London’s push to shape AI

Good morning,

I'm on a campsite in deepest Normandy, but the fantastic Eleanor Warnock is stepping in for today's briefing. She's spoken to members of Sadiq Khan's jobs taskforce to look at how London is trying to shape AI's impacts at work and how its approach differs to other cities.

News In Brief 🩳

Go Zone: The Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone has secured £300m of funding, the government announced this morning. The investment — largely made up of a £202m guarantee from the National Wealth Fund — will mean developer DataVita can expand a data centre on the site, bring in the latest chips this year and build a second data centre. The package is backed by banks ING, ABN AMRO, Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank and Siemens Financial Services. Dell, meanwhile, will relocate its Scottish team to the area.

Briefing: DCMS minister Ian Murray is taking over the online harms brief and is also being tasked with misinformation work. His colleague Stephanie Peacock will look after GDS. Meanwhile, Liz Lloyd's brief of cyber, space and regulatory reform will be split across DCMS and BIST. DCMS Secretary of State Lisa Nandy pushed for the changes to bring "information ecosystems" under one roof, according to two people familiar with the thinking.

Locked out: The government is "locking out" British startups from public sector procurement by trying to build in-house products and giving huge contracts to foreign firms, the Startup Coalition argued in a report out yesterday. Founders interviewed for the report complain of endless pilots, risk aversion, too much bureaucracy and difficulties getting in front of buyers. The Startup Coalition has 16 policy recommendations but warns of a "24-month window" to fix procurement.

Get organised: Organisers of the Geneva AI Summit — the latest of the international AI summits which started at Bletchley Park — are inviting organisations to register pre-summit events. It takes place next June and is being led by the former director-general of CERN.