, rather than raw data, the company is making AI work miles from shore, where connections are spotty to non-existent.

Finally – what's in a name? Well, plenty, according to Ingka Group’s Tim Hills. Ingka, the world’s largest IKEA retailer, processes so many orders that a one-in-a-million error could happen twice a week, so standardisation is key.