IT Essentials: Party manifestos are a miss for tech

The industry needs more than vague promises

British politics are getting interesting - or not, if you're a technologist.

The consumerisation of IT has made scale the bane of technologists. If one person can adopt a new tool quickly, the thinking goes, why can't it be deployed equally speedily across the business?

The topic came up at an AI roundtable I attended last week, where sponsor Alteryx's CDIO, Trevor Schulze, said that a third of IT leaders across EMEA found it more difficult than expected to bring gen-AI systems to production.

We've heard similar stories from CIOs up and down the country. It's a known problem, but one that politicians haven't grasped.

Last week, of course, was manifesto week, when the UK's competing political parties set out their pitches for the electorate. We've dug into them to see what the next government might offer the tech industry.

First, cyber comes up short. A mere three mentions in the Liberal Democrats' document (two of which repeat the first point) is actually the high point; it gets two in the Conservatives' manifesto, one in Labour's, and none at all in the Greens' (Reform is due to release its manifesto this week). With cyber firmly positioned as the fifth dimension of warfare, there's no excuse for this.

Second, every party is talking about AI, but in scant detail.

The left-wing parties' main foci are on regulation, a marked step away from the Conservatives' approach. The only one to talk practical uses is Labour, which is looking to roll out AI systems across the NHS; a goal the Conservatives share.

The NHS is a massive beast though, and doctors are notoriously reluctant to adopt new technologies; just ask any hospital CIO. Only a few weeks ago someone told me, almost in tears, that their consultants used supplied tablets as clipboards to hold their handwritten notes.

And that's the problem with scaling any system. Getting the tech into people's hands is pretty easy, especially in these days of cloud; but to get any sort of value out of it, you need to invest time and effort in training. That's where it can all fall down, and too few of the parties competing to run the country (hats off to Labour and the Lib Dems for talking about adult education) seem to be aware of the fact.

For a full rundown of what each leadership contender is offering the industry, make sure you read our analysis of their respective manifestos.

Further reading

We've released the 2024 edition of the IT Leaders 100: a list of the inspiring people who are at the top of the UK's tech sector. Whether they're driving outstanding technical transformations, helping people from underrepresented groups, or leading their organisations into the future – or all three – each of them is a case study in leadership.

Penny Horwood and John Leonard have both written about AI. Penny has tackled the emerging area of emotive AI in an interview with Intuit's Joe Preston and Ustwo's Nayan Jain; while John discussed AI trust and regulation with SAS's Josefin Rosén.

We also looked at how data is boosting biodiversity across the 12,000-acre Blenheim estate in Oxfordshire, which the Innovation team is using to feed predictive analytics for cost savings.