Copyright TechTarget - All rights reserved ComputerWeekly’s best articles of the day https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html Techtarget Feed Generator en Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:27:20 GMT https://www.computerweekly.com editor@computerweekly.com <p>Process mining and intelligence software supplier Celonis has called on FTSE 100 companies to seize an opportunity to save a collective £4.4bn in economic value over three years by closing what it terms “execution gaps” in enterprise workflows.</p> <p>The supplier is making the claim today at its UK event, Process Intelligence Day: London.</p> <p>Basing its claim on <a target="_blank" href="https://tei.forrester.com/go/celonis/processIntelligence/index.html?lang=en-us" rel="noopener">Forrester research</a> that suggests a $20bn revenue company could find $44.1m worth of economic benefits over three years from Celonis’s process mining technology, the supplier estimates that the FTSE 100, as a whole, could benefit to the tune of roughly £4.4bn.</p> <p>Celonis says the opportunity is larger still when agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is scaled up. It said a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.capgemini.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/AI-Agents_web_160226-1.pdf" rel="noopener">Capgemini Research Institute study</a> indicates that organisations with <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/agentic-AI">agentic AI</a> deployed at enterprise levels could generate economic value equivalent to 2.5% of annual revenue over the next three years – a roughly £50bn opportunity when extrapolated to the FTSE 100.</p> <p>The Capgemini research cited by Celonis estimates that AI agents could create around $450bn in economic value by 2028 across 14 countries through revenue growth and cost savings.</p> <p>But Celonis maintains that an “execution gap” stands in the way of realising business value from AI. This represents, it said in a statement to Computer Weekly, the “hidden cost of fragmented data and inefficient workflows that cause the average large enterprise to leak significant annual revenue”.</p> <p>The firm said in a press statement: “There is a fundamental gap between a personal productivity hack and a robust enterprise solution. Companies need to bridge that gap to industrialise AI.”</p> <p>Rupal Karia, Celonis senior vice-president and general manager for UKI, Northern Europe and MEA, said: “The UK is rapidly building the foundations to lead in applied AI, from investment in <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641682/UK-governments-50m-sovereign-AI-fund-bids-to-commercialise-research">sovereign AI</a> to nationwide skills training.</p> <p>“The next challenge is turning that ambition into measurable results. Many organisations still face a gap between AI investment and return because their systems and agents lack a shared understanding of how the business actually runs. Celonis provides a living model of operations that helps people and AI agents reason and act reliably. That context is what enables enterprises and the public sector to modernise processes, improve transparency and unlock measurable value.”&nbsp;</p> <p>Celonis said it already works with 20% of FTSE 100 companies, and has delivered £1.5bn in economic value for its UK customers.</p> <p>Customers include Asos, AstraZeneca, Ireland-based packaging company Smurfit Westrock and the UK <a href="https://www.celonis.com/news/press/celonis-announces-partnership-with-uk-cabinet-office-to-streamline-government-processes">Cabinet Office</a>. Celonis says its technology allows these organisations to streamline workflows, optimise inventory management and replace legacy systems.</p> <p>The supplier also says it is supporting the UK government’s skills ambitions, with 3,200 people enrolled in the Celonis Academy, which works with 260 UK partner organisations.</p> <p>Celonis faces competition in the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/tip/Process-mining-software-comparison-What-CIOs-should-look-at">process mining</a> and intelligence market from <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsap/news/252495495/SAP-acquires-process-mining-software-vendor-Signavio">SAP Signavio</a>, Software AG, with its ARIS platform, and UiPath Process Mining, among others.</p> <p>In May 2026, it <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642978/Celonis-acquires-MIT-linked-decision-intelligence-firm-Ikigai">acquired MIT-linked decision intelligence supplier Ikigai Labs</a> to bolster a stated drive to eliminate artificial intelligence blind spots from enterprise IT.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about process intelligence</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>What is <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/process-intelligence">process intelligence?</a></li> <li>Celonis acquires <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642978/Celonis-acquires-MIT-linked-decision-intelligence-firm-Ikigai">MIT-linked decision intelligence firm Ikigai</a>.</li> <li>What adding a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/podcast/What-adding-a-decision-intelligence-platform-can-do-for-ERP">decision intelligence platform</a> can do for ERP.</li> </ul> </div> </div> Celonis claims FTSE 100 firms could save £4.4bn by closing ‘execution gaps’ in workflows through process intelligence software, potentially rising to £50bn with agentic AI https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/German/article/warehouse-worker-2-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644572/UK-companies-can-seize-50bn-prize-by-industrialising-AI-claims-Celonis Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:00:00 GMT <p>MPs are calling on the government to reduce the UK’s dependency on big technology companies amid concerns that the state is over-reliant on overseas suppliers, posing national security and economic risks.</p> <p>An <a href="https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4035/stages/20525/amendments/10034731">amendment</a> to the <a href="https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4035">Cyber Security and Resilience Bill</a> (CSRB), backed by 20 MPs, calls for the government to publish a digital security strategy to assess the risks of relying on overseas technology in critical infrastructure.</p> <p>The move comes as the European Commission <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643862/EU-unveils-full-stack-sovereignty-package-to-build-Euro-tech-muscle">sets out plans for a programme to build sovereign IT capabilities</a>, including European datacentres and a move to open source software to reduce dependency on US technology suppliers.</p> <p>The amendment, proposed by <a href="https://members.parliament.uk/member/5201/contact">Liberal Democrat MP Victoria Collins</a>, which will be debated today, calls on the British government to publish a “digital sovereignty strategy” that will commit to building technology capabilities in the UK and to reduce dependency on overseas suppliers.</p> <p>The amendment, which covers critical digital and managed service providers, would require the government to set out a strategy to mitigate the risks of foreign interference and the UK’s reliance on foreign suppliers.&nbsp;It also calls for an assessment of the risks associated with hardware, software, supply chains and procurement processes.</p> <p>The MPs argue that a digital sovereignty strategy is necessary to ensure that government departments do not get “locked in” to proprietary technology from big tech companies, making it difficult or impossible for them to change suppliers.</p> <p>The strategy would also support UK jobs, skills and innovation by encouraging <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643844/Starmer-announces-sovereign-compute-strategy-amid-11bn-chip-investment">investment in UK technology companies</a> and making it easier for them to win <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/search">government contracts</a>.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="UK ‘at mercy’ of a handful of US tech companies"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>UK ‘at mercy’ of a handful of US tech companies</h2> <p>The amendment follows <a href="https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/135/science-innovation-and-technology-committee/news/214048/mps-warn-that-palantirs-increasing-presence-in-the-uk-public-sector-is-an-unacceptable-point-of-weakness/">warnings from a cross-party group of MPs</a> that the UK public sector is becoming increasingly reliant on a small number of US technology suppliers, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643883/SIT-Committee-urges-Palantir-exit-in-push-to-end-US-cloud-grip">Palantir</a>.</p> <p>The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee said the UK’s dependence on a small number of providers represented a “clear vulnerability” and left ambitions to digitally transform public services potentially “at the mercy” of foreign actors.</p> <p>Collins has previously raised concerns over the lack of published information in the UK’s <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67b5f85732b2aab18314bbe4/National_Risk_Register_2025.pdf">National Risk Register</a> on the risks posed by foreign states using legal powers, such as sanctions, to disrupt or discontinue critical digital services used by the UK.</p> <p>She was among <a href="https://www.sianberry.org.uk/publications/calling-for-changes-to-the-national-risk-register/">four MPs to write to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster</a> and the chairs of two influential parliamentary committees in April, urging the government to take steps to ensure the UK’s digital systems would remain resilient in the event of threats or interference by a foreign government.</p> <p>The MPs pressed the government to publish a currently secret analysis of “chronic risks”, including “concentration of risk through dominance of global tech”, the UK’s “reliance on digital platforms and digital services”, and “impacts from the use and capability of artificial intelligence (AI)”.</p> <p>“The UK public debate on digital sovereignty is significantly hampered by the secrecy surrounding the mitigation strategies for the chronic risks mentioned in the National Risk Register,” the MPs wrote.</p> <p>“This contrasts with open discussions and analysis in other European countries. While there may be aspects of the current documents that need to be kept secret, this cannot and must not apply to the whole analysis,” they stated.</p> <p>European states, including France, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, have engaged in national debates about the risks of overdependence on overseas technology.</p> <p>France, for example, is moving to <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/france-dumps-teams-zoom-digital-sovereignty-replacement/">sovereign open source desktop and collaboration</a> tools for its senior civil servants to reduce risks of surveillance or loss of services. And <a href="https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/bwibundeswehr-chooses-open-source-adopting-opendesk">the German armed forces are moving to OpenDesk,</a> an open source alternative to Microsoft Office.</p> <p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/16/uk-bank-bosses-plan-visa-mastercard-alternative">European banks are also taking</a> action to protect themselves against interference from the US by building their own electronic card payment system as an alternative to the US-run Mastercard and Visa networks.</p> <p>The UK Parliament has previously discussed potential risks of relying on Chinese suppliers, including Huawei and Lenovo.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Amendment to the UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill</h3> <p>The secretary of state must publish a digital sovereignty strategy setting out the government’s plans for maintaining the security and resilience of networks and information systems within 12 months.</p> <p>The strategy will set out the government’s approach to:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Assessing, managing and mitigating the risks of foreign interference.</li> <li>Assessing, managing and mitigating the risk of reliance on foreign-supplied technologies.</li> <li>Building UK capabilities to prevent over-reliance on foreign providers.</li> </ul> <p>The strategy will:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Cover relevant operators of essential services, digital service providers, managed services and critical suppliers as defined by the Security of Network &amp; Information Systems Regulations (NIS Regulations).</li> <li>Assess the risks associated with hardware, software, supply chains and procurement processes.</li> <li>Show how the government intends to reduce strategic dependence on foreign-owned service providers to mitigate the risk of systemic disruption</li> <li>Commit to prioritising technologies developed in the UK to reduce reliance on foreign technologies.</li> <li>State how the government intends to address risks of foreign interference by supporting domestic technology or introducing technology to secure systems.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Amendment seeks ambitious approach to UK technology"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Amendment seeks ambitious approach to UK technology</h2> <p>Collins said the aim of the amendment was not to shut the doors to global technological innovation, but for the government to take a “smart, strategic and ambitious approach” to UK technology.</p> <p>“Right now, too much of our critical national infrastructure and too many government services depend on foreign technology and supply chains. This creates real risks, from national security vulnerabilities to economic fragility,” she added.</p> <p>Collins said <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/This-rise-of-the-splinternet-Data-sovereignty-risks-and-responses">UK technology companies are being locked out of government procurement in favour of large multinationals</a>.</p> <p>“A proper digital sovereignty strategy would change that: backing UK innovation, reducing the UK’s dependencies, and ensuring the UK is a world leader in the technologies that will define the next decade,” she added.</p> <p>The Open Rights Group (ORG), a campaign group for digital rights and privacy, which supports the amendment, said the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641487/UK-reliance-on-US-big-tech-companies-is-national-security-risk-claims-report">UK’s reliance on US big tech companies</a> posed both a national security and an economic risk.</p> <p>Jim Killock, executive director of the ORG, said that “by voting on this amendment, MPs can take the first step to secure the UK’s resilience and control over its digital infrastructure”.</p> <p>Richard Starnes, a chief information security officer and author of a <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/ehandbook/An-evaluation-of-the-UKs-cyber-security-and-privacy-legislative-framework">study on the UK’s cyber security and privacy legislative framework</a>, said the amendment raises valid national security concerns.&nbsp;But he said it also conflates foreign interference risks and economic protectionism.</p> <p>“The enormous risks facing UK critical infrastructure, vendor lock-in and the UK’s current economic climate warrant a more strategic, open-minded approach,” he said.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about the UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643176/MPs-propose-kill-switch-to-shut-down-rogue-AI-systems">MPs propose ‘kill switch’ to shut down rogue AI systems</a>: An amendment to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill proposes giving the government a ‘kill switch’ to close datacentres hosting AI if they pose a critical threat to UK infrastructure or national security.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/When-IT-Meets-Politics/What-is-the-objective-of-the-Cyber-Security-and-Resilience-Bill">What is the objective of the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill?</a> Is it to change corporate behaviour and improve cyber security and resilience? Or is it to create jobs for compliance officers and consultants?</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366621764/Top-1000-IT-service-providers-in-scope-of-UK-cyber-bill">Top 1,000 IT service providers in scope of UK cyber bill</a>: The government’s proposed Cyber Security and Resilience Bill is set to include regulatory provisions covering datacentre operators and larger IT service providers.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366625838/Cyber-Bill-at-risk-of-becoming-a-missed-opportunity-say-MPs">Cyber Bill at risk of becoming a missed opportunity, say MPs</a>: An APPG report warns that the government’s&nbsp;flagship cyber security legislation&nbsp;is too narrow in its scope and risks missing opportunities to embed resilience at the heart of the British economy.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366628013/UK-government-to-bring-in-ransomware-payment-ban">UK government to bring in&nbsp;ransomware payment ban</a>: Critical infrastructure operators, hospitals, local councils and schools will be among those banned from giving in to cyber criminal demands as the UK moves forward with proposals to address the scourge of ransomware.&nbsp;</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> Amendment to the UK’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill calls for the government to publish a ‘digital sovereignty strategy’ to promote domestic technology https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/London-Westminster-Parliament-Big-Ben-Getty-RF.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644347/MPs-call-for-UK-government-to-back-sovereign-IT Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:24:00 GMT <p>Almost a third (30%) of English hospital trusts using Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) are carrying out fewer patient operations than before they started using it, according to data obtained from the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/resources/Healthcare-and-NHS-IT">NHS</a>&nbsp;by campaigning group Foxglove.</p> <p>The findings, revealed via freedom of information (FOI) requests, challenge claims by the UK government and <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-1-Understanding-the-problems-facing-NHS-data">Palantir that FDP</a> is increasing overall surgical procedures across hospitals, said Foxglove.&nbsp;</p> <p>The NHS data indicates that 41 trusts are currently utilising Inpatient CCS, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643883/SIT-Committee-urges-Palantir-exit-in-push-to-end-US-cloud-grip">Palantir</a>’s FDP module, which is designed to assist hospitals in managing patient operation scheduling. Of these, 13 trusts – approximately 30% – reported a decrease in the total number of operations performed compared with the period before they adopted the FDP tool.</p> <p>Collectively, said Foxglove, these 13 trusts recorded 9,073 fewer operations after implementing Inpatient CCS, when compared with the equivalent timeframe before its adoption. This marks the first public release of data detailing whether individual trusts using FDP have experienced an increase or decrease in surgical volumes.</p> <p>According to Foxglove, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640642/More-tech-funding-is-coming-promises-NHS-Englands-chief-clinical-information-officer">NHS England</a> had previously only published the cumulative total of additional operations across all trusts using FDP. Foxglove argues this approach was potentially misleading as it obscured instances where performance had declined at a significant number of trusts that had adopted the technology.</p> <p>Foxglove head of strategy Tim Squirrell said: “Foxglove’s investigation has shown that the flagship claim made by NHS England and Palantir about the benefits to hospitals of the Federated Data Platform needs a serious health warning.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> The big claim that the FDP is delivering more operations for hospitals across the NHS is covering up a much less positive reality – a third of the trusts using FDP’s operations scheduling tool, Inpatient CCS, are actually delivering fewer operations than before they started using Palantir’s kit </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Tim Squirrell, Foxglove</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>“We now know that the big claim the FDP is delivering more operations for hospitals across the NHS is covering up a much less positive reality – a third of the trusts using FDP’s operations scheduling tool, Inpatient CCS, are actually delivering fewer operations than before they started using Palantir’s kit.”</p> <p>The campaigning group has argued that attributing performance improvements to FDP without providing the underlying data prevents effective public and parliamentary scrutiny of the platform. It also says NHS England has not published comparative data for trusts that are not using Palantir’s tools, which makes it difficult to isolate the impact of FDP.</p> <p>“Palantir can’t have it both ways. If it expects us to believe that FDP is responsible for improvements in some hospitals, it must also accept that things are getting worse as a result of its tools in others,” Squirrell added. “To date, ministers and Palantir have failed to provide the information we all need to decide whether the FDP is really helping or not. We shouldn’t have to go through a series of time-consuming FOI requests to access the crucial information that allows us to work out if this tool is truly delivering for the NHS or not.”</p> <p>Questions regarding the value for money of Palantir’s services have also been raised in other government departments. Civil servants recently opted to bring a multimillion-pound Palantir contract for housing Ukrainian refugees in-house.</p> <p>The Palantir contract for the NHS is valued at more than £300m. “Ministers may want to consider whether NHS patients across England will agree that this ropey evidence is enough to justify giving this US tech giant another massive contract in one of our most important public services,” Squirrell said.</p> <p>However, Tom Bartlett, former deputy director of data engineering at NHS England, who led the 150-person team that built the FDP, argued that focusing solely on specific nationally commissioned products might miss the broader strategic intent of the FDP.</p> <p>“The FT and Foxglove are right that the benefits are concentrated in a handful of trusts. NHS England is right that the platform is delivering results where it is properly adopted. The benefits <a href="https://www.bartlettdata.co.uk/post/culture-of-silence-fdp-evidence-parliament">need to be measured properly</a> if we are to understand how well the nationally developed products are working, and although NHSE have commissioned this, we won’t see the results for years,” Bartlett stated.</p> <p>Bartlett emphasised that the primary use cases for the FDP are expected to be generated by clinicians developing solutions locally. He highlighted significant, often overlooked, data risks within the NHS.&nbsp;</p> <p>“Across the NHS, boards are running enormous risks they seem unaware of. Walk into any ward, theatre or clinical team base, and you will see whiteboards and spreadsheets containing patient information, in full view of anyone who visits and liable to being accidentally deleted, not connected to any other hospital system. No one is even asking the question about this monumental risk – just look at any Trust Board Assurance Framework or Corporate Risk Register, and you will not find it.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about digital transformation in the NHS</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640417/Health-workers-call-for-Palantir-to-be-booted-from-NHS-contracts">Health workers call for Palantir to be booted from NHS contracts</a>: Health justice charity Medact warns that Palantir’s involvement in NHS data systems is a threat to patients and healthcare organisations.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-1-Understanding-the-problems-facing-NHS-data">Inside FDP – understanding the problems facing NHS data</a>: In the first of an exclusive series of articles by the former deputy director of data engineering at NHS England, we examine the real story behind the NHS's controversial Palantir software project, the Federated Data Platform</li> </ul> </div> </div> Around 30% of English hospitals that use Palantir’s FDP tools for scheduling are carrying out fewer procedures than before adoption, according to data from campaign group Foxglove https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/healthcare-medical-icons-network-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644346/NHS-trusts-operating-on-fewer-patients-with-Palantir-FDP-warns-Foxglove Tue, 16 Jun 2026 09:58:00 GMT <p>Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) startup Ineffable Intelligence has selected Google Cloud as its exclusive infrastructure partner to develop the world’s first “superlearner”. The partnership comes hot on the heels of a $1.1bn (£860m) seed round announcement in April.</p> <p>The deal, announced at the Google Cloud Summit in London this week, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/resources/Infrastructure-as-a-Service-IaaS">will result in the startup deploying</a> one of the world’s largest clusters of <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639658/Huge-grid-and-heat-challenges-ahead-as-Nvidia-set-for-1MW-rack">Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs</a> (A5X) to power research into systems that can discover knowledge through their own experience rather than human-provided datasets.</p> <p>Ineffable Intelligence was founded by David Silver, the UCL professor and former Google <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366627732/UKtech50-2025-winner-Demis-Hassabis-co-founder-and-CEO-DeepMind">DeepMind</a> scientist who led the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/photostory/450423850/AI-A-brief-history-of-man-versus-machine-intelligence/6/AlphaGo-versus-Lee-Sedol">AlphaGo</a> and AlphaZero projects. The company is aiming to bypass the “human data ceiling” that it said currently limits large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude.</p> <p>April’s record-setting seed round – the largest in European history – values the London-based company at $5.1bn and includes backing from Sequoia, Lightspeed and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Fund.</p> <p>Unlike traditional AI training which relies on static data, Ineffable’s “superlearner” is designed for experience-based learning where the model generates, evaluates and learns from its own actions in real time. This operational shift places fundamentally different demands on infrastructure and requires the high-performance networking and tightly integrated training systems such as those provided by Google’s AI Hypercomputer architecture.</p> <p>According to David Silver, CEO and founder of Ineffable Intelligence, the decision to partner with Google Cloud was driven by the need for access to orchestrated hardware and software rather than just access to raw compute.</p> <p>“We evaluated the space and chose Google Cloud as the best fit for our reinforcement learning infrastructure,” said Silver. “We aren’t just looking for processors; we are building a resilient and scalable environment to make ‘first contact’ with superintelligence – AI that transcends human limitations in science, mathematics and technology.”</p> <p>The deployment utilises Google Cloud’s full-stack AI Hypercomputer, incorporating Jupiter networking and optimised storage to handle the massive computational scale required for reinforcement learning. This architecture moves away from standard “box of chips” provisioning to provide a systems-level optimisation that ensures researchers can focus on breakthroughs in autonomous learning rather than infrastructure bottlenecks.</p> <p>The project further consolidates London as a critical global centre for frontier AI research, with the startup’s mission expected to attract premier engineering talent to the UK. The backing from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Sovereign AI Fund reflects <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642362/Government-funds-self-learning-AI-company">a strategic move by the UK government</a> to scale British-built technology that can generate new knowledge in medicine, engineering and science.</p> <p>Industry observers have noted that Ineffable’s “anti-LLM” strategy represents a high-stakes scientific bet. While reinforcement learning proved successful in closed-system game environments like <em>Go</em> and <em>StarCraft</em>, applying trial-and-error algorithms to the vast complexity of human knowledge and scientific discovery remains an unproven frontier.</p> <p>By bypassing human data avoids the inherent flaws and biases of engines designed for mimicry, the “superlearner” path may lack the immediate utility and predictability of current generative AI systems. The technical challenge of ensuring safety and ethical guardrails in a system that discovers knowledge independently of human input will be a big hurdle as the lab attempts to rediscover and then transcend human inventions.</p> <p>In May, Ineffable Intelligence announced collaboration with Nvidia on the engineering requirements for its massive GPU cluster, to ensure the environment can scale to support the next generation of reinforcement learning algorithms. Silver believes this superlearning capability will eventually discover profound intellectual breakthroughs in language and mathematics.</p> <p>The startup was founded in late 2025 and has become a cornerstone of Europe’s AI ecosystem.&nbsp;</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about AI and Google Cloud</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644158/Brace-for-cloud-price-hikes-and-AI-failures-amid-pressure-to-modernise">Brace for cloud price hikes and AI failures amid pressure to modernise</a>. Organisations risk losing control of their IT infrastructure unless they embrace platform-centric models, modernise procurement and cut through the agentic AI hype, Gartner analysts warn.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639143/Google-Cloud-supplants-Azure-as-Unilever-cloud-of-choice">Google Cloud supplants Azure as Unilever cloud of choice</a>. Microsoft Azure provided ‘the bulk’ of provision when Unilever went all-in on cloud in 2023, but now Google will be the ‘destination’ for the multinational’s cloud and data platform.</li> </ul> </div> </div> London-based ‘anti-LLM’ developer led by AlphaGo founder David Silver selects Google Cloud Vera Rubin GPU infrastructure to build reinforcement learning ‘superlearners’ https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/AI-artificial-intelligence-robot-fotolia.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644382/Ineffable-Intelligence-strikes-Google-Cloud-deal-for-Vera-Rubin-GPU-power Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:00:00 GMT <p>From a manual business with 130 depots and a vast inventory of hire equipment, to an Uber-like digital marketplace that is set to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/resources/Artificial-intelligence-automation-and-robotics">deploy AI agents</a> to resolve customer queries, all with a vast <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638839/Half-of-Googles-software-development-now-AI-generated">improvement in developer productivity</a>.</p> <p>That’s the journey taken by <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640327/HSS-ProService-Uber-ifies-with-functional-programming-and-agentic-AI">HSS ProService</a>, formerly HSS Hire Group – established in 1947 – which last October sold its physical rental operations to a private equity firm and became a pure-play digital conduit between construction customers and suppliers.</p> <p>We talk to CEO Tom Shorten about how the newly branded HSS ProService became the digital hub of an “Uber-ified” business that pairs construction managers with a network of suppliers to provide tools, equipment, fuel, training and building materials.</p> <p>He tells us about the inspiration that led to the transformation – Brenda, the nerve centre of the digital marketplace – and his Tower One to Tower Two approach to migrating to the new systems.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What have you digitised and how would you describe the journey?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What have you digitised and how would you describe the journey?</h2> <p>Historically, HSS was a truly analogue hire business, where someone would walk into a branch and ask for a piece of kit, and you’d write it on a piece of paper, a slip. We eventually started using green screen computer programmes to manage that. I mean, it’s still a green screen industry. They’re using F10, F9, F8 prompts on the keyboard to move through logic.</p> <p>Our journey started to change because we started to understand that buyers don’t mind where the kit comes from as long as it turns up on time and it works. That gave us an opportunity to be just a broker of this kit – to give a fantastic experience and own the relationship with the customer and supplier, but not own the assets.&nbsp;</p> <p>We had a business within the business called OneCall, where we did that, really successfully. That was really the acorn. It was fascinating to me that a customer would call one of our sales guys, he’d see we don’t own that piece of kit, call another supplier, and the customer would get what they wanted. We’d sit in the middle and make a turn on it. That acorn grew into the idea of “let’s digitise that”.&nbsp;</p> <p>So, if a customer logged onto our platform and said, “I want one of these on this day”, and we have all the details we need, the system runs off to a supplier and says, “Hey, look, we’ve got this opportunity for you, hit here to accept”.</p> <p>It comes back and we put the two together, and that’s effectively the nuts and bolts of a marketplace algorithm. So, we started to build out that journey.&nbsp;</p> <p>When we started, about 5% of our orders were going through the .com site, so we digitalised orders. Now it’s anywhere between 40% and 45% purely via the web. The rest is via phone, email, chat.&nbsp;</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Are the orders that come in via phone, email, etc, still digitised after that?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Are the orders that come in via phone, email, etc, still digitised after that?</h2> <p>Imagine a Rubik’s Cube in the middle of our business, and that Rubik’s Cube has got a supplier interface, a colleague interface, a customer interface, an admin interface and a tech interface.&nbsp;</p> <p>What happens is, however the order comes in, it always ends up in that.&nbsp;</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> The challenge has been to move at the speed the market will allow you to move at. There’s no point in trying to get ahead of the market because that’s not great for business </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Tom Shorten, HSS ProService</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>We call that Brenda. That’s the mothership of our business. In any office, there’s someone who knows everything, and it’s typically a lady, and she knows everything. So, we named our system Brenda. And however it comes in – from .com, from a phone call, WhatsApp, or whatever it is – it ends up in there.&nbsp;</p> <p>The algorithm works to provide the best supplier for that customer, for that product, and we put it in the supplier portal for that supplier to look at it and accept the order.</p> <p>We were an organisation where we owned a load of kit. We’ve pivoted all the way to owning no kit. We manage customer relationships and supplier relationships. The supplier delivers the kit, services the kit, and picks up the kit. We manage the customer relationship to ensure that all goes as smoothly as possible for our customer.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Could you sum up the challenges inherent in the process of moving from a real-world model to a fully digitised business?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Could you sum up the challenges inherent in the process of moving from a real-world model to a fully digitised business?</h2> <p>The first thing is that the build of the technology has to be right, and that’s a really challenging thing to do for hire. There’s also <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Culture-eats-technology-in-digital-transformation">a cultural challenge</a>, because lots of our salespeople historically have gone out and sold on the basis that it was our kit and they were comfortable with our kit. What they have to do now is trust the fact that we will find the best kit for the customer, which isn’t our kit. And that is a different nuance for someone who’s been selling hire for a long time.&nbsp;</p> <p>Also, for some of our customers who had always effectively gone to a branch to pick up a piece of kit, we spent a lot of time explaining to them how this new way of working would work for them and why it would be beneficial. The challenge has been to move at the speed the market will allow you to move at. There’s no point in trying to get ahead of the market because that’s not great for business.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What were the challenges on the technical side of the transition? What did the crossover period between the two models look like?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What were the challenges on the technical side of the transition? What did the crossover period between the two models look like?</h2> <p>I didn’t try for a “crossover”. We did it like this. Imagine Tower One was our old business. I didn’t try to grow the new business in Tower One. I created Tower Two, and with a different tech team built Tower Two. And then I moved people into Tower Two. I didn’t create a drawbridge.&nbsp;</p> <p>I knew from previous experience that if you try to take a legacy organisation and grow a new change, you’ll spend years convincing people and you’ll have the wrong skillset.&nbsp;</p> <p>So, [CTO] Daniele [Turi]’s team was totally separate to the legacy IT team. We built new foundations and we grew anew all the way up, including brand, culture, look and feel – everything.&nbsp;</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="We’re in the AI era with automation and agents, so what’s next?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>We’re in the AI era with automation and agents, so what’s next?&nbsp;</h2> <p>We’re developing agents now to do what we call highly repetitive tasks in an environment. For example, if a customer wants a proof of delivery, at the moment one of our team might have to call up the supplier, hunt down a proof of delivery, can’t get hold of the right person, etc. All that now is going to be done through AI on an associated timeline.</p> <p>For every single contract, we’ll be able to visualise the status and the AI agents will work to update the data required to satisfy the customer need. We’re building those AI agents ourselves.&nbsp;</p> <p>We’re really lucky with our team. They’ve upskilled themselves to use Cloud Code really, really well, and now we don’t write any code at all in our business. We think we’ve probably got 10 times the output from our IT team. We’re running at two-week sprints into delivery. Software engineering has changed forever in our business.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Looking back at the platform’s scaling journey, what is one major architectural or strategic decision you would approach differently today?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Looking back at the platform’s scaling journey, what is one major architectural or strategic decision you would approach differently today?</h2> <p>The one I would mention is an architectural debate about what platform to use and how we make management information available for reporting.&nbsp;</p> <p>We ended up with a system called Metabase, which is a really good dashboard and analytics platform. You can go as deep as you want to go, down to the nth crumb, as it were. We had been using other systems, and when our new head of data science came in, they suggested we park Metabase over the top of the data lake and shut down all the other things.&nbsp;</p> <p>We didn’t do that at first, because we were scared. But the implementation of Meta as a management tool was foundational to enabling the flow of data that our teams can understand. Prior to that, we had a lot of data, but not a lot of it was understood. So Meta brought data literacy into our business.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about digital transformation</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640327/HSS-ProService-Uber-ifies-with-functional-programming-and-agentic-AI">HSS ProService ‘Uber-ifies’ with functional programming and agentic AI</a>: HSS’s pivot from 130-depot hire business to a digital-only marketplace to handle messy transactions and old-school processes in the construction sector.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366617867/Metro-mayors-face-similar-digitisation-challenges-to-banks-but-lack-their-resources">Metro mayors face similar digitisation challenges to banks, but lack their resources</a>: UK regional leaders want to be independent of central government when it comes to digital transformation decision-making, but don’t fully understand what’s ahead.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> HSS ProService underwent a profound transformation from asset-heavy hire business to digital marketplace set to deploy agentic AI. CEO Tom Shorten tells us how it did it https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/Rubiks-cube-puzzle-project-vitranc-getty-RF-hero.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/The-digital-pivot-How-HSS-transformed-hire-with-agentic-AI Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:24:00 GMT <p>With its customers using multiple financial professional services in its portfolio, corporate services provider Vistra wants to provide a single platform. The digital backbone will also give customers access to better quality business information through embedded artificial intelligence (AI).</p> <p><a href="https://www.vistra.com/people/damian-leach">Damian Leach, recently installed chief AI and digital officer at Vistra</a>, has been tasked with accelerating the group’s capabilities in digitally enabled and AI-powered professional financial services.&nbsp;Vistra has around 10,000 staff across 65 global locations, and offers tax, payroll, fund and entity management services among others.</p> <p>A project to build the digital backbone platform will gradually enable customers to access more of its products and services through a single front-end, says Leach: “For us, [the digital platform] is a tremendous opportunity to make sure we are operating internationally with borderless, frictionless services.”</p> <p>Vistra’s client businesses currently use a combination of digital services and products as well as teams of services, according to Leach. The platform will make them all accessible through a single interface.</p> <p>“For example, iiPay –&nbsp;a <a href="https://www.fintechfutures.com/m-a/vistra-acquires-payroll-platform-iipay">recent acquisition</a> that we made – is a multi-country global payroll provider, but we’ve also got local payroll solutions that we offer in certain markets,” he tells Computer Weekly. “So, we’re intending to unify them and make them readily available across the platform.”</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Better data"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Better data</h2> <p>One of the key benefits for Vistra’s customers, according to Leach, is providing them with better quality data about their business: “Data remains one of the largest issues for our customers. Often, organisations have fragmented data in silos, working from multiple sources, which leads to fragmented output and multiple answers to the same question.</p> <p>“We can play a pivotal role in cleaning up that view for customers within their portfolios that we have under management, not only unifying the clean data that we have, but providing the ability to ask questions of that data to gain intelligent insights.”</p> <p>Leach says that by infusing AI into the workflow behind the scenes, a modern approach to the customer journey is created.&nbsp;Vistra is building the platform itself and will use AI offered by hyperscalers, with orchestration and automation tools.</p> <p>“We are coming up with a tenanted architecture that allows us to promote granularity to each of our individual clients while keeping their data secure,” says Leach.</p> <p>He adds that the project will be ongoing with regular iterations, but it all starts with “the boring stuff”. According to Leach, this is of “upmost importance” and includes “designing policies and the guardrails, setting the standards, doing the architecture, setting the roadmap, engineering blueprints, and addressing regulatory issues and trust and privacy concerns that our clients have”.</p> <p>He adds: “We have a blueprint and it is released into certain markets with features. We work in iterative agile sprints to release features and capabilities into the platform on an ongoing basis.”</p> <p>Vistra plans on releasing new capability for the business to test every two weeks, says Leach: “Once tested and approved, we then release it to our clients.”</p> <p>The company intends to roll out to major market hubs by the end of the year.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="AI opportunity"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>AI opportunity</h2> <p>Leach tells Computer Weekly that AI is a huge opportunity for Vistra to improve its services despite some misgivings across wider industry.</p> <p>“There’s a lot of judgement that comes about through the topic of AI, because a lot of people tend to think AI is about automating processes,” he says. “This is somewhat true, but I think the real benefit is improving the client experience. If you connect the client to the data that they have and put intelligent services over it to build those ‘what if?’ scenarios, they can question the data and we can open new services.”</p> <p>A key opportunity is also to offer services as part of an integrated suite of products through relationships and integration into other platforms, adds Leach. “One of the things that I’m looking at is how to build strategic relationships with other cloud native platform vendors to include our products and services which are different to theirs in their marketplace,” he says.</p> <blockquote> <div class="imagecaption alignLeft"> <img src="https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/Damian-Leach-Vistra-140px.jpg" alt="Headshot of Damian Leach."> </div> <p><strong><span style="color: #34495e;">“We are coming up with a tenanted architecture that allows us to promote granularity to each of our individual clients while keeping their data secure”</span></strong></p> <p><em><span style="color: #34495e;">Damian Leach, Vistra</span></em></p> </blockquote> <p>In terms of its own IT resources, Vistra has 450 tech staff which all sit in Leach’s team. He describes his role as being like a CIO, chief technology officer (CTO) and chief data officer (CDO) rolled into one, heading up infrastructure core services such as datacentres, end user computing, as well as networks, voice and collaboration services and cloud.</p> <p>In addition, he is responsible for Vistra Digital, which covers all the customer-facing products and services, and traditional enterprise applications, while cyber security, architecture, engineering and all the functional also falls within his remit.</p> <p>Leach spent 13 years in global banking technology roles leading global teams and has been the CTO of a global fortune 500 software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. Until recently, he was global <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620921/Seaco-charts-course-for-unified-security-strategy">CIO at container leasing company Seaco</a> where he led the modernisation and scaling of enterprise technology capabilities.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Skills challenge"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Skills challenge</h2> <p>Leach says one of the biggest challenges faced when adopting AI is the availability of the right skills, which are “the biggest challenge as we enter the AI era, and learning and focusing on talent and skills within the existing team”.</p> <p>He says to address this he has three combined strategies. The first is to build and foster grassroots innovation in the existing workforce: “It’s important for us to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366629372/AI-advances-clear-path-to-software-development-careers">lift the existing core team skills</a> and expertise that we have and arm them with the right tools and support needed to succeed. This includes providing psychological safety for the team to experiment, innovate and even fail as they learn, but at least [they gain] progress.”</p> <p>He says employees understand the challenges the company has but perhaps lack the tools to help solve them. “Through innovation grassroots mindset, we can encourage the best-in-class ideas to surface and for people to stay as they learn and continue to contribute,” he adds.</p> <p>The current drive is to encourage the development of a community of builders by releasing AI tools to them to start coding to meet some needs that they have.</p> <p>Leach says the company is also “<a href="https://www.theserverside.com/blog/Coffee-Talk-Java-News-Stories-and-Opinions/How-long-is-a-Sprint-in-Agile?_gl=1*keci33*_ga*Mjg4MTcxMzU3LjE3Nzk5NjUxNTU.*_ga_TQKE4GS5P9*czE3ODEwMDE1MjIkbzQ1JGcxJHQxNzgxMDAyNDYxJGoxMSRsMCRoMA..">sprinting</a>” using new talent: “I’ll be setting up strategic relationships with key universities and taking in fresh graduates. It’s a focused project, building new talent from the ground up. And of course, here in Singapore, there’s great opportunity and very supportive government initiatives to meet the national AI strategy.”</p> <p>The company is also building on existing capacity in delivery centres in Malaysia, China and India.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more CIO interviews</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643836/Interview-Clare-Hickie-EMEA-CTO-Workday">The IT chief went from implementing Workday software at one of the firm’s largest customers to leading technology at the supplier – she discusses what she learned</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643817/Interview-Michael-Cole-chief-technology-officer-DP-World-Tour">AI promises to revolutionise the experience of watching or taking part in the traditional golf for players, fans and TV viewers – the IT chief leading the change explains how</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639330/Interview-Nick-Pearson-CIO-Ricoh-Europe">Working for a company undergoing a major pivot in its business model means variety and opportunity for the supplier’s tech chief</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366635509/Interview-Art-Hu-global-CIO-Lenovo">The IT chief at the PC, servers and storage supplier is using his experience of rolling out tech internally to boost the growing services ambitions of the Chinese tech giant</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> CIO Damian Leach discusses Vistra’s digital platform, which he says will harness artificial intelligence in its financial professional services offering https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/financial-results-chart-graph-5-adobe.jpeg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643928/CIO-interview-Damian-Leach-Vistra Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:06:00 GMT <p>Customer and employee experience software supplier Freshworks is pivoting towards artificial intelligence (AI)-driven <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/definition/employee-experience">employee experience (EX)</a>. This move, which places AI at the heart of the firm’s strategy, has significant implications for companies and professionals relying on its <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Data-Matters/How-simplifying-IT-helps-teams-perform-at-racing-speed">Freshservice platform</a>.</p> <p>That is the key takeaway from Freshworks Refresh 2026 in New York City, where senior executives outline the company’s product roadmap, and customers present best-practice techniques they’ve adopted to make the most of the platform. What’s clear during the event is that the technology firm seems eager to do things differently from its competitors, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot and ServiceNow.</p> <p>Dennis Woodside, CEO and president at Freshworks, says in his keynote speech to service leaders in the room that his company absorbs the complexity of modern business so they can do their jobs better. He suggests that attending professionals share something in common: “You all bet on a different way of doing enterprise software.”</p> <p>During the keynote and a series of product-focused sessions, Woodside and his colleagues outline new features the company hopes will differentiate it from its competitors. The aim is to create an agile, open platform for connecting assets and incidents, with the company’s <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Data-Matters/The-importance-of-simplifying-IT-enterprise-capability-without-the-complexity">Freddy AI technology</a> at the heart of an agentic approach to customer support.</p> <p>Freshworks announced a series of product features at the event, including AI Agent Studio, its no-code agent builder; MCP Gateway, which bridges Freshservice with the AI tools customers choose; and new performance dashboards that offer AI-powered insights to service leaders charged with delivering high-quality EX.</p> <p>Woodside says these capabilities will position Freshservice for a continuing data-enabled transformation that will accelerate during the next two years. He suggests everyone’s world will change in three radical ways.</p> <p>First, professionals at all levels in all sectors will rely on thousands of agents that must be governed and identifiable.</p> <p>Second, traditional performance measures, such as service-level agreements (SLAs), will be replaced by experience-level agreements, as service leaders aim to ensure agentic-enabled support boosts staff productivity.</p> <p>Finally, in an age when operations will be more proactive than reactive, organisations will require a single source of truth that human and AI agents can trust.</p> <p>“When you look at what we’re shipping today and what we’re talking about for the future, those are the beliefs that we’re building towards,” says Woodside, as he concludes his keynote. “So, the question really isn’t whether this is going to happen; it’s going to happen. The question is, ‘Who do you trust to walk into that future with you?’”</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What customers need to know now"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What customers need to know now</h2> <p>Freshworks CTO Murali Swaminathan tells Computer Weekly in a one-to-one interview that he believes the on-stage announcements demonstrate that the company is pivoting strategically to develop a competitive edge in the age of AI.</p> <p>“We’re trying to make our platform more configurable and usable,” he says. “It’s not like we’re trying to bring everyone else to our interface. Instead, we want to be more interoperable with everyone else. The MCP Gateway, for example, means our customers can use our technology to call any AI.”</p> <p>This approach resonates with Chris Kairinos, senior director of global modern workplace technology, client services and technology operations at A+E Global Media. He explains to Computer Weekly how his media company has used Freshworks technology since late 2020.</p> <p>During the past six years, Kairinos has continued to hone his company’s use of the platform. He says he is impressed with some of the new features, particularly Agent Studio. At a time when his company, like so many others, is attempting to plot a roadmap towards <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/agentic-AI">agentic AI</a> in support services, Kairinos says he also likes the in-built flexibility of MCP Gateway.&nbsp;</p> <p>“The Freshworks approach is all about growing the ecosystem,” he says. “The MCP Gateway is going to help a lot. Before, you might have used something like Copilot Studio with Microsoft, but then, when you come to adding the technology to your platforms, you might encounter integration issues.”</p> <p>Kairinos says he regularly speaks with the Freshworks product team about new features, adding that&nbsp;the company’s focus on interoperability is crucial to helping alleviate long-term integration concerns. “I say to the product team at Freshworks that AI is a case of, ‘Who’s the best kid in the playground?’” he says.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Success in the age of AI will be all about which provider will play nicest with your existing digital stack </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Chris Kairinos, A+E Global Media</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>“Success in the age of AI will be all about which provider will play nicest with your existing digital stack. With the technology they’ve demoed on stage, and from an <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/How-the-Model-Context-Protocol-simplifies-AI-development">MCP standpoint</a>, Freshworks is a pretty good kid in that playground at the minute, and the position is only going to get better.”</p> <p>Speaking on stage at the event, Julie Mohr, principal analyst at research firm Forrester, says the key to unlocking value from AI is focusing on the right business outcomes. Companies can use AI-powered technologies to boost employee experiences. However, their effectiveness will rely on in-depth expertise, and that’s where Freshworks can play a supporting role.</p> <p>“Skill sets in AI are at a premium right now,” she says. “For people to make the right decisions and to understand how to transform, they need those skills. And because companies don’t necessarily fully understand what that transformation is going to look like, they’re going to rely on vendors and partners.”</p> <p>The key to success for technology providers like Freshworks, suggests Swaminathan, is openness. Gone are the days when enterprise software specialists maintained a strong firewall that kept customers locked to their limited set of services. In the AI era, companies must be open to new interfaces and partnerships.</p> <p>“Every single player has to coexist with the rest of the players, and interoperability is going to be the biggest thing that drives success,” he says. “You can’t force customers to say you have to use this tool or that tool. The customer is going to use the tool of their choice, and you have to be able to embed yourself or connect to that tool.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Understanding the technology roadmap"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Understanding the technology roadmap</h2> <p>While the announcements at the event highlight Freshworks’ desire to prepare for an agentic future, Swaminathan says customers should be aware that the company’s new features aren’t only focused on agents. He says the firm is aiming for breadth and depth, both in the features it offers and the ways it supports its clients.</p> <p>“I meet many customers, and not everybody’s ready to embrace AI yet,” he adds. “They have their own challenges. So, we are in this mode where we still have to support folks who don’t use AI and those who do. That reality means everything we build has to be built with a mindset that says, ‘Okay, the world is moving, but not moving as fast as the technology is changing.’”</p> <p>Swaminathan’s point is an interesting one – sometimes, technology suppliers, perhaps unwittingly, innovate faster than their customers can absorb. Speaking to Computer Weekly at the event, Shannon Kalvar, research director at analyst IDC, discusses Freshworks’ strategy.</p> <p>“What they’re trying to say is that we can help mid-sized enterprises to achieve the end goal you’re headed towards, which is a world where you are working with your digital estate, not just as a productivity tool, but as a production tool,” he says. “They were saying, ‘It’s the world you already find yourself in, but you’re not ready.’”</p> <p>Kalvar suggests that enterprises need to become agile organisations – and reaching this position might require a heavy lift for slower-moving firms. For Freshworks, like for all enterprise software providers, pushing transformation at the right pace for digital leaders is crucial. So, should Freshworks develop a strategy to help its customers manage cultural change?</p> <p>The answer, says Swaminathan, is maybe. He stresses that the company already has an AI advisory group to help guide customers through the change process. While companies will have to deal with the “heavy stuff” behind the scenes, Swaminathan recognises that the rise of agentic AI poses new challenges and that advisory input can be crucial.</p> <p>“A lot of the functionality we have in the product, you can turn it on and start using it,” he says. “But AI is one area where we will have to guide customers through the process. So, with our AI advisory and some of our specialised engineering, we want to help by providing white-glove service to the right customers, because that’s how we think they can be successful.”</p> <p>Regardless of the route to the destination, one thing is certain: Freshworks’ future is all about embracing AI. So far, the market likes the moves the company is making. Before the New York event, the company presented its quarterly results in an earnings call. In Q1 2026, revenue rose 16% year-over-year to $228.6m.</p> <p>During the call, Freshworks announced it would lay off roughly 500 employees (around 11% of staff). The company’s CEO, Dennis Woodside, stated the cuts are due to over 50% of the company’s code now being written by AI, reducing the need for traditional manual coding and allowing the company to streamline operations.</p> <p>Woodside says on the earnings call: “About over half of our code is originated in AI today, and like many other software companies, that is definitely changing how we build products, how fast we can build products, and the amount of people who we need to build products.”</p> <p>Freshworks is <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642756/Tech-sector-job-losses-show-AI-replacement-in-action">far from alone in announcing IT job cuts</a> and joins an ever-growing list of technology firms that are seeing the power of AI-enabled code. At the event, Swaminathan tells Computer Weekly that the company recognises that innovation velocity has increased with AI-enabled development.</p> <p>“That capability means we can do more quickly,” he says. “The speed and agility are where we’re seeing the difference, right? So, that’s what we have to figure out: how do we level up our engineers to do bigger things faster?”</p> <p>Asked to paint a picture of how Freshworks and its services will look three years from now, Swaminathan says it won’t just be his company that uses AI heavily. He says AI-powered services will continue to mature, as will customers’ approaches, including firms that are slower to embrace AI right now.</p> <p>“I said earlier that not everyone is ready for AI,” he says. “In three years, every customer will be there. That means we won’t need two ways to support customers; instead, everyone will be using AI. That means a lot of the workflows will be autonomous, and every single feature will be AI native or AI-powered.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about AI in EX and CX</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/CXEXBG-with-added-AI-A-winning-formula-for-customer-experience">CX+EX=BG</a>, with added AI: A winning formula for customer experience.</li> <li>The <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-future-of-CX-is-AI-powered-and-human-centric">future of CX is AI-powered and human-centric</a>.</li> <li>Elevate <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/Elevate-customer-experience-with-AI-and-analytics">customer experience with AI and analytics</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> Freshworks is pivoting to AI-driven employee experience, launching its AI Agent Studio, MCP Gateway and AI dashboards https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Customer-experience-AdobeStock_323398101.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Freshworks-Refresh-2026-pivot-to-AI-driven-employee-experience Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:20:00 GMT <p>At London Tech Week, deputy prime minister David Lammy announced the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) legal assistants for use in Crown Court cases, alongside an AI tool for judges to identify cases ready for trial.</p> <p>At the end of December 2025, the Crown Court backlog was 80,200 cases in England and Wales, the highest level recorded since 2016, <a target="_blank" href="https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8372/" rel="noopener">according to Minstry of Justice (MoJ) figures</a>. The backlog in magistrates’ courts was 379,400.</p> <p>The MoJ said in a statement that AI legal assistants will be developed “in partnership with the UK’s top legal experts and leading AI developers”. It is said that the assistants will support legal professionals with routine casework, including research and case analysis.</p> <p>Before being used in the Crown Court, the technology will be trialled to ensure the software meets the standard required by judges and lawyers before being considered for roll-out in the courts system, the MoJ said.</p> <p>Lammy said: “Artificial intelligence has the power to transform how we live, work and govern for the better. This impact for good can be seen in our justice system – with thousands of days of admin work saved for our probation staff, and the advent of new tools which aim to cut court backlogs and deliver swifter justice for victims.”</p> <p>He will also announce that every probation officer in England and Wales has been equipped with Justice Transcribe, described as an AI tool that automatically records and transcribes conversations with offenders.</p> <p>The MoJ said the tool could free up the equivalent of 18,750 calendar days of time every year, allowing frontline staff to spend more time monitoring offenders. A similar tool is being trialled in the Immigration and Asylum Tribunals, the department said. It is one of the projects forming part of the prime minister’s “AI Exemplars programme”, which are examples of how the government wants to use AI across the public sector.</p> <p>In August 2025, the MoJ announced it had hired a chief&nbsp;<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366623117/UK-MoJ-crime-prediction-algorithms-raise-serious-concerns">artificial intelligence</a>&nbsp;(AI) officer as part of a three-year action plan to deploy AI. The plan included setting up the Justice AI Unit, described as an interdisciplinary team comprising experts in AI, ethics, policy, design, operations and change management.&nbsp;</p> <p>The unit’s website, <a target="_blank" href="https://ai.justice.gov.uk/" rel="noopener">ai.justice.gov.uk</a>, is used to provide updates on what the MoJ is looking at in terms of AI. On the site, Lammy is quoted as saying: “Trials in the probation system with Justice Transcribe had helped record meetings between offenders and officers,&nbsp;saving 25,000 hours of time&nbsp;by helping transcribe more than&nbsp;150,000 meetings.”</p> <p>A probation officer said: “For once, I feel that I actually have time to look at the person in front of me and they feel that they’re being listened to”.</p> <p>Lammy was appointed deputy prime minister and secretary of state for justice in the 2025 cabinet reshuffle on 5 September 2025, following the resignation of Angela Raynor. In February 2026, Lammy <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639522/Deputy-prime-minister-vows-to-reform-justice-system-with-AI">vowed to reform the justice system with AI</a>. Speaking at the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639308/Microsoft-CEO-opens-up-London-AI-tour-with-Copilot-push">Microsoft AI Tour</a>, Lammy said the justice system is in “desperate” need of renewal.</p> <p>This week, the government also announced testing environments called <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644113/UK-government-pumps-200m-into-AI-skills-and-adoption">AI Growth Labs</a>. These might enable the UK’s “lawtech” sector to develop and refine AI products in “secure, controlled settings” before bringing them to market.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about the UK government and AI</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>UK government <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644113/UK-government-pumps-200m-into-AI-skills-and-adoption">pumps £200m into AI skills and adoption</a>.</li> <li>UK government and Cisco unveil <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643929/UK-government-and-Cisco-unveil-AI-digital-skills-initiative">AI, digital skills initiative</a>.</li> <li>UK government’s £500m <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641682/UK-governments-50m-sovereign-AI-fund-bids-to-commercialise-research">sovereign AI fund bids to commercialise research</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> Deputy PM David Lammy announces AI legal assistants for Crown Courts and AI tools for judges to tackle record backlogs https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Justice-law-court-davidfranklin-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643991/Lammy-announces-AI-legal-assistants-for-Crown-Courts-at-London-Tech-Week Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:22:00 GMT <p>Prince William’s homelessness programme, <a href="https://homewards.org.uk/">Homewards</a>, is teaming up with Salesforce and LandAid, a property industry charity, to set up a Homelessness Data Lab.</p> <p>The Homewards charity, launched in 2023, works in six locations: Aberdeen, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, Lambeth, Newport, Northern Ireland and Sheffield. It is supported by <a target="_blank" href="https://royalfoundation.com/" rel="noopener">The Royal Foundation</a>.</p> <p>The<b> </b>Homelessness Data Lab is described in a joint statement by Homewards, LandAid and Salesforce as a first-of-its-kind national collaboration, designed to use data and technology to prevent homelessness.</p> <p><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366632839/UK-Salesforce-execs-Agentforce-begins-to-stoke-new-business-forms">Zahra Bahrololoumi</a>, CEO of Salesforce UK and Ireland, will join William on the AI Arena stage at <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366625615/Starmer-opens-London-Tech-Week-with-1bn-AI-boost">London TechWeek</a>&nbsp;today to launch the initiative and talk about how IT can put an end to homelessness.</p> <p>In the statement, she said:<b> </b>“Our work with Prince William’s Homewards programme and the launch of the Homelessness Data Lab represents a definitive shift in how society can tackle its most complex challenges. Over 430,000 people across the UK are currently facing homelessness – but this isn’t inevitable.</p> <p>“Homelessness is rarely random. It can be predictable, which means with the right tools and support, it can be preventable. At Salesforce, we are proud to contribute our technology and expertise to frontline services, identify risk earlier, and help make homelessness rare, brief and unrepeated.” </p> <p>The project involves more than 25 organisations drawn from business, technology, government, local authorities and frontline services. The lab will explore practical homelessness prevention schemes in the six Homewards locations.</p> <figure class="main-article-image half-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/Tech-Week-2026-Homewards-PR-800px-h.jpg"> <img data-src="https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/Tech-Week-2026-Homewards-PR-800px-h_half_column_mobile.jpg" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/Tech-Week-2026-Homewards-PR-800px-h_half_column_mobile.jpg 960w,https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/Tech-Week-2026-Homewards-PR-800px-h.jpg 1280w" alt="Photo shows Homewards presence at London Tech Week" height="217" width="279"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>Homewards at London Tech Week </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p>Bloomberg, VodafoneThree, Accenture and NatWest Group are involved in the venture and will develop projects whose aim is to show that homelessness can be predictable and preventable. The projects are intended to focus on improving coordination between frontline services, developing a better understanding of why people become homeless, and getting support to them at the first signs of difficulty.</p> <p>This will be the first time that homelessness has been discussed at London Tech Week. The panel the Prince of Wales is participating in will also include business leaders and feature a “pitch” session where five entrepreneurs will present uses of data and technology aimed at preventing homelessness.</p> <p>At an <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366569394/Why-open-data-is-needed-in-the-battle-to-address-homelessness">open data conference in London in 2024</a>, a researcher at national youth homeless charity Centrepoint related how it had to send freedom of information requests to more than 300 local authorities in England to access information about the scale of homelessness among the young, which is also a hidden problem, in that they might be sofa surfing with friends.</p> <p>“The immediate idea we have [of homelessness] is someone sleeping rough,” the researcher said. “However, there are many more that can actually be considered homeless while not sleeping rough in the streets.”</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Homelessness is rarely random. It can be predictable, which means with the right tools and support, it can be preventable </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>The conference, OpenUK’s State of Open Con 24, shone a spotlight on the bureaucracy that <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Cliff-Sarans-Enterprise-blog/A-powerful-case-for-more-open-data">prevents opening up datasets</a> to tackle the homelessness crisis.</p> <p>The Homelessness Data Lab also involves housing sector organisations Centrepoint, Crisis, the Centre for Homelessness Impact, Community Action Network and Homeless Link, as well as the Ministry of Housing, communities and local government, local authorities, and local organisations in the six locations.</p> <p>Dan Hughes, a trustee at LandAid, said: “The property industry has a real role to play in tackling youth homelessness, and this collaboration is a brilliant example of what’s possible when businesses, government and the sector come together around shared data and a shared goal. By using data to identify warning signs earlier, we can move from responding to crisis to preventing it.”</p> <p>Hazel Detsiny, executive director of homelessness at The Royal Foundation, added: “The Royal Foundation has a proud track record in harnessing brilliant collaboration and the latest technology as a force for change, and this is the time to bring homelessness into such conversations.</p> <p>“We’re proud to be working with LandAid and Salesforce to launch the UK’s first Homelessness Data Lab, where partners are developing and testing practical projects across our locations to use data more effectively.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about data technologies for social good</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Why <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366569394/Why-open-data-is-needed-in-the-battle-to-address-homelessness">open data is needed in the battle to address homelessness</a>.</li> <li>In this guest blog post, Cindi Howson, chief data strategy officer at ThoughtSpot, discusses using <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Data-Matters/Using-data-for-good-not-evil">data for good</a>, not evil.</li> <li>Putting <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Putting-data-at-the-heart-of-policymaking-will-accelerate-Londons-recovery">data at the heart of policymaking</a> will accelerate London’s recovery.</li> </ul> </div> </div> Prince William’s Homewards charity is partnering with Salesforce and LandAid to launch a data lab with the aim of using data technology to predict and prevent homelessness https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/LTW-2026-Leon-Neal-Getty-RM-SINGLE-USE-ONLY-hero.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366644097/Prince-William-charity-and-Salesforce-set-up-data-lab-to-tackle-homelessness Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:09:00 GMT <p>The big theme of the keynote programme at this year’s Infosecurity Europe focused on how artificial intelligence (AI) is turbo-charging the activities of cyber attackers, whether criminals or states hostile to the West.&nbsp;</p> <p><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366632649/China-responsible-for-rising-cyber-attacks-says-NCSC">Paul Chichester</a>, director of operations at the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642625/UKs-NCSC-warns-of-wave-of-patches">National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)</a>, told attendees that he had moved from a more to a less sceptical position on the salience of artificial intelligence for cyber security over the past year.</p> <p>We are now at a point of “maximum uncertainty” that might also be the calm before a coming cyber storm, he said, in part because of the sheer “number of variables” now at play. He agreed with the description of the present made by Blaise Metreweli, the head of MI6, that the UK is currently positioned “between peace and war”.</p> <p>“The combined uncertainty in so many parts of our lives – personal, work, the environment – is something different,” said Chichester. “The world is more dangerous and contested now than in decades, and te greater acceleration of connectedness is increasing. So, when you try to think about what’s next and predict where things are going, it’s hard.”</p> <p>The rapidity of technology evolution is novel, he said, adding that while his tendency is to be sceptical, “it feels that the technological rate of change…is going to [mean] societal and civilisational change. A lot of what we’re trying to understand is far beyond our adversaries stealing our secrets. States have integrated cyber operations into everything they do.</p> <p>“We see that integration in the military domain, playing out in Ukraine, Syria, the Middle East. The way that we now see our adversaries integrating to support military outcomes is changing at a vast pace. And we’ve seen Russia, particularly, learning a huge amount.”</p> <p>Nevertheless, he declared himself “a massive optimist about a lot of the challenges that we face…there are a lot of opportunities”.</p> <p>In terms of responding to cyber threats, Chichester drew attention to “more aggressive countering” by the state, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641790/UK-to-build-national-cyber-shield-to-protect-against-AI-cyber-threats">advocated by security minister Dan Jarvis</a>, as well as building in more resilience, as exemplified by the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/UKs-Cyber-Bill-should-be-just-one-part-of-a-wider-effort">Cyber Security Resilience Bill</a>.</p> <p>“The government absolutely recognises that it needs to do more in that space [working with regulators],” said Chichester.</p> <p>But it is a “collective endeavour”, he added. “I know you’ve heard the NCSC talk before about partnership, and ‘now is the time to act, you must act’. I mean it this time. Now, more than ever, is the time to act. We must work together to get ahead of threats that we face and vulnerabilities that we talk about. Even if the things you ultimately do aren’t 100%, you’re getting match fit. Don’t wait for certainty, because it’s never coming.”</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Adversaries accelerating"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Adversaries accelerating</h2> <p><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366623776/UK-government-websites-to-replace-passwords-with-secure-passkeys">Stuart McKenzie</a>, managing director of Mandiant Consulting EMEA, part of Google Cloud, gave attendees his “big, fat security update of the year”, which echoed Chichester’s presentation in terms of its stress on the increased speed scale of the adversarial activities with which network defenders are confronted. His session covered lessons learned from Mandiant’s work on the front lines of incident response.</p> <p>Attackers have gotten faster and become more persistent over the past year, said McKenzie. Cyber criminals are also working more in unison and are merely 18 months behind nation-state actors in capability, whereas previously they were more like years behind. “We see attackers now handing off attacks to other groups, actively collaborating,” he added.</p> <p>While some actors are incredibly quick, there were others who preferred to maintain a very long dwell time in their target networks. “Attackers are increasingly trying to get in and deny you access to your recovery environment,” said McKenzie. “They’re actively taking down your ability to recover, which makes it difficult to get your organisation back up. We need to think about how to move from the reactive state that we’re in today, where we’re responding to every incident, to a much more proactive state.”</p> <p>AI is making a big difference, he said, both in his talk and in an interview with Computer Weekly afterwards; “Attackers are very much like us. They use AI in the same way we do and have done. At the start of early 2025, they were, ‘Cool, this is a good chatbot’. And then in mid-2025, as we all began to see how you can use <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/large-language-model-LLM">LLMs</a> [large language models] directly, they started integrating the LLMs into their attack chains to handle dynamic tasks.</p> <p>“There was a step change around about October last year where we all thought, ‘This could be the future’, and went from being AI sceptical to embracing it. At the same time, we saw the attackers integrate [AI] directly into their environments. Then at the start of 2026, we saw attackers collaborate to find a zero day in a content management platform. Luckily, through some Google intel, we were able to see what they were going after, and we worked with the vendor to patch it before it could be actively exploited.”</p> <p>McKenzie expanded on how the way a defender sees their network is completely different to how an attacker sees it: “When a security person draws their network, they draw a beautiful network architecture of how they think it’s all being segregated. They have these lovely diagrams of where all the workstations are, what the servers are and what the connections look like.</p> <p>“But the attacker finds all the misconfigurations and systems that aren’t supposed to be connected, they’re supposed to have logical gaps between them. They see this view of network that is a real-world view. That is why we always suggest that defenders use adversarial emulation or red teaming to be able to work out: how does that network exist, does it really have all the logical separation you think it has, are there bits that have changed over time?</p> <p>“Their network will have grown organically over time and they’re still looking at the network diagram from when it was designed. They’ve forgotten that something’s been layered on top and changed and connected or someone’s made a policy change, and so on.”</p> <p>Security fundamentals have not changed, he said, but AI has sped up attacks and so sped up required defence.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Cyber criminal ecosystem evolves"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Cyber criminal ecosystem evolves</h2> <p>On the second day of the event, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366625059/Infosecurity-2025-NCA-cyber-intelligence-head-spells-out-trends">William Lyne</a>, head of economic and cyber crime at the Metropolitan Police Service, offered a picture of how cyber criminality has been changing as its ecosystem has evolved.</p> <p>There is now less stove piping of criminality, and cyber criminals are getting involved in a fuller gamut of activity, he said. Lyne said that when he joined the UK National Crime Agency as a trainee investigator 15 years ago, “you had cyber crime, hacktivists and hostile state actors, and everything sat quite nicely in those particular stove pipes. But this has changed quite a lot recently.</p> <p>“People aren’t just involved in cyber crime, or another type of online offending, they’re involved in many&nbsp;different types of offending, which is something that we never used to see previously,” he added.</p> <p>Lyne said there is now an evolved cyber adversarial ecosystem, with a commoditisation of cyber crime over the past few years that – among other things – means you can rent malware as a service, just as a business will use software as a service for its customer relationship management. “You can get a service for basically anything in the cyber crime ecosystem now,” he added.</p> <p>Another step change is that the rise of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/cryptocurrency">cryptocurrencies</a> has made cyber crime much more profitable. Cashing out used to be “massive pain in the backside” for cyber criminals, said Lyne. “How do you convert the data you have stolen into money? How do you launder the money you’ve stolen from credit card fraud and other types of identity theft? Cyber criminals were losing between 50% to 75% of their ill-gotten gains due to those kinds of complexity. Cryptocurrencies have changed all of that; now 99.5% is realisable.</p> <p>“Virtual currencies are also massively helpful because, if you want to commoditise, if you want to run as a service entity, you’ve got to trade with each other. Criminals trading with each other is inherently quite dodgy.” Virtual currencies have been tremendous for ensuring trust among those dedicated to criminality.</p> <p>Nevertheless, UK law enforcement has had big successes in recent years, said Lyne. Like Chichester, he appealed for collaboration between the security services and civilian business organisations: “Collaboration is critical for every one of our investigations – with multiple organisations, across the UK and local and international partners.</p> <p>“We want to have meaningful, strategic and tactical integration with industry partners who we know hold keys to the questions and challenges that we have in this space. It’s important for us to build and generate trust. And it can be a challenge, but I’m grateful for those partners.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about Infosecurity Europe 2026</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Infosecurity Europe <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638558/Infosecurity-Europe-launches-cyber-security-startups-stream">launches cyber security startups stream</a>.</li> <li>Infosec 2026: <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/microscope/news/366641752/InfoSec-The-Channel-Zone-returns">The Channel Zone returns</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642956/Security-chiefs-too-polite-for-startups-says-cyber-flywheel-founder-Alastair-Paterson">Security chiefs ‘too polite’ for startups</a>, says cyber flywheel founder Alastair Paterson.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> AI is accelerating cyber attacks by criminals and hostile states, with attackers faster, more persistent and increasingly collaborative, say experts speaking at Infosecurity Europe 2026 https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/Infosecurity-Europe-2026-PR-hero.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643943/Infosecurity-Europe-2026-AI-turbo-charging-cyber-crime-and-response Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:19:00 GMT <p>MPs on the Science, Industry and Technology Committee have called for a “period of over-correction” to break the cycle of supplier lock-in and foster <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/resources/Cloud-computing-services">a domestic UK cloud ecosystem</a> through mandatory re-competition and open source standards.</p> <p>One notable measure recommended in the report – <em><a href="https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/53352/documents/298462/default/">Rewiring the state: Delivering digital government</a></em> – is that the UK government should exercise the break clause with <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640417/Health-workers-call-for-Palantir-to-be-booted-from-NHS-contracts">Palantir and the Federated Data Platform (FDP)</a> in the NHS and publish a fully costed exit plan by the end of 2026.</p> <p>Elsewhere, the report highlights a “lack of competition” in government cloud spending, which totals about £10bn per year. It cites the March 2026 HM Revenue &amp; Customs (HMRC) contract with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a primary example of market failure. AWS was the sole bidder for <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640606/Flaws-in-government-procurement-show-in-HMRC-473m-AWS-award">the 10-year, £472m deal</a>, despite concerns over restrictive licensing practices.&nbsp;</p> <p>Meanwhile, the report recommends the establishment of a unit to monitor and disseminate digital government best practices from the European Union (EU), including how member states encourage the development of sovereign alternatives to incumbent providers.&nbsp;</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Dangerous levels of lock-in"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Dangerous levels of lock-in</h2> <p>The report warns that the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643799/Data-dive-Mapping-the-UK-public-sectors-hyperscale-dependence">UK public sector’s heavy reliance on a small group of US-based technology providers</a> – specifically Microsoft, AWS and Palantir – creates <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Is-cloud-data-sovereignty-all-just-a-case-of-Trust-me-bro">dangerous levels of supplier lock-in and systemic fragility</a>.</p> <p>The committee’s report argues that these dependencies, often driven by proprietary software and complex, opaque contracts, undermine competition, hinder innovation by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and expose the government to significant operational risks, including potential data access by the US under the Cloud Act.</p> <p>To address such vulnerabilities, the committee recommends a comprehensive strategy to achieve “technology sovereignty” and that the government should prioritise open source alternatives and mandate that a defined percentage of procurement budgets go to UK-based startups.</p> <p>Key interventions include exercising the break clause for the NHS FDP, implementing a rigorous cloud consumption dashboard to monitor supplier power, and legally requiring public bodies to favour open standards over proprietary systems to ensure the government retains the ability to make strategic choices independent of dominant incumbents.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Key recommendations in the report"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Key recommendations in the report</h2> <p><strong>Federated Data Platform:</strong> The government should commit to exercising the February 2027 break clause in the Palantir FDP contract and develop an in-house replacement or seek an alternative from UK-owned and UK-based providers, with a fully costed exit plan for the FDP published by the end of 2026.</p> <p><strong>Data access and transparency:</strong> The government must confirm the nature of Palantir’s access to patient data, the statutory basis for this authorisation, when and by whom it was authorised, and whether the information commissioner was consulted.</p> <p><strong>NHS single patient record</strong>: The government should prioritise using UK-owned and UK-based suppliers <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643138/NHS-Modernisation-Bill-promises-single-patient-record-by-2028">to develop and implement this</a> and award all contracts through open and transparent procurement processes.</p> <p><strong>Ministry of Defence and Palantir:</strong> The government must set out the reasons for awarding a £240m Ministry of Defence contract to Palantir without a competitive tender process.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">What is the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee?</h3> <p>The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee is a cross-party body of MPs tasked with scrutinising the expenditure, policy and administration of its parent department. Via formal inquiries, it gathers evidence from ministers, officials and experts to produce research-backed reports. While the committee’s findings are not legally binding, they serve as a powerful mechanism for parliamentary oversight and provide ammunition that can hold the government accountable for digital strategy.</p> <p>The committee’s influence is exercised through mandatory government responses (usually within 60 days), public pressure and the ability to shift the national debate. Even when the government does not adopt specific recommendations, the committee’s oversight can lead to increased transparency, policy adjustments and internal reviews.</p> </div> </div> <p><strong>Procurement and SMEs:</strong> Central departments and public bodies should be required to spend a defined minimum percentage of their technology procurement budgets on products from UK-based and UK-owned startups and SMEs, with quarterly progress updates published.</p> <p><strong>Ending supplier lock-in:</strong> The Government Digital Service (GDS) should produce a strategy to end supplier lock-in, including targets for supplier diversification across departments and public bodies, with quarterly reporting.</p> <p><strong>Cloud consumption dashboard:</strong> The government’s promised cloud dashboard should include a breakdown of contract awards by company, their value, details of break clauses, specific licensing terms, and a value-for-money assessment.</p> <p><strong>All of Government cloud contract:</strong> The government should detail how this contract will prevent supplier lock-in, including its engagement with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and how it will embed a pro-competition approach.</p> <p><strong>Technology sovereignty strategy:</strong> The government should define technology sovereignty. The definition should be reviewed annually, and it should set out how the government intends to support sovereign alternatives to incumbent providers.</p> <p><strong>Open source in the Procurement Act 2023:</strong> The government should use the update to this act to require public sector bodies to prioritise open source tools and technology over proprietary offerings.</p> <p><strong>Data access contingencies:</strong> The government should detail its contingencies for safeguarding citizens’ data should the US trigger data access provisions under the Cloud Act 2018, and share relevant impact assessments.</p> <p><strong>Monitor EU digital government initiatives:</strong> As part of the government’s “wider reset” in relations with the EU, DSIT should establish a unit to monitor and disseminate digital government best practice from, with a remit to engage with European Commission and member state-level bodies, in particular to focus on how the EU and member states develop sovereign alternative providers.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Industry reaction: Welcomed but measured</h3> <p>Nicky Stewart, senior advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition, said: “We agree with the need to reduce vendor lock-in across the public sector and to move towards a system that rewards choice, interoperability and fair competition for all providers.”</p> <hr> <p>Conservative peer Lord Chris Holmes said: “This is an important report from the committee which the government must consider seriously and respond to. The most important recommendation is to increase competition in the UK cloud market. This is a critical question of resilience. The cloud concentration risk for the UK right now is beyond worrying. It is also a question of economic value and growth for UK business and a key consideration for any serious discussion around sovereign capability and capacity.”</p> <hr> <p>Bill McCluggage, director of IT strategy and policy in the Cabinet Office and deputy government CIO from 2009 to 2012, said: “I applaud the committee’s thoroughness, but we need to be honest about what select committees actually do. They shine a light; they don’t drive change. This is Parliament holding the executive to account, not the government committing to act.</p> <p>“With the current political pressures bearing down on the government, economic headwinds, a crowded legislative agenda, and an ever-present lobbying machine from the big tech players, I’d be really surprised if more than a handful of these recommendations make it into policy in any meaningful timeframe. We’ve seen this film before.”</p> <hr> <p>Owen Sayers of Secon Solutions, an enterprise architect with more than 20 years’ experience in delivering national policing systems, said: “It’s the most radical set of recommendations I’ve seen in any Parliamentary report in 10 years. The title of the report clearly means they are laying out – or seeking to reset – government policy.</p> <p>“I doubt the government can fully ignore it, but some of the measures – such as following Europe’s lead, which is very sensible right now in technical and compliance/derisking terms – might be hard for Whitehall and the government to stomach. Are they brave enough to take the recommendations and work through them to develop a new, more balanced and less US-centric policy? I seriously doubt it.”</p> </div> </div> </section> A Science, Innovation and Technology Committee report contains recommendations that would radically alter UK public sector IT, procurement and relationship with hyperscalers if adopted https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Westminster1-fotolia.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643883/SIT-Committee-urges-Palantir-exit-in-push-to-end-US-cloud-grip Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:41:00 GMT <p>Back in 2024, research at Harvey Nash found that just over 10% of businesses already had or were planning to appoint a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/C-suite-shakeup-Demand-for-chief-AI-officers-accelerates?_gl=1*114guyy*_ga*MTMxMDQ1OTgxMi4xNzc3OTY4NDc4*_ga_TQKE4GS5P9*czE3ODA0ODA2MDYkbzc2JGcxJHQxNzgwNDgwNjcyJGo1OCRsMCRoMA..">Chief AI Officer</a> (CAIO). This was an exciting development – but would it last, or would AI roles perhaps become subsumed into existing tech leadership briefs such as CIO, CTO, CDO as AI became business as usual?</p> <p>&nbsp;A couple of years later, the answer is clear: it is here to stay – and it’s spreading fast. We see this ourselves in the mandates we work on with clients who are increasingly looking to appoint senior postholders with direct responsibility for AI. Of course, the job title for this may not be CAIO specifically – there are a host of titles emerging such as Head of AI, Chief AI Scientist, AI Transformation Officer, Responsible AI Director and more.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Sector hotspots"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>&nbsp;Sector hotspots</h2> <p>These appointments are especially prominent in financial services where organisations are generally advanced in their technology systems and data platforms, and where AI is a natural fit with the tech-enabled operating models of digital banking. <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640627/HSBC-gets-its-first-artificial-intelligence-chief">HSBC has recently announced the appointment of a CAIO</a>, for example, while <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639140/NatWest-hails-progress-after-12bn-spent-on-tech-last-year-but-true-AI-transformation-to-come">NatWest</a> appointed a Chief AI Research Officer last year.</p> <p>Senior AI roles are also widespread in highly regulated sectors such as energy, where there is a particular focus on ensuring there is strong governance over the deployment of AI, managing the risks and maintaining compliance with data privacy and security rules. Other sectors where AI is really on the march include legal, accountancy and consultancy. The Big Four firms, for example, have CAIOs or equivalent and are driving significant efforts to integrate AI into both internal ways of working and solutions for clients. Graduate recruitment has reportedly dropped as AI begins to do more and more analytical work.</p> <p>In general terms, it is the large FTSE and Fortune enterprises where AI roles are proliferating. At the mid-market level, it is more likely that the CIO or equivalent retains the lead on AI, perhaps with the appointment of a role a level below to lead on data, automation and the factors that lay the foundations for AI. The reality, after all, is that many organisations are still a long way from being AI-ready: there is still a considerable amount of modernisation and digitisation that needs to happen first.</p> <p>Nevertheless, the CAIO role is rapidly reaching into more and more businesses. Indeed, an <a href="https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-05-04-ibm-study-ceos-are-reshaping-c-suite-roles-for-the-ai-era">eye-catching piece of research from IBM</a> finds that as many as three-quarters of organisations (76%) now have a CAIO or equivalent, a huge jump from 26% in 2025.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Qualities of a CAIO"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Qualities of a CAIO</h2> <p>So what are the skills and attributes of this new generation of CAIOs? Needless to say, a strong track record in and passion for technology comes with the territory. Many postholders have a CTO type background. But they are not merely ‘techies’ excited by the inner workings of an LLM. We have in fact seen quite a marked evolution of the CAIO role over the last couple of years. In the early days, they were often positioned as ‘evangelists’ whose function was in essence to raise awareness of AI, spread the word, and prepare the way for adoption. Now, as AI has matured and agentic deployment is the buzzword, the CAIO role has become much more about ‘doing’: commercially credible leaders who are driving ROI, engaging with boardrooms, managing enterprise change, reshaping operating models and managing governance and risk controls too.</p> <p>It is not an overstatement to say that there is now a new, fixed career path for technology professionals to aspire to: the CAIO position is becoming a career goal for many, alongside the traditional targets of CIO, CTO, CDO, CISO etc. The role may sit slightly below the CIO and CTO in terms of seniority and remuneration, but it is becoming an established feature of the tech leadership org chart.</p> <p>In some ways, this reflects the wider reality that tech roles are always evolving. Another post on the rise, for example, is Chief Product Officer (CPO). We are seeing this especially in fintech organisations where products need a tech solution for their channels to market. We are even seeing the appointment of some Chief Product and Technology Officers (CPTO) as a result.&nbsp;</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="CAIO here to stay"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>CAIO here to stay</h2> <p>Looking ahead, we expect the ubiquity of the CAIO to only increase. AI is the fastest moving market we have ever seen. The pace of development is incredible, so that organisations need to constantly check themselves, via a CAIO or equivalent, against key questions such as: Do we have the best utilisation possible? Are we keeping up with our competitors? Are we governing this appropriately and managing the risks?</p> <p>&nbsp;This brings us back to the business as usual (BAU) question at the start. With AI moving so fast, it feels like it will never just be BAU. How could it be, when AI never stands still? For that reason, a CAIO or equivalent feels like a necessity for more and more organisations. Say ‘ciao’ to the CAIO therefore – they’re spreading and are here to stay.</p> <p><i>Kirsteen Bell and Peter Birch are Directors of technology &amp; digital executive search at Harvey Nash</i>&nbsp;</p> </section> Chief AI Officers are proliferating as organisations look to deploy agentic AI, make a return on investment, and meet their governance obligations. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Artificial_intelligence_AI.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-unstoppable-rise-of-the-Chief-AI-Officer Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:20:00 GMT <p>SAP changed direction on its “journey” to becoming a wholescale business artificial intelligence (AI) provider “around eight or nine months ago”, according to its CEO Christian Klein.</p> <p>The company aimed to communicate to attendees of its Sapphire events in Orlando and Madrid 2026 that it had changed its focus somewhat to de-emphasise AI technology in favour of business outcomes that add up to, in its view, “<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643054/Sapphire-2026-SAP-heralds-dawn-of-autonomous-enterprise">autonomous enterprise</a>”.</p> <p>The supplier said its AI technology stack is being retuned to capture more of the specific business context of each customer. At Sapphire, the supplier <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/news/366642871/SAP-unveils-agentic-AI-tools-to-partially-automate-ERP-suite">unveiled a raft of AI applications and development and data management tools</a> under new brands, SAP Business AI and SAP Autonomous Suite.</p> <p>At a press and analyst conference immediately after the day one keynote at Sapphire in Madrid, Klein responded to a Computer Weekly question about when the “penny had dropped” that the supplier’s AI messaging was missing the mark with customers in search of business value.</p> <p>“I guess the penny dropped only around eight, nine months ago, [when] we were looking at the end user feedback about <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsap/news/366624180/SAP-sits-Joule-at-helm-of-apps-data-flywheel">Joule</a>, about our AI, and what we found was there was some really positive feedback, but the biggest challenge was still that on our <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsap/definition/SAP-HANA-Cloud-Platform">Business Technology Platform</a> we had our agent builder, then we have BDC [<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsap/feature/SAP-BDC-strives-to-be-an-AI-catalyst-but-clarity-is-needed">Business Data Cloud</a>], where you have the data content, but they were not really connected,” he said. “And then on the governance side, this was also again completely independent.</p> <p>“So, you could pick Anthropic as a standalone model, build an agent, and you get the same results as if you had built it on BTP,” said Klein.</p> <p>“And that was the moment in time where we said: ‘Let’s build and engineer the new AI platform, where you can build with any LLMs you want’. We are not competing here. But what we can do is give right away the business context into the agent so that when I’m using, for example, Anthropic on the SAP AI platform, the agent immediately understands my business goals, my business data.</p> <p>“That’s when we had our Code Red moment as a company and brought all of our engineers together,” added Klein. “It was really hard work to show what we have announced. The customers were not all negative, but they said: ‘The accuracy, the outcome was not being 100% accurate. And when you’re asking business questions, you need higher reliability on the results you’re getting.</p> <p>“With the new platform, with the agents now, we are very confident from the first customers and partners testing the platform that this experience will be much, much better than <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366624161/Sapphire-2025-SAP-mints-business-AI-flywheel-with-Palantir-on-board">what we delivered a year ago</a>.”</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Manos Raptopoulos: avoid agentic chaos"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Manos Raptopoulos: avoid agentic chaos</h2> <p>Manos Raptopoulos, global president of customer success for Europe, APAC, the Middle East and Africa at SAP, told Computer Weekly in an interview at Sapphire in Madrid that “in terms of adoption of AI, I wouldn’t say there is a particular industry or type of customer that is more sceptical than others, other than the more or less obvious consideration these days about sovereignty”.</p> <p>“If there is a growing consideration – which is a consideration, not a concern – it is how do you make all the agents controllable in your estate and avoid an agentic chaos type of situation. That I would consider the CEO or C-level nightmare – having uncontrolled agents roaming across your most valuable data and publishing those data to people that shouldn’t see them. That’s a security concern, a governance concern.</p> <p>“If you go to any country, it could be a European country or it could be an APAC country, or even in the Middle East, it doesn’t make a difference, you have the same issue,” he said. “And that is not so much about ‘can you bring me AI or not?’ It’s firstly making sure that you have a relevance in the conversation because your AI is providing outcomes to the customer.</p> <p>“And secondly, it’s about the pace because of sovereignty requirements – if SAP needs to do some type of engineering in order to make sure that it’s compatible with those,” added Raptopoulos.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about Sapphire 2026</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/news/366643487/Disrupted-by-AI-SAP-grapples-with-exposing-its-ERP-data">Disrupted by AI</a>, SAP grapples with exposing its ERP data.</li> <li>The AI technology <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/news/366642887/The-AI-technology-behind-SAPs-Autonomous-Enterprise-pitch">behind SAP's Autonomous Enterprise pitch</a>.</li> <li>SAP unveils agentic AI tools to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/news/366642871/SAP-unveils-agentic-AI-tools-to-partially-automate-ERP-suite">partially automate ERP suite</a>.</li> <li>How <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/news/366643078/How-SAP-sees-the-future-of-HR-in-the-age-of-AI">SAP sees the future of HR in the age of AI</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> <p>At Sapphire, in Orlando and Madrid, SAP harped on a knowledge management theme of “company memory”.</p> <p>Raptopoulos expanded a little on this concept. “Basically, every company has its own golden rules somehow: the way things are done around here, the diligence that you have,” he said. “It’s not even coded. Sometimes it exists in some type of a manual, but you often don’t find it in a manual. It’s just how things are done.</p> <p>“So, you need to make the system be able to learn from that behaviour, and that’s the company memory concept.</p> <p>“Plus, on top of that, we have the privilege to be in the very detail of how companies are running their processes, end to end. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsap/news/252495495/SAP-acquires-process-mining-software-vendor-Signavio">SAP Signavio</a> does that. With that, you have the digital twin of the processes that the customer is running, which is another layer of context and company memory. You can see which processes are automated, which processes present opportunity for automation, which are non-standard versus standard functionality, and you can actually visualise the outcome of an agentic workflow.”</p> <p>Raptopoulos conceded that customers could use other process mining software, such as the one offered by <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642978/Celonis-acquires-MIT-linked-decision-intelligence-firm-Ikigai">Celonis</a>. “Yes, they can, and some do,” he said. “The differentiation, we believe, it’s always, if you think about SAP, we’ve always been talking about integration, that means fewer friction points, less interfacing, more tight collaboration between processes, but customers do have optionality, always. And we are committed to an open ecosystem, an open collaboration.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Haleon: out-of-the-box agentic preference"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Haleon: out-of-the-box agentic preference</h2> <p>One customer at Sapphire who said SAP’s messaging is resonating was Claire Dickson, chief digital and technology officer at Haleon, which is a British multinational consumer healthcare company formed in 2022 through the merger of portfolios from GSK, Pfizer and Novartis.</p> <p>She said, in an interview with Computer Weekly: “When we entered into the partnership with SAP, we made some assumptions that there would be more agentic capability coming, and therefore the partnership was premised on being [SAP] “<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsap/news/366631222/There-are-50-shades-of-clean-core-for-SAP-customers">clean core</a>” and we trust that the agents are coming.</p> <p>“So, we were delighted with the announcement here because clearly a lot of that comes out of the box as standard,” said Dickson. “Our AI strategy is to leverage as standard out-of-the-box from our suppliers where possible. We don’t want to be systemically building huge numbers of agents ourselves. We are building some, but we don’t want to do that as a strategy.”</p> </section> SAP shifted its AI strategy eight to nine months ago to focus on business outcomes over tech, launching an SAP Business AI platform said to integrate business context with AI agents https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/SAP-sapphire-2026-christian-klein-hero.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643794/Sapphire-2026-SAP-executives-admit-route-change-on-high-road-to-business-AI Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:30:00 GMT <p>Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being positioned as the key to faster software development, smarter customer experiences and more efficient operations.</p> <p>Yet as organisations rush to build AI-powered applications, there is a growing recognition that success depends not only on the technology itself, but on the controls surrounding it. The challenge is no longer simply how to use AI, but how to do so safely, securely and in a way that aligns with business goals and customer expectations. Building apps with AI should make processes smoother, but a human needs to be in the loop to add guardrails to development and ensure that an app works safely and as intended.</p> <p>At its summit in London in March, Datadog – a supplier which provides an observability service for cloud-scale applications and monitors servers, databases, tools and services through a SaaS-based data analytics platform – promises the audience that it will demonstrate its knowledge and prowess around AI use, showcasing where it believes the capability of AI to drive modern business operations could be realised.</p> <p>In a year when AI capital spending is expected to reach <a target="_blank" href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/04/07/dimon-says-ai-capital-spending-will-hit-725-billio/?msockid=301b91e18b0f6afe284787598aaf6b5d" rel="noopener">$725bn in 2026</a>, this surge in investment is driving business transformation as organisations increase their spending and reshape their operations around AI.</p> <p>At the Datadog summit, Yrieix Garnier, vice-president of product management, says that the “numerous kinds of AI agents” launched by the company are helping to identify context and problems, as well as recommend fixes, because every additional change introduced creates more “stress on your system”.</p> <p>“This is very siloed, repetitive and fairly slow,” Garnier says. “This is what we already solve at Datadog; we help customers close that end-to-end loop and make sure we continuously monitor systems for cycle stress. We like to give customers the right information to detect issues and the information needed to remediate them.”</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Governance requirements"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Governance requirements</h2> <p>The company made announcements in London, specifically about its UK datacentre presence, with the opening of a new site. Datadog says this will help customers to meet data governance and security requirements as those demands continue to evolve in the wake of questions around <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/European-digital-sovereignty-Storage-surveillance-concerns-to-overcome">European digital sovereignty</a>.</p> <p>With <a target="_blank" href="https://www.lseg.com/en/resources/reports/cloud-strategies-financial-services?utm_campaign=3008165_CloudSurveyReport2025&amp;elqCampaignId=28535&amp;utm_source=Other&amp;utm_medium=Referral&amp;utm_content=Report&amp;utm_term=CloudSurvey&amp;referredBy=PressRelease#report" rel="noopener">82% of firms</a> surveyed in a recent London Stock Exchange Group study saying they operate in multicloud or hybrid environments, companies are adapting to changing UK data governance requirements as cloud adoption continues to accelerate across regulated organisations.</p> <p>Garnier says the company has invested in adding “more AI into our product to make sure that we give you those correlations of what’s happening in your environment, so you can cut through the noise and really accelerate resolution times”.</p> <p>This increased use of AI provides a more automated view and fuller visibility across an entire estate, Garnier claims, as well as bringing AI into infrastructure monitoring. “It’s really about helping you detect and remediate very quickly what’s happening inside <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/Google-Kubernetes">Kubernetes</a> environments,” he says. “Understanding what’s happening inside that environment gives you the right recommendations, but also applies fixes on top of it, changing your environment.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Meet the Concierge"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Meet the Concierge</h2> <p>At the summit, Mark O’Neill, senior manager of AI software engineering at Datadog customer Virgin Atlantic, speaks about Virgin Atlantic’s AI achievements. The company’s investment and development centred on a chatbot for its website, intended to take chatbots a step beyond simply answering questions and guiding visitors through a series of prompts, and instead to provide genuine assistance.</p> <p>O’Neill describes the concept of implementing a customer-facing AI chatbot as “daunting”, particularly as it was launched over a period of just 90 days and “especially when brand reputation is so important”.</p> <p>As Virgin Atlantic’s brand is built on service, personality and trust, he says, the Concierge chatbot had to fit within those parameters and support help and Q&amp;A, Flying Club queries, flight search and holiday discovery, adding: “For trip planning, we didn’t just prompt an LLM, we observed how our frontline teams support our customers and then built those patterns directly into Concierge.”</p> <p>Negative experiences with AI-powered chatbots, and their failure to solve problems rather than send users round in circles, have created the need for companies such as Virgin Atlantic to build better chatbot experiences.</p> <p>O’Neill says that traditional chatbots take users down a fixed path, whereas generative AI (GenAI) can effectively tackle any starting point in a journey, which is a development Virgin Atlantic is “most proud of”. In particular, the holiday discovery function allows a user to find a flight to a specific destination on a particular date through Concierge. “The beauty of this technology is that it gives you the flexibility to have more varied conversations,” he adds.</p> <p>Developed with OpenAI, O’Neill admits that there were three concerns about Concierge’s delivery: providing the wrong information to customers, personally identifiable information (PII) leakage, and not “authentically being Virgin Atlantic” by ensuring the brand’s tone was present.</p> <p>To protect PII, O’Neill says a decision was made that Concierge would not contain any personal data within its system. “So, we don’t allow the model to access or process personal customer data,” he adds. “Concierge has no account context, no booking retrieval, no session memory tied to identity and we only support read-only operations.”</p> <p>Perhaps with an eye on the British Airways data breach in 2018, Concierge can source information, but it cannot conduct transactions, change bookings or update account details.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Build your own LLM?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Build your own LLM?</h2> <p>Should businesses build out their own LLM to support the use of GenAI? O’Neill says Virgin Atlantic used OpenAI’s models and application programming interfaces (APIs) as the foundation of Concierge rather than building its own LLM, adding custom prompts and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) database that can answer common questions.</p> <p>He says the company recognised that it did not necessarily have the knowledge or skills in-house to build the system, so it worked with OpenAI’s consultancy arm, TomorrowAI. He says this provided the knowledge and expertise needed to get the project moving.</p> <p>“We had the experts in the room explaining this is how you can make it safe, this is how you make it secure, and that was certainly something I pushed,” says O’Neill. “What we recognised as a business is that we fundamentally believe in this technology, and it’s here for the long term.”</p> <p>So, where does Datadog fit into Concierge? O’Neill says it acts as the end-to-end observability platform. From the front end through to every interaction with OpenAI, “we’ve got that full trace of everything that’s going on: we use it for our monitoring, alerting and running evaluations”.</p> <p>O’Neill says Datadog is also used in testing and in checking the accuracy of answers during development, meaning it is involved across the entire lifecycle.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="AI meets the human element"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>AI meets the human element</h2> <p>The message from both Datadog and Virgin Atlantic is clear: AI can accelerate development, automate operations and improve customer experiences, but only when it is supported by strong visibility, careful governance and clear boundaries around what it is allowed to do. Human oversight remains essential, whether that means monitoring infrastructure, validating responses or ensuring that AI systems reflect the values and tone of a brand.</p> <p>As businesses continue to increase investment in AI, the winners will likely be those that balance speed with control. Organisations that combine observability, security and human judgement will be best placed to build applications that are not only more capable, but also more trustworthy.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about AI safety</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643439/AI-safety-cannot-wait-for-a-Chernobyl-moment-experts-warn">AI safety</a> cannot wait for a ‘Chernobyl moment’, experts warn.</li> <li>Second ever <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638957/Second-ever-international-AI-safety-report-published">international AI safety report</a> published.</li> <li>Technology secretary Liz Kendall urges Britain’s business community to pay attention to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641649/UK-businesses-must-face-up-to-AI-threat-says-government">emerging AI threats, following debut of Anthropic’s new frontier model, Mythos</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> Virgin Atlantic’s adoption of AI for customer service might indicate the fruits of a safety-first approach https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/German/Hero-Danger-by-Muhammad-Adobe-06.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/How-safer-AI-applications-could-be-built Fri, 29 May 2026 10:53:00 GMT <p>Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have written to the European Commission raising concerns over “systematic governance” failures in the European police agency, Europol, and the European Union’s (EU) <a href="https://www.frontex.europa.eu/">border and coast guard agency</a>, Frontex.</p> <p>The letter, signed by 19 MEPs, follows an investigation by <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642525/They-protect-the-law-while-breaking-it-Inside-Europols-shadow-IT-system">Computer Weekly</a>, <a href="https://wearesolomon.com/en/mag/focus-area/accountability/they-protect-the-law-while-breaking-it-inside-europols-shadow-it-system/">Solomon</a> and <a href="https://correctiv.org/en/europe/2026/05/05/they-protect-the-law-while-breaking-it-inside-europols-shadow-it-system/">Correctiv</a> that revealed Europol had stored huge volumes of sensitive data on shadow IT systems without adequate governance, auditing or security controls.</p> <p>The MEPs warn that it has become increasingly clear that Europol and the border agency are processing, storing and transferring data in ways that raise serious concerns under EU data protection law and the fundamental principles of the rule of law.</p> <p>Supported by <a href="https://left.eu/">left group</a> members, Germany’s <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/197468/OZLEM_DEMIREL/home">Özlem Demirel</a>, Spain’s <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/257012/ESTRELLA_GALAN/home">Estrella Galán</a>, Belgian Green MEP <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/197470/SASKIA_BRICMONT/home">Saskia Bricmont</a>, and other political groups, the letter warns that imminent plans to expand the remit of Europol and <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366571020/Home-Office-signs-tech-and-data-sharing-deal-with-Frontex">Frontex</a> should only go ahead if the agencies are fully compliant with EU law and data protection principles.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="MEPs call for robust independent oversight"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>MEPs call for robust independent oversight</h2> <p>“These reforms cannot be limited to operational or efficiency considerations … they must be firmly conditioned on full compliance with the <a href="https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter">EU Charter of Fundamental Rights</a>, strict adherence to data protection principles, and the establishment of robust, independent, and enforceable oversight mechanisms,” the MEPs wrote.</p> <p>The letter cites investigative reporting from Computer Weekly, Solomon and Correctiv, revealing that Europol ran an internal shadow IT infrastructure where large volumes of sensitive personal data were processed for years “outside of properly governed and auditable systems”.</p> <p>“These parallel environments appear to have enabled analytical work without sufficient access controls, incomplete logging and, in some instances, circumvention of established internal and external oversight mechanisms,” the MEPs wrote.</p> <p>The unregulated systems identified include a clandestine intelligence tool – known internally as the “pressure cooker” and built to extract information from the internet – that had been concealed from Europe’s privacy regulator until 2019.</p> <p>The EU’s top privacy watchdog, the European Data Protection Supervisor that oversees Europol, has confirmed that the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642721/MEPs-call-for-greater-scrutiny-of-Europol-following-concerns-over-Shadow-IT">available evidence</a> “may point to a broader pattern of uncontrolled data processing than previously acknowledged”.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Frontex transferred tens of thousands of people’s data to Europol"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Frontex transferred tens of thousands of people’s data to Europol</h2> <p>The MEPs have also raised concerns over the transfer of personal data related to tens of thousands of people interviewed by Frontex to Europol without adequate legal safeguards or individual assessments of the necessity and proportionality of sharing the data.</p> <p>An investigation by <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2025/07/07/frontex-illegally-shared-thousands-of-people-s-personal-data-with-european-police_6743113_8.html">Le Monde</a>, <a href="https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-07-13/for-years-the-eus-border-agency-illegally-transferred-data-on-migrants-and-activists-to-europol.html">El País</a>&nbsp;and <a href="https://wearesolomon.com/en/mag/format/investigation/frontex-unlawfully-shared-thousands-of-peoples-personal-data-with-europol/">Solomon</a> in 2025&nbsp;revealed that Frontex had collected data from 13,000 people during “debriefing interviews” and had systematically transferred it to Europol between 2019 and 2023.</p> <p>The data included contact details, social media identifiers and often unverified suspicion-based information. In several cases, the data was used in criminal investigations into migrants and civil society actors.</p> <p>The automated and bulk data transfers between Frontex and Europol are incompatible with core principles of EU data protection law, including purpose limitation, data minimisation and lawfulness, according to the MEPs.</p> <p>Taken together, the disclosures about Europol and Frontex suggest a systemic governance failure.</p> <p>“Data obtained in legally and ethically sensitive contexts is being transferred into institutional environments where compliance with EU requirements on legality, accountability and transparency is not sufficiently guaranteed,” the MEPs wrote.&nbsp;“This undermines not only data protection standards, but also the broader integrity of EU law enforcement cooperation.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="European commissioners urged to act"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>European commissioners urged to act</h2> <p>The letter is addressed to <a href="https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/michael-mcgrath_en">Michael McGrath</a>, commissioner for democracy and justice, <a href="https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/magnus-brunner_en">Magnus Brunner</a>, commissioner for migration and home affairs, and <a href="https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en">Henna Virkkune</a>, executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.</p> <p>It asks whether the European Commission will expand the investigatory and oversight powers of EDPS over Europol and Frontex, and what steps have been taken to hold senior officials to account at the police and border agency for the breaches identified.</p> <p>“Can Europol and Frontex, in their current institutional and technical configurations, ensure lawful and rights-compliant processing of personal data at all, and how can it be ensured that such data breaches do not happen again?” the MEPs wrote.</p> <p>They are urging the commission to consider holding back a proportion of Europol’s budget that will only be released when Europol is compliant with data protection and other fundamental rights.</p> <p>“The upcoming decisions on the future of both agencies therefore constitute a decisive test of the European Union’s credibility as a community governed by the rule of law,” they wrote.</p> <p>An <a href="https://left.eu/app/uploads/2025/07/Letter-Frontex-Europol-data-July-2025-with-signatures-final.pdf">earlier letter signed by 41 MEPs</a> from four political groups in July 2025, calling for an independent investigation into co-operation between Europol and Frontex, remains unanswered.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about Europol</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642525/They-protect-the-law-while-breaking-it-Inside-Europols-shadow-IT-system">‘They protect the law while breaking it’ – inside Europol’s shadow IT system</a>: Under pressure to deliver in the fight against serious cross-border crime, Europol built and operated a shadow data analysis platform containing large volumes of sensitive information, which operated without key legal and technical safeguards</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642721/MEPs-call-for-greater-scrutiny-of-Europol-following-concerns-over-Shadow-IT">MEPs call for greater scrutiny of Europol following concerns over shadow IT</a>: Expansion of Europol’s mandate should be paused while allegations investigated, say MEPs.</li> <li>The&nbsp;<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366634419/Hungry-for-data-Inside-Europols-secretive-AI-programme">EU’s law enforcement agency has been quietly amassing data to feed an ambitious but secretive AI development programme</a>&nbsp;that could have far-reaching privacy implications.</li> <li>Europol wants&nbsp;<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366618230/Europol-seeks-evidence-of-encryption-on-crime-enforcement-as-it-steps-up-pressure-on-Big-Tech">examples of police investigations hampered by end-to-end encryption</a> as it pressures tech companies to provide law enforcement access to encrypted messages.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> MEPs have written to the European Commission calling for action following revelations that Europol and Frontex processed, stored and transferred personal data in ways that raise serious concerns about compliance with EU law https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Europol-building-2-PR-hero.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643585/MEPs-urge-European-Commission-to-take-action-over-Europol-shadow-IT Fri, 29 May 2026 08:24:00 GMT <p>The UK’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, has confirmed plans to build a national cyber shield using artificial intelligence (AI) agents to defend against cyber attacks.</p> <p>“In the past few months, GCHQ has developed the blueprint for a new national cyber defence capability that will hardwire cutting-edge agentic AI into machine-speed cyber defence,” GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler said yesterday.</p> <p>The system, which is planned to be up and running within five years, will use AI agents to identify threats to critical national infrastructure, including energy, water, healthcare, transport and financial services.</p> <p>The project, described by ministers as a “generational endeavour”, aims to protect UK infrastructure from sophisticated attacks, such as that on Jaguar Land Rover, which is <a href="https://cybermonitoringcentre.com/2025/10/22/cyber-monitoring-centre-statement-on-the-jaguar-land-rovercyber-incident-october-2025/">estimated to have cost the economy £1.5bn</a>.</p> <p>The GCHQ director said the agency was using AI to “reimagine” cyber security, reflecting a government vision to develop defensive AI technology with the capability to identify and repair security vulnerabilities in software at “machine speed”.</p> <p>Her comments follow growing concerns about the impact of frontier AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641789/A-tsunami-of-flaws-When-frontier-AI-and-Patch-Tuesday-collide">which are capable of uncovering thousands of unknown security vulnerabilities</a>&nbsp;across commonly used software applications.</p> <p>The latest frontier AI is “rapidly unearthing fault lines in technologies our society relies on every single day”, she said.</p> <p>GCHQ is also building frontier AI “responsibly and ethically” into its own algorithms for analysing data collected for intelligence purposes, Keast-Butler confirmed.</p> <p>Uses include translating foreign languages and finding needles in a haystack of data faster than ever before.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Requirement for AI-powered cyber defence"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Requirement for AI-powered cyber defence</h2> <p>Keast-Butler said Russia has scaled up actions against the UK and Europe, targeting undersea cables and launching cyber attacks.&nbsp;These “hybrid attacks” are designed to undermine critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust.</p> <p>“GCHQ is working tirelessly with intelligence and defence partners to degrade and reduce the Russian threat,” she said.</p> <p>The National Cyber Force is delivering high-impact cyber operations every day to counter state threats and undermine terrorists and criminals.&nbsp;A priority area is protecting the data and energy flowing through the critical undersea cables and pipelines.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>“We’re also disrupting Russia’s attempts to smuggle Western tech, fending off its cyber attacks, and countering reckless sabotage and assassination attempts,” said Keast-Butler.</p> <p>UK security minister Dan Jarvis first <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641790/UK-to-build-national-cyber-shield-to-protect-against-AI-cyber-threats">announced plans for a “national cyber shield” in April</a>. He said protecting critical national infrastructure would require a “fundamentally different approach” in the age of AI. “We will not secure the central pillars of the UK state simply by purchasing off-the-shelf vendor solutions.”</p> <p>The Cabinet Office has asked leading AI companies to work with the government to develop AI-powered cyber defence capabilities.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Sovereign IT"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Sovereign IT</h2> <p>The GCHQ director said that as nations grapple with sovereign IT, it is not realistic for countries to shut out foreign technology.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Tech sovereignty is about the agency, ability and agility of nations to shape their own digital future </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Anne Keast-Butler, GCHQ</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>“For me, tech sovereignty is about the agency, ability and agility of nations to shape their own digital future,” she said.</p> <p>That means backing UK tech companies and academic research, “whilst not limiting our ability to harness the best of the world’s technology”.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>“Sovereignty doesn’t have to mean ‘made in the UK’, so long as we carefully manage our supply chains, dependencies and data,” she said.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Quantum future needs action now"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Quantum future needs action now</h2> <p>Keast-Butler, a mathematician, said that usable <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/What-is-quantum-technology-Use-cases-and-future-implications">quantum technology</a> has always been a decade away, but that has changed.</p> <p>“Quantum sensing is here – our new cutting-edge work with academia and industry is identifying the fingerprints of stealth, such as detecting missile launches,” she said.</p> <p>Once they are operational, quantum computers will be able to complete tasks that currently take years in a matter of seconds.</p> <p>That includes <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366631279/Arqit-to-support-NCSCs-post-quantum-cryptography-pilot">breaking encryption</a>, she said, urging businesses to follow advice from the National Cyber Security Centre to phase in encryption algorithms that are secure from attacks by quantum computers.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Space-based tech is a critical asset"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Space-based tech is a critical asset</h2> <p>China and Russia are investing heavily in space to support both peacetime and war ambitions. And Iran has used satellite images to support its attacks on Gulf states.</p> <p>In three years, more than 10,000 new objects have been launched into space as more satellites are required to support the growing volume and speed of data crossing the planet.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p>“Space-based tech is critical to both our way of life and our national security, and that’s why GCHQ is working with partners to harness, secure and defend it,” she said.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Cryptography for the quantum era"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Cryptography for the quantum era</h2> <p>Keast-Butler said GCHQ’s ability to design world-leading encryption was fundamental for protecting the integrity of technology and for national security.</p> <p>GCHQ pioneered public key cryptography in the 1970s, which is still used to protect the security of the internet.&nbsp;The agency’s mathematicians are developing <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/video/An-explanation-of-post-quantum-cryptography">new forms of encryption</a> that will allow data to be managed safely.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about the security of critical national infrastructure (CNI)</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>GSMA calls for targeted regulatory reform from European governments to close the €205bn 5G funding gap that is <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642836/GSMA-205bn-funding-gap-leaving-Europes-critical-infrastructure-at-risk">leaving Europe’s critical infrastructure at risk</a>.</li> <li>Geopolitical tensions are stoking cyber threats to UK critical infrastructure. State actors and ransomware groups are targeting industrial systems. <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Global-conflicts-accelerate-cyber-threats-against-UK-CNI">Operators must improve visibility</a>.</li> <li>After years of lobbying, the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366611074/UK-government-adds-datacentres-to-CNI-regime-Why-did-it-take-so-long">UK government has agreed to classify datacentres as critical national infrastructure</a>, with the tech industry claiming the move is long overdue, but also recognition of the importance of server farms to the economy.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler confirms plans to build a national cyber defence capability using AI agents to defend critical infrastructure at ‘machine speed’ https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/German/Hero-Data-Protection-by-kasinv-Adobe-02.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643734/National-cyber-shield-could-be-ready-in-five-years Thu, 28 May 2026 12:08:00 GMT <p>Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as growing tensions between Western nations and Russia and China are having direct consequences for the security of critical national infrastructure worldwide. And for UK operators of essential services, they are driving measurable increases in cyber threats that target the industrial systems that keep energy flowing, water clean, and manufacturing fully operational.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="From the perimeter to the process"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>From the perimeter to the process</h2> <p>While there have been cases of state-sponsored attacks to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/critical-infrastructure">critical infrastructure</a>, most cyber adversaries have focused the vast majority of their efforts on breaking into corporate IT systems to gather information and credentials. During this time, industrial organisations were not the primary target because of their industrial nature – they were collateral. But cyber attackers have grown more aware of industrial organisations as high value targets in recent years.</p> <p>Take last year’s <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366630592/Jaguar-Land-Rover-admits-data-has-been-compromised-in-cyber-attack">ransomware attack on Jaguar Land Rover</a>. This attack wasn’t targeting industrial equipment, yet production lines stopped, supply chains seized, and disruption ensued. The incident highlighted how the connections between organisations matter as much as the defences within them. And while ransomware like the JLR attack causes disruption from the outside in, a different category of threat is now emerging from groups that have moved far deeper into industrial environments.</p> <p>Of the three newly identified threat groups tracked by Dragos last year, two have demonstrated Stage 2 capability, meaning they have crossed from IT into OT networks and are now able to interact with specific industrial control system technologies. These groups are probing port, interfacing with industrial protocols, mapping devices, and building an understanding of the physical processes those devices govern, from power generation and water treatment to manufacturing lines.</p> <p>These <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/What-is-threat-hunting-Key-strategies-explained">tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs)</a> are consistent with pre-positioning reported by public sources. &nbsp;The US government and allied nations have publicly attributed Chinese-linked groups to a sustained campaign of pre-positioning inside critical infrastructure, believed by these agencies to be establishing persistent access intended for activation during a Taiwan contingency to disrupt power, communications, or essential services. Separately, groups with ties to Iranian interests have been tracked targeting industrial environments as Middle Eastern instability continues to escalate. In both cases, the access is being built now, against the backdrop of active conflicts, as preparation for future disruption.</p> <p>The barrier to entry for targeting industrial environments is falling in other ways too. Threat intelligence teams have recently observed adversaries using large language models to automate target development at a pace that manual operations cannot match.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Ransomware is compounding the problem"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Ransomware is compounding the problem</h2> <p>State-sponsored pre-positioning is not the only threat intensifying globally. The number of ransomware groups targeting industrial entities rose 49% over the past year, with 119 groups affecting more than 3,300 organisations. The true number is almost certainly larger: ransomware hitting a Windows machine running a human-machine interface or process control software is routinely classified as an IT incident because the device runs a familiar operating system, even when the function the device performs is entirely OT. This reporting gap means the sector is making risk decisions on incomplete data and underestimating the true scale of industrial ransomware exposure.</p> <p>Manufacturing sits at the top of ransomware’s target list because the sector embraces newer technologies and cycles through equipment faster than energy or water. Every upgrade cycle widens the gap between what’s deployed and what’s defended. Newer devices run standard operating systems and open-source libraries, removing the specialist knowledge barrier that once stood between adversaries and OT environments.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What UK operators should do now"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What UK operators should do now</h2> <p>UK infrastructure operators do not control the geopolitical forces driving this escalation, but they do control their readiness. Firstly, UK organisations need to realise the boundary has been crossed. With 81% of architecture reviews revealing poor IT-OT segmentation, operators should be assessing whether an adversary with IT access has a viable path into their OT systems - and acting on the findings rather than just documenting them.</p> <p>There is also an urgent need for UK organisations to close the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Why-asset-visibility-matters-in-industrial-cybersecurity">visibility gap</a>. Less than 10% of OT networks are monitored globally, and what isn’t seen isn’t detected. Monitoring OT network traffic is no longer a discretionary investment for any organisation whose operations underpin public services.</p> <p>Reporting blind spots across the sector need to be addressed before the true scale of industrial ransomware exposure can be understood. Ransomware affecting devices performing OT functions needs to be classified by the operational role of the system, not by the IT system running on the affected machine. Without accurate classification, the sector will never build an honest picture of its exposure. In parallel, tabletop exercises and incident response planning need to be designed to reflect the threat as it exists today, not the threat of three years ago. Tabletop exercises testing a single organisation's response to an isolated intrusion no longer reflect the operating environment. Exercises need to simulate disruption across dependency chains and test whether suppliers and partners can continue operating under simultaneous pressure from the same adversary or campaign.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Where next?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Where next?</h2> <p>State-sponsored attacks and the surge in ransomware groups targeting industrial organisations are not separate trends. They are compounding pressures on the same set of UK infrastructure operators, and they are increasing in parallel. The threat groups tracked over the past year are building capability inside industrial environments now, and they are doing so against the backdrop of conflicts that show no sign of easing.</p> <p>UK infrastructure operators won’t out-run adversaries. What they can do is shut the gaps that adversaries depend on – poor segmentation, missing visibility, ransomware misclassified as IT, and exercises that test individual perimeters rather than the full dependency chain. More information on these best practices can be found in the framework published by the SANS Institute, The Five ICS Cybersecurity Critical Controls.</p> <p><em>Magpie Graham is VP, Strategic Intelligence at Dragos</em></p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about Critical National Infrastructure security</h3> <p>Overconfidence in cyber security: <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Overconfidence-in-cyber-security-a-silent-catalyst-for-CNI-breaches">a silent catalyst for CNI breaches</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642032/Nation-states-responsible-for-nationally-significant-cyber-attacks-against-UK-says-NCSC-chief">Nation states responsible for ‘nationally significant’ cyber attacks</a> against UK, says NCSC chief</p> <p>Interview: <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641946/Interview-Critical-local-infrastructure-is-missing-link-in-cyber-resilience">Critical local infrastructure is missing</a> link in UK cyber resilience</p> </div> </div> </section> Geopolitical tensions are stoking cyber threats to UK critical infrastructure. State actors and ransomware groups are targeting industrial systems. Operators must improve visibility https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/energy-power-electricity-pylons-АртурНичипоренко-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Global-conflicts-accelerate-cyber-threats-against-UK-CNI Thu, 28 May 2026 11:57:00 GMT <p>Throughout history, transformative technologies have generally stirred the masses with a mixture of fear, suspicion and misunderstanding. With AI, however, those misunderstandings have taken a surprising turn.</p> <p>Most people aren’t afraid of AI. In fact, confidence is high and anxiety is low. But dig a little deeper and a more complicated picture emerges. Because, while people feel comfortable with AI in the abstract, most fail to recognise it even in their own daily lives.</p> <p>This is the AI Knowledge Gap. Not a fear of the future, but a blindness to the present. And if we don’t close it urgently and deliberately we risk squandering the most significant technological moment of our lifetimes, with knock-on effects for <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/resources/IT-careers-and-IT-skills">IT skills</a> and <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641901/AI-adoption-is-rapid-but-many-stuck-at-basic-levels-says-AWS">the development of AI in the economy</a>.</p> <h3>Gap spans geographies, ages and genders</h3> <p>Drilling down into data collected from 6,000 respondents across Europe, Equinix found that 77% of those surveyed weren’t worried about the growing role of AI, with 57% of UK people feeling confident about using it already. All of which suggests that AI is being widely embraced, and will continue to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/What-the-UK-is-getting-right-and-wrong-about-AI-adoption">be adopted</a> quickly.</p> <p>But the survey also identified a clear knowledge gap. Only 33% of respondents recognised that they use AI-powered services or applications daily, and 18% said they never use them at all, rising to 28% in the UK. This suggests a lack of understanding about what AI is, how it works, or where it is being woven into everyday life.&nbsp;</p> <p>It is a misconception to believe AI only impacts your life when you actively log onto an LLM. AI has been embedded into all walks of digital life. It powers apps on your smartphone or smartwatch and is embedded in your email and calendar. It suggests what you might want to stream or buy online, it navigates your fastest route home, and even monitors your health. AI supports countless digital services that many consumers now take for granted.&nbsp;</p> <p>More broadly, AI can design drug molecules that reach clinical trials in under 18 months, enable smart home thermostats to learn daily routines or track the carbon intensity of the grid to save costs, optimise production processes and reduce waste. It also helps improve supply chains, enhance food quality, and make industrial systems more efficient and sustainable.</p> <p>The fact that so many people benefit from AI without recognising its presence shows how embedded the technology has already become and why public understanding has failed to keep pace with its adoption.</p> <p>The knowledge gap transcends regions, with patterns also existing according to age and gender. Nearly three quarters (72%) of under-35s felt confident about using the technology, compared to just 41% of those aged 55 or over. That disparity is particularly stark in the UK, where those gaps widened to 80% and 33% for the same age groups. Between men and women, meanwhile, confidence in understanding AI stood at 62% and 50% respectively.</p> <p>These disparities matter because confidence often shapes participation. Those who feel less confident may be less likely to adopt new tools, access the benefits they provide, or adapt to rapid changes in the workplace. If these patterns persist, we could witness an ever-widening digital gap where the benefits of AI are not shared equally across society, and reinforce existing differences or inequalities across communities.</p> <p>The practical applications outlined above demonstrate that AI is not an abstract future concept but a technology already delivering measurable benefits across healthcare, energy and manufacturing. For AI to reach its full potential, governments and companies need to focus on education, and not just regulation.</p> <p>However, if governments, local communities and individuals don’t fully understand how AI is already improving their lives, they might not support the policies or investments needed to grow the technology.</p> <p>Public trust is essential to sustaining the investment required for innovation, and when people do not recognise the benefits AI already delivers, they may be less likely to support the infrastructure, regulation and long-term investment that will be needed to develop AI responsibly and at scale.</p> <h3>How to close the gap</h3> <p>Governments should prioritise AI education alongside technological development to ensure it is embraced with clarity and understanding. Yet, this requires reactive and proactive thinking.&nbsp;</p> <p>Reactively, by dispelling the “myth” that AI is just an LLM. And proactively, in the sense of building hands-on knowledge and experience by investing in training programmes.</p> <p>People need help to understand where AI is already present in their lives, what benefits it can deliver, and what limitations it has. Practical pathways should be created that enable people to build confidence – through workforce training, apprenticeships, or education programmes – that are designed to equip them with the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366637953/Skills-key-to-successful-AI-adoption-says-IBM">digital skills</a> they need in our increasingly AI-driven economy.</p> <p>Without this effort, technological progress may continue, but public understanding will lag, limit adoption and weaken support for future innovation.</p> <h3>Close the gap or fall behind</h3> <p>Innovation starts with education. When the internet first appeared, it was viewed as a fad for academics and teenagers. Today, it underpins virtually every aspect of how we live, work and connect. AI is on a faster, steeper trajectory and the window to get ahead of it is narrow.</p> <p>History is unambiguous on this point. Societies that moved fastest to understand new technologies didn’t just survive the disruption. They led it. They set the standards, built the industries and captured the opportunities that others were too slow to see.</p> <p>We need to close the AI Knowledge Gap so everyone, regardless of age, gender or geography, understands how AI works, where it already exists in their lives, and where it is likely to lead. The technology is ready. Now public understanding needs to catch up.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about AI skills</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-UK-governments-AI-skills-programme-betrays-UK-workers-and-our-digital-sovereignty">The UK government’s AI skills programme betrays UK workers and our digital sovereignty</a>. The government's plans to offer AI skills training to the public depends almost entirely on US big tech companies - how is this meant to support the aim of supporting homegrown AI firms and enhancing sovereignty?</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366637838/UK-government-signs-more-partners-to-boost-AI-skills-across-the-country">UK government signs more partners to boost AI skills across the country</a>. The government is seeking to educate 10 million adults in the UK on how to use artificial intelligence tools to streamline their work.&nbsp;</li> </ul> </div> </div> <p></p> Equinix found big gaps in people’s knowledge about AI and how it is used in everyday life. MD James Tyler says we need to close that gap to nurture AI skills and to support AI projects https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/puzzle-skills-gap-adobe.jpeg https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-AI-knowledge-gap-and-how-to-close-it Thu, 28 May 2026 11:56:00 GMT <p><i>This is the final article in a five-part series on what FDP is for. <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-1-Understanding-the-problems-facing-NHS-data">Part 1 described how the NHS data architecture</a> accumulated and named eight interconnected problems. <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-2-Delivering-on-the-NHS-vision-for-data">Part 2 defined the seven Frontline-First dimensions</a> and how FDP delivers them. <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-3-The-data-architecture-that-makes-it-work">Part 3 described the ontology</a>, object types and actions that make FDP structurally different. <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-4-The-NHS-data-model">Part 4 analysed the shared data model</a>. Author Tom Bartlett led the 150-person team that built the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620412/NHS-chief-data-officers-concerned-with-FDP-roll-out">Federated Data Platform</a>.</i></p> <p>The <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-1-Understanding-the-problems-facing-NHS-data">previous four articles in this series</a> have described a connected set of problems the NHS has never addressed, an approach called Frontline-First that would address them, the architecture that makes it possible, and the data model and consistent products that make it work at national scale.</p> <p>The case for delivering this is strong, and the platform to deliver it exists.</p> <p>The supplier has been chosen – despite the strong opinions that supplier, Palantir, arouses - and there is nothing practical that can be done to change that unless the NHS is forced to go backwards and then stand still until another supplier emerges, perhaps in five years, perhaps in 10, perhaps never.</p> <p>While our heroic NHS teams press on with making the Federated Data Platform (FDP) work for them, they are doing so against a relentless backdrop of controversy that puts delivery at risk, and not because the architecture is wrong.</p> <p>Trust chief executives who could be leading adoption are hesitant, uncertain about what the system actually does, never mind whether the political environment will support them. I have spoken to senior NHS staff in Trusts who are asking whether they should invest locally, whether they should push their staff on this, whether they should get involved at all.</p> <p>Technology companies who could be building products for the Solution Exchange are holding back - at a recent supplier event I heard companies say they had read about a contractual break clause in the press and could not justify the investment if the programme might be pulled.</p> <p>Local data leaders who built impressive platforms over many years feel their work is being sidelined rather than integrated, and their frustration is genuine.</p> <p>And MPs who see an opportunity to build political capital with their base have turned FDP into a proxy for broader anxieties about US technology, public sector outsourcing, data privacy, and the ethics of Western governments.</p> <p>Meanwhile, patient opt-outs from NHS data sharing have accelerated sharply, causing long-term damage to the very people opting out and to other citizens who share their demography and health needs.</p> <p>The cumulative effect is organisational drift, where the people who need to act are waiting for clarity that the debate is not providing. Public trust matters, and the UK government's unsuccessful attempts to secure it have had real consequences.</p> <p>Some commentators have drawn parallels with <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240216751/Analysis-Caredata-where-next">Care.data</a>, the national programme withdrawn in 2016 after public concern made it politically costly to defend. I do not think we are there. Cross-party political will for FDP remains strong, and the Westminster Hall debate attracted barely a dozen backbenchers.</p> <p>The risk is not that FDP will be cancelled. It is that it will drift while the noise consumes the bandwidth of the people who should be delivering it. The answer to a trust deficit is not to abandon the approach - it is to be transparent about what the platform does, why it matters, and how the data is protected. That is part of what this series has tried to do.</p> <p>The government's reorganisation of the NHS has accelerated the drift. Arbitrary and untargeted cuts to central services have made it harder for the national team to coordinate the most ambitious data programme the NHS has ever attempted. No staff group or programme has been protected - all are subject to disruption with no apparent strategy beyond reducing headcount.</p> <p>This article engages with the objections that are causing that drift, takes them on their merits, and makes the case for why constructive engagement matters more than any of the individual arguments.</p> <p>These are the arguments I have heard, in good faith, from NHS leaders, clinicians, technology companies, and parliamentarians since I left NHS England. Some of them I might once have made myself, before I saw FDP up close.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="&quot;We don't need it. We already have platforms that do this.&quot;"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>"We don't need it. We already have platforms that do this."</h2> <p>This is the objection I hear most often, and it rests on a misunderstanding of what FDP is.</p> <p>It takes several forms. Senior Integrated Care Board (ICB) leaders have reported to their boards that local capability exceeds anything FDP currently offers. Trusts have told NHS England in FOI responses that adopting FDP tools would cause them to "lose functionality rather than gain it."</p> <p>The <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620412/NHS-chief-data-officers-concerned-with-FDP-roll-out">Chief Data and Analytical Officer (CDAO) Network wrote in an open letter</a> that Trusts "already have similar tools in use that presently exceed the capability of what the FDP is currently trying to develop."</p> <p>In Parliament, FDP has been framed as an overpriced analytics subscription, or "an expensive data warehouse." Freedom of Information responses from multiple Trusts described FDP as "a step backwards" compared to existing tools.</p> <p>But every one of these statements frames FDP as an analytics platform competing with existing business intelligence (BI) tools. That is not what FDP is.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Could a home-grown system do what FDP does? In principle, yes. The ideas underneath the Foundry application are knowable and implementable. But </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Tom Bartlett</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>The confusion is understandable - when you describe FDP it genuinely does sound like a cloud data platform, with waiting list dashboards, productivity metrics, care coordination insights and so on. But operational FDP products are already running in production across adopting Trusts - theatre scheduling, discharge coordination, waiting list validation, pathway tracking.</p> <p>These are workflow applications where clinicians and operational staff make decisions, record them, and have those decisions update the underlying data. They are not dashboards. They are tools.</p> <p>The Frontline-First vision that this series has described was in the original procurement specification, which explicitly required operational tools, a marketplace for sharing products, and the capability for Trusts to develop their own digital solutions.</p> <p>But the programme's communications did not land this. The result is that even people inside the NHS data community describe FDP using analytics vocabulary, talking about dashboards and data warehousing, when its production applications are operational products designed for clinical and operational workflows.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="&quot;This is not what we procured&quot;"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>"This is not what we procured"</h2> <p>The CDAO Network wrote in their open letter of February 2025 that the original business need for FDP was "about creating a data connection capability" and "about federating data and interoperable standards," and that it "should not be about imposing or advancing adoption of specific software solutions." The group described the shift toward operational tools as "programme drift."</p> <p>These statements reveal the scale of the misunderstanding. The contract explicitly covers operational applications and the Solution Exchange. The original procurement prospectus, published in January 2023, explicitly stated that the platform would "provide Trusts and Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) with the capability to develop their own digital tools that address their most pressing operational challenges" and that its connectivity would "enable us to rapidly scale and share innovative solutions."</p> <p>A separate Marketplace procurement was published in May 2023 covering "the creation and delivery of use cases and products by other suppliers and subsequent publishing of operational products and solutions."</p> <p>Operational tools, use cases, and a marketplace for sharing products were in the procurement from the start. They were not added later as programme drift. The community either did not read the procurement closely enough or read it through a reporting-first lens and assumed "tools" meant dashboards.</p> <p>How has this misunderstanding happened? Look at the programme's own communications, largely confined to the NHSE website. The language used reinforces the misunderstanding by describing FDP in phraseology used extensively in analytics.&nbsp;</p> <p>The programme's communications were narrower than the procurement, and the Frontline-First vision was never publicly articulated. Where NHS England leaders have described the system it has often been indirect, at times over-simplified to the point where meaning is lost, and at times wrapped in Palantir marketing, an immediate turn off to many who might otherwise have listened.</p> <p>The message should have been clear - FDP supports a Frontline-First approach that requires operational products at the point of care, and those products need to sit on the same platform as the data to deliver the benefits.</p> <p>I described this at length in <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-2-Delivering-on-the-NHS-vision-for-data">Parts 2</a> and <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-3-The-data-architecture-that-makes-it-work">3 of this series</a>. The name of the programme was never going to do the communication on its own, but it is in itself confusing. Data federation alone doesn't give a clinician a useful product, doesn't replace the spreadsheet, doesn't produce better data at source. What drifted was the communication, not the programme.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="&quot;Why not build our own?&quot;"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>"Why not build our own?"</h2> <p>This is the most politically prominent objection. Martin Wrigley, MP, has called in Parliament for "a staged exit with a retender for British companies to build a replacement for Palantir" and argued that "a UK tech consortium" could "build UK sovereign solutions, tech skills and competencies."</p> <p>An NHS developer, quoted by Julian Smith, MP, in the same debate, wrote: "There are any number of reassuringly boring companies that could deliver this contract, many of them based in the UK." The BMA has called for termination of the Palantir contract.</p> <p>Could a home-grown system do what FDP does? In principle, yes. The ideas underneath the Foundry application are knowable and implementable.</p> <p>But "in principle" is doing a lot of work. Foundry is not a product that was built by a project team. It is the output of a $328bn company that has employed thousands of engineers over 20 years, unconstrained by NHS pay scales, headcount ceilings, or recruitment timelines, and funded by billions of dollars in commercial and government contracts across defence, intelligence, and the private sector.</p> <p>The NHS would not be replicating a team - it would be replicating a company. <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366560657/Palantir-awarded-NHS-FDP-data-contract">A contract worth £330m over seven years</a> is not remotely close to that. It is enough to use Foundry. It is not enough to build it.</p> <p>Critics will say they would do it differently, using a combination of existing open-source components and cloud services, and they may be right that a different route is possible. But nobody has yet demonstrated an alternative that delivers the combination of capabilities described in Part 3 at the scale the NHS requires.</p> <p>The UK consortium version is the argument that gets put to me most often when the home-grown option runs out of road. The UK does have genuine data companies. Quantexa, which bid for the FDP contract in 2023 alongside IBM, is a serious UK-founded firm with strong entity resolution and decision intelligence capability. Voror Health Technologies, Eclipse and Black Pear formed an all-British consortium that also bid. Both lost to Palantir.</p> <p>The reason matters more than the result. Neither Quantexa nor any other UK data company currently offers a platform with the combination of capabilities I described in Part 3 – that is, object types that hold data and descriptions together, live navigable relationships between them, actions that create new data through operational applications, writeback into the same data fabric, and a national data model hosted in the same layer.</p> <p>The UK has strong data companies solving adjacent problems. Since I began writing publicly about FDP, I have invited anyone who knows of an alternative platform that delivers this combination to tell me about it. Several have tried, but nobody has come close to describing the functionality needed. I acknowledge that I can only speak to what I have seen - there may be a platform in development that has not yet declared its capability. I would welcome being shown one, and I will need more than vague declarations or lists of company names.</p> <p>FDP is a multi-year endeavour even with Palantir's two decades of platform R&amp;D behind it. Anyone hoping for a different answer in the next 18 months, whether by intervention or by break clause, is asking for a delivery timeline that does not exist on any platform of this scale anywhere in the world.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="&quot;Why does it have to be one platform?&quot;"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>"Why does it have to be one platform?"</h2> <p>This is the most substantive objection, because it accepts most of the argument I have been making and proposes a different deployment model. Martin Wrigley, MP, called in Parliament for "a distributed, interoperable UK sovereign solution," comparing it to "how massive systems, such as the internet or mobile phone networks, work. They do not rely on one single system or supplier." The CDAO Network's open letter argued that the original business need was to federate data, not to impose a single platform.</p> <p>There is broad agreement across the NHS data community, including from the strongest critics of FDP, that a common data model is needed. The disagreement is not about whether the NHS needs a canonical data model (CDM). It is about whether the NHS needs a single platform to implement it.</p> <p>The alternative position is that different parts of the NHS can run different platforms, all conforming to the same CDM but implementing it locally on their own technology. This position has surface appeal - it preserves local autonomy, avoids single-vendor dependency, and lets each region use the tools its teams know best.</p> <p>But there are things it cannot deliver that a single platform with the CDM can.</p> <p>First, application portability. An application built on FDP cannot run on an Advanced Data Services Platform (ADSP) any more than an iPhone app can run on Android, even if both work with the same underlying data model.</p> <p>On a single platform, a Trust in Dorset builds an application and a Trust in Newcastle installs it through the Solution Exchange without rewriting. On multiple platforms, the application has to be rebuilt for each one. That is the difference between interoperability – where systems can talk - and portability, where the same thing runs in both places.</p> <p>Second, semantic consistency. As I argued in Part 4, a consistent data model is necessary but not sufficient. You also need consistent products that constrain recording to produce data of known meaning. On a single platform with the Solution Exchange, those products are portable and enforceable. On multiple platforms, conformance becomes aspirational rather than structural.</p> <p>My view is that a single platform makes national consistency structurally achievable. Multiple platforms make it aspirationally possible but operationally much harder, and we can already see this if we look at the current state of electronic patient records (EPRs).</p> <p>There is one area where the distributed model has a legitimate case - the analytical layer. As I acknowledged in Part 3, Foundry's native analytics are less mature than a well-configured Power BI or Tableau environment, and Trusts with strong analytical infrastructure should not be forced to abandon tools that work well for that purpose. Their data team will have to justify to their CFO each year why they have to rebuild and maintain analytics locally when every other Trust is collaborating on shared infrastructure.</p> <p>But for the operational layer, where the Frontline-First products sit, the case for a single platform with a shared data model and portable products is structural, not a matter of preference. The evidence from the next few years of FDP delivery will make this clearer. But it is worth naming the category error in this objection.</p> <p>Consider a fleet of mobile phones. Nobody argues there should be five competing operating systems on the same device. The operating system is standard; the apps are diverse. Apple’s iOS does not compete with the apps that run on it - it enables them. In this analogy, FDP is the operating system, not the device. The Solution Exchange is the App Store. The CDM is the API standard. The products that run on the platform are built by Trusts, by NHS England, and by third-party suppliers, all competing on the basis of clinical usefulness. The interoperability that critics, including Wrigley, call for is the very thing the platform provides.</p> <p>A related argument deserves attention.</p> <p>There is strong NHS data work at regional level, where dedicated teams have spent years linking data across acute, primary, mental health, and community settings, applying population-level risk scoring, and embedding analytics inside clinical systems.</p> <p>But this work tends to produce a collection of separate specialist tools for separate use cases - one for the shared care record, another for waiting list prioritisation, another for GP prescribing interventions, another for the system control centre. The tools do not share a common data model. They are not portable to other regions. They are not built using AI-assisted development that allows non-engineers to contribute. And they are not integrated into a single operational workflow where data created in one tool is immediately available to every other. This is excellent analytics infrastructure with operational extensions bolted on. It is not a Frontline-First approach.</p> <p>The question is whether 26 ICBs can each build their own version independently, maintain semantic consistency across them, and make the resulting tools available to every Trust in the country. The CDM and the Solution Exchange exist because the answer is no.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="&quot;The cost is too high&quot;"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>"The cost is too high"</h2> <p>Senior NHS data leaders have asked for independent evaluation of costs and benefits and they are right to do so. The published contract value of £330m significantly understates the true cost of FDP adoption, and as I described in Part 2, implementation costs vary significantly depending on how a Trust approaches adoption.</p> <p>There are also operational costs that early adopters are still defining - incident management, change control, monitoring, and the service management model for a platform that runs clinical tools. These day-to-day realities of running FDP in production are not yet fully established, and Trusts considering adoption should factor them in.</p> <p>But the evaluation must also account for the costs of the status quo. The hidden costs of operating without a Frontline-First approach are real and large - data quality failures that distort commissioning decisions and funding allocations; clinical variation that persists for years because enrichment never reaches the consultant; the information governance and data loss risks created by shadow IT that sits outside the formal data estate; analyst time spent reconciling data that should have been consistent at source; and the downstream research and policy consequences of working from data that looks reasonable but is silently wrong.</p> <p>The information governance risks presented by current practice of using whiteboards, spreadsheets and paper have not gone away, and are costing the NHS millions each year. These costs are harder to quantify but they are borne every day by every Trust in the country. An honest evaluation would put the cost of FDP adoption alongside the cost of not adopting it, and let the numbers speak.</p> <p>There is a further cost that is harder to see but may prove the largest of all - the opportunity cost of falling behind on AI.</p> <p>Every major health system in the world is investing in AI capabilities that depend on consistent, structured, semantically coherent data. Implementing AI across the pre-FDP data landscape, with its fragmented systems, inconsistent semantics, and data locked in siloed warehouses, would require building bespoke grounding and integration for every Trust, every data source, and every use case.</p> <p>The operational AI capabilities on the platform (Ask FDP, AI-FDE, the emerging agentic workflows described in Part 3) work because the ontology provides the semantic layer that AI needs to reason across the data. Without that layer, AI in the NHS will be confined to isolated local experiments that cannot scale.</p> <p>Other countries are not waiting. The cost of delay is not just what the NHS loses today - it is the widening gap between what the NHS can do with its data and what comparable health systems will be able to do with theirs.</p> <p>The cost comparison that puts this in context is the EPR investment. The NHS has spent roughly £2bn on electronic patient records over the past five years, with single geographies spending £200m on a single EPR upgrade. In that context, £330m for a national operational data platform looks like what it is - a modest beginning, not an extravagance.</p> <p>The objections so far have been about whether FDP is needed and whether it is worth the cost. The next set are about the supplier - who owns what, how dependent the NHS becomes, and whether Palantir is an acceptable partner.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="&quot;The NHS owns no intellectual property&quot;"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>"The NHS owns no intellectual property"</h2> <p>This is the most disingenuous claim in the debate. Martin Wrigley stated in Westminster Hall that the FDP contract delivers "no software, not one line" and that "all the specially written software and intellectual property rights belong to the supplier." I wrote to Wrigley before the debate explaining why this was wrong. He repeated the claim regardless. The minister, Zubir Ahmed, contradicted him in the debate: "The NHS owns the intellectual property for all products and it is possible to migrate them to other providers."</p> <p>The accompanying diagram shows the layered architecture and where intellectual property (IP) ownership sits at each level.</p> <p>The NHS Trust owns its network infrastructure, its connection agent host, its connector configurations, and its ETL pipeline logic, all written in standard open-source languages (SQL, Python, PySpark, React) that can be lifted and run on any platform.</p> <p>The Canonical Data Model belongs to the NHS, is licensed via the Open Government Licence, and is available to all on GitHub.</p> <p>Every FDP product built by NHS engineers belongs to the NHS. Every Trust-built application, dashboard, and report belongs to the Trust.</p> <p>What Palantir retains is intellectual property in Foundry itself - the platform engine, and the proprietary tools like Quiver, Workshop, Contour, and the Ontology Engine. This is no different from Microsoft retaining IP in Excel while users own the spreadsheets they create.</p> <p>If Palantir lost the contract tomorrow, the NHS would retain all of its data, all of its code, all of its products, and all of the CDM. Only the Foundry platform engine and Palantir's own tools would need replacing. That is a significant migration task, but it is not "no software, not one line."</p> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/fdp_architecture_v5.png"> <img data-src="https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/fdp_architecture_v5_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/fdp_architecture_v5_mobile.png 960w,https://www.computerweekly.com/rms/computerweekly/fdp_architecture_v5.png 1280w" alt="FDP architecture diagram" height="780" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>FDP integration architecture </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> <p>The IP ownership question is separate from the vendor lock-in question, and it is worth being clear about both. Everything built on FDP is technically portable - the code is in open source languages, the CDM belongs to the NHS, the data belongs to the Trusts. But portability on paper and migration in practice are very different things.</p> <p>If the break clause were triggered and Palantir's software became unavailable, the migration task would be monumental. Every pipeline, every ontology configuration, every application would need to be rebuilt on whatever platform replaced it. The CDM would need to be reimplemented. The integrations with Trust source systems would need to be reconnected. And the NHS would need to have a platform to migrate to, which, as I have argued above, does not currently exist.</p> <p>This is not unique to FDP - any platform migration at this scale is a multi-year programme in its own right. The SAS to Foundry migration that NHS England undertook was a significant project and that was one analytical platform within one organisation. Migrating 220 Trusts' operational products would be orders of magnitude harder.</p> <p>The challenge to migrate away from FDP is significant, but it is operational rather than legal, and it is the same kind of challenge that applies to every EPR, every data warehouse, and every enterprise system the NHS runs.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Data sovereignty and the Cloud Act"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Data sovereignty and the Cloud Act</h2> <p>A persistent claim in the debate is that the NHS has handed its data to Palantir. It has not. The data remains under NHS data controllership. Palantir provides the platform software under contract - it does not own, control, or have the right to use NHS data for any purpose outside the contracted services.</p> <p>The contract explicitly prohibits commercial or research use of the data by the supplier. This is the same arrangement that applies to every other technology supplier the NHS uses - Microsoft hosts NHS data on Azure, Epic hosts clinical records, and neither owns the data they process. The minister confirmed this in the Westminster Hall debate - the NHS owns the data and can migrate it to other providers.</p> <p>A related concern is that Palantir is a US company and that the US Cloud Act could theoretically compel disclosure of NHS data to the US government. This is a legitimate concern in principle. It is also one that applies equally to any US company including Epic, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. There is unlikely to be anyone in England who has not already willingly shared their personal data with at least one of those firms. The NHS runs on Microsoft infrastructure. Most Trusts use Microsoft 365. Many are migrating to Azure. Epic and Oracle Health, both US companies, provide the EPR systems that hold the most sensitive patient data in the NHS.</p> <p>The Cloud Act requires US law enforcement to obtain a warrant from a US court, demonstrating probable cause that the data sought contains evidence of a crime. The warrant must describe with particularity the data to be obtained, and the provider can challenge the order in court. It is a targeted legal process, not a mechanism for bulk data extraction.</p> <p>Campaigners have suggested that FISA, separate US surveillance legislation designed for counter-terrorism, could be used to compel bulk access to NHS data without individual warrants, bypassing the safeguards described above. FISA authorises the surveillance of foreign intelligence targets, not the bulk extraction of datasets from commercial platforms. Using it to obtain NHS patient records would require a US intelligence agency to persuade the FISA Court that millions of NHS patient records are relevant to a foreign intelligence investigation.</p> <p>There is no credible technical mechanism by which this could happen without triggering every alarm in NHS England's cyber security monitoring and becoming instant headline news. The fact this has never happened to any US-hosted NHS data, despite UK citizens using US software since the start of the information age, is telling. The concern is understandable given the political climate and media coverage, but it is not supported by the evidence of how these legal instruments work in practice.</p> <p>If data sovereignty from US jurisdiction is the standard, the NHS would need to exit not just Palantir but its entire cloud and EPR infrastructure. That is not a realistic proposition, particularly when the UK government is actively inviting US technology companies to invest in the UK.</p> <p>The sovereignty argument is worth having as a matter of national policy. It is not a credible basis for singling out FDP while leaving every other US technology dependency in the NHS untouched.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The ethics of the supplier"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The ethics of the supplier</h2> <p>There is a further objection that this series has deliberately not addressed until now, because it sits outside the architectural argument - the ethics of Palantir as a company.</p> <p>Palantir's involvement in military operations, immigration enforcement, and intelligence work is a matter of public record. The company has attracted intense criticism, and some of the language used to describe it and its employees has been extreme. NHS staff, including data analysts who are asked to work on the platform, have raised sincere objections to working with a company whose other contracts they find morally unacceptable.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> I have listened to the frustration local leaders feel and it is real. The programme was operating under continual, near-unmanageably high pressure for years. Both things are true, and both need to be acknowledged if the relationship between the national programme and the local teams is going to work. </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Tom Bartlett</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>The tension is understandable. The NHS is built on values of care, compassion, and the equal treatment of every patient. Military and security organisations operate on different values - national defence, deterrence, and the use of force where necessary. Both sets of values exist within British society.</p> <p>The UK funds its armed forces, operates intelligence services, and contracts with companies that support them. These are not fringe activities - they are functions of a democratic state. The discomfort that NHS staff feel when those two worlds intersect through a shared supplier is real, but it is a tension between values that coexist in the same society, not a choice between right and wrong.</p> <p>These objections are legitimate. They are also personal. We each make choices about who we vote for, what we buy, where we work, and which companies we are willing to do business with. Those choices reflect our values and nobody should be told their values are wrong. But this series is about whether the Frontline-First approach works, whether the architecture delivers it, and whether the NHS should build on it. The ethics of the supplier are a question for individuals, for lawmakers, and for the democratic process. They are not a question this series can answer, and they should not be used to avoid engaging with the substance of the argument, nor to judge those who work within an imperfect framework to try to do good for patients and the public.</p> <p>I find it hard to watch decent colleagues be heckled as "genocide supporters" for expressing the opinion that the software is helpful in improving the NHS. This sort of behaviour diverges from NHS values and it materially dampens collaboration and delivery.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="&quot;The programme has not worked with us&quot;"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>"The programme has not worked with us"</h2> <p>The objections above are about the platform, the supplier, and the architecture. There is a separate set of concerns that are about how the programme itself has been run. These deserve their own acknowledgement because they come from people who are not opposed to FDP in principle but who have been frustrated by their experience of working with it.</p> <p>The FDP programme is led by a national team at NHS England, but the platform is adopted and operated by individual NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Boards, each with its own data team, infrastructure, and priorities.</p> <p>Trusts and ICBs have at times felt that the national programme worked around them rather than with them. Concerns raised locally were treated as the Trust's responsibility to resolve, resourcing requirements have at times been too optimistic, and opportunities for shared learning between organisations were constrained.</p> <p>Combined with insufficient communication about what FDP is and what it requires, this has created frustration and disengagement. I have heard directly and with feeling from senior people who say they are valued in their own organisations but felt undervalued by the national programme.</p> <p>Data teams in the NHS have historically operated at one step removed from the frontline. A Frontline-First approach changes that - it moves data capability closer to the point of care, into environments where the pace is relentless and the tolerance for friction is low.</p> <p>Combine that with AI capabilities delivered via FDP, and that is a significant shift for teams who are used to working in the back office, and it is a change that requires strong and purposeful leadership across the technical professions. The need for this leadership is urgent, both nationally and in Trusts.</p> <p>That is not to judge the national FDP programme whose task was herculean from the start. Problems with communication and engagement are not unique to FDP, and any national programme working in public, at technical depth, across 250 autonomous organisations will create friction. The context makes it harder for the FDP programme to get right - it was delivering through a period in which NHS England itself was being reorganised, workforce reductions were affecting every level of the system, and the political environment was hostile. It is not possible to please everyone when working at this scale under those conditions.</p> <p>I have listened to the frustration local leaders feel and it is real. The programme was operating under continual, near-unmanageably high pressure for years. Both things are true, and both need to be acknowledged if the relationship between the national programme and the local teams is going to work.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is actually happening on the ground"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is actually happening on the ground</h2> <p>The debate about FDP has been conducted largely in the abstract - procurement politics, supplier ethics, theoretical capabilities. Meanwhile, Trusts that have committed to the platform are building.</p> <p>One NHS group has re-platformed all its core FDP products into a shared cross-Trust space, with both Trusts running single instances of theatres, Optica and shared patient tracking lists backed by permissions-based access. The same group is decommissioning its local data warehouse and moving entirely to FDP. Its national submissions are being automated through the Health Decision Suite (HDS), the FDP product that provides cloud-based data warehouse functionality, with ECDS and CDS complete and 14 further priority reports in progress.</p> <p>The same group is building local products for ward accreditation, programme management, and quality improvement, with working groups involving corporate nursing teams and ward leaders. The implementation cost has been significantly lower than the figures most often cited in the debate, because the Trust embedded FDP adoption into its existing transformation programmes rather than running it as a separate digital programme. I was told four products were built side of desk and the organisation is now recruiting a developer to frontline teams to quality-control AI-assisted product prototypes into production.</p> <p>This is one example. There are others. Trusts are building DNA prediction tools, clinical quality products, cross-Trust shared patient lists, and nursing quality applications.</p> <p>Third-party technology companies are also beginning to engage, working with Trusts and NHS England to bring their products onto the platform through the Solution Exchange. The teams doing this work are not waiting for the debate to conclude. They are building, and the gap between what is happening on the ground and what is being discussed in the media and in Parliament is growing wider by the month.</p> <p>The platform's long-term sustainability depends on the NHS developing its own Foundry expertise. Trusts need to invest in building internal capability rather than remaining dependent on Palantir's engineering support. This should be a priority for every Trust that adopts FDP, and the example above shows it is already happening.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The cost of the distraction"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The cost of the distraction</h2> <p>There is a collective cost to the debate that none of the individual objections acknowledges - while the NHS argues about who won the contract, the Frontline-First approach is being delivered by the Trusts that have committed, but not at the pace or scale the NHS needs.</p> <p>The CDM governance described in Part 4 needs investment and attention now, not after the debate concludes. The Solution Exchange needs a commercial framework and early adopter engagement now. The Trusts that are building local products need support, access to the governance process, and a community contribution model that scales. Trusts that have not yet engaged need to understand what FDP is for, which is the purpose of this series.</p> <p>None of this is happening at the pace it should, because the bandwidth of senior leaders in the system is consumed by the political noise rather than the delivery challenge.</p> <p>There is a quieter cost that receives less attention. Every patient who opts out of NHS data sharing on the basis of the campaigners' framing makes themselves less visible to the system trying to look after them.</p> <p>The research datasets that power studies into cancer, dementia, and cardiovascular disease become not just smaller but biased, because the patients who opt out are not randomly distributed. The campaigners are sincere in their concern about data privacy, and patients must have the right to opt out. But the current dynamic, where the Palantir controversy is used to drive opt-outs that damage both care and research, is causing real harm.</p> <p>The objections are not wrong to exist. But they are wrong to dominate. Realists know that there is no alternative, despite the prospect of contractual break clauses. The real question is not whether Palantir should be the supplier - that ship has sailed. The focus should be on how collectively we can support the Frontline-First approach, the CDM, and the consistent products that enforce it to be delivered, reducing the harms of a debate that has already gone on long enough.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Why this matters now"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Why this matters now</h2> <p>There are two ticking clocks that the debate has not acknowledged.</p> <p>The first is the NHS App. It is a central feature of the 10-Year Health Plan and is connecting to more Trusts every month. As it expands, it will expose more of the patient record directly to the public. Patients will see records that do not match what they were told - missing information, stale data, inconsistencies between what their GP recorded and what the hospital has. The data quality problems described in Part 1 are about to become publicly visible in ways that will erode patient confidence in how the NHS manages their information.</p> <p>The second is the pace of change in data and AI. The rest of the world is not waiting. Every major health system is investing in AI capabilities that depend on consistent, structured data, and the gap between what those systems can do and what the NHS can do is widening. The NHS data landscape described in Part 1 was already behind. With AI accelerating the pace of change, standing still means falling further behind, faster.</p> <p>The public debate about FDP has been dominated by questions of ethics and trust - who supplies the platform, what the supplier's track record looks like, whether the procurement was right. Those questions matter and they deserve answers. But they have crowded out the question that matters most: does the Frontline-First approach work, and what will it take to deliver it?</p> <p>The answer will not come from a single supplier. Palantir provides the platform software, but FDP is built by the NHS. It is built by Trust data teams configuring it for their clinical services, by ICB teams linking data across their systems, by the national engineering team designing the architecture, and by the third-party suppliers who will build products for the Solution Exchange.</p> <p>The approach should not be in doubt - the evidence from early adopters, the architectural case, and the absence of any credible alternative all point the same way. What should be in doubt is whether the system can stop arguing long enough to deliver it.</p> <p>The conversation needs to move from who supplies the software to how we make the approach work. If the government is serious about moving resources to the frontline, it should understand that investing in data solutions for clinicians is how data supports that ambition, and it should ensure the programme does not stall because the central team is consumed by organisational upheaval. Campaigners and MPs should focus on building what comes next, for example a sovereign competitor to Palantir.</p> <p>Everyone who has a role in this should be careful not to tear down what has been built, or criticise the NHS staff who are building, as that helps no one - not the patient, the taxpayer, or the clinician.</p> <p>Find ways to constructively engage and find solutions. The NHS has the platform, the data model, the early products, and a growing community of Trusts and technology companies who want to build on it.</p> <p>What it needs is collective commitment to the Frontline-First approach and the willingness to adapt on all sides - the national team listening to local leaders, local leaders engaging with the architecture rather than dismissing it, and the supplier community building products that the frontline actually wants to use.</p> <p>Together, we can make the NHS safer, easier and quicker to access. We can achieve higher quality patient outcomes and a better patient experience. We can make more efficient use of taxpayer funds. All of this starts with getting the data to work harder and giving the frontline what it needs. That is what Frontline-First means, and it is within our reach if we choose to build it together.</p> <p>I left NHS England in March 2026 after three years inside the FDP programme. I wrote this series because I believed the public debate was missing the most important part of the story - what the platform is actually for.</p> <p>I have tried to be honest about what works, what does not, and what needs to change. The Frontline-First approach is not perfect and neither is the programme delivering it. But it is the best answer I have seen to problems the NHS has failed to solve for 20 years, and I would rather help build it than watch the debate consume it. I intend to keep writing, and I intend to keep building.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about NHS data</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Electronic-health-records-are-still-creating-issues-for-patients">Electronic health records are still creating issues for patients</a> - Almost every NHS trust will have moved onto a digital system by this spring. Experts have cautioned many patients are still struggling to access their own health data.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639993/Child-rapist-could-have-profiled-victims-through-unaudited-access-to-NHS-databases">Child rapist could have profiled victims through unaudited access to NHS databases</a> - NHS analyst’s conviction for child sexual abuse offences raises concerns over unaudited access to patient data.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366574914/Women-In-Data-panel-NHS-needs-to-get-data-basics-right-before-rushing-into-AI">NHS needs to get data basics right before rushing into AI</a> - During a panel discussion at a Women in Data event, speakers from across the public healthcare sector outlined the groundwork that has to be laid for artificial intelligence to take the NHS by storm.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620174/NHS-investigating-how-API-flaw-exposed-patient-data">NHS investigating how API flaw exposed patient data</a> - NHS patient data was left vulnerable by a flaw in an application programming interface used at online healthcare provider Medefer.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641178/NHS-digital-drive-hit-by-usability-gaps-despite-progress-national-survey-finds">NHS digital drive hit by usability gaps despite progress, national survey finds</a> - The shift from analogue to digital across the NHS is hindered by usability issues in electronic patient record (EPR), but the newly launched frontline productivity programme could be the answer.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> Many people - in the NHS, in Parliament, in the tech sector and beyond - have raised objections to FDP and its supplier. Some have merit, others less so https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/healthcare-medical-doctor-ipopba-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-5-Addressing-the-objections Thu, 28 May 2026 04:00:00 GMT <p>The UK and its allies have only a “narrowing window” to stay ahead of technology threats from Russia and China, the head of the UK’s spy agency GCHQ will warn today.</p> <p>Director of GCHQ Anne Keast-Butler will say that the UK needs to step up cyber security and make it “10 times more urgent” in the face of “increasingly brazen behaviour” from adversaries.</p> <p>The world is facing a “new era of radical uncertainty, contested geopolitics and rapidly changing technology,” the director will say in a lecture at Bletchley Park, the war time home of the organisation that became GCHQ.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Russia scaling up threats"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Russia scaling up threats</h2> <p>“Russia is scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the UK and Europe,” Keast-Butler will tell experts, academics and government officials. “[The country is] relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust.”</p> <p>Groups linked to Russia were responsible for a series of <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638859/Russias-cyber-attacks-on-Polish-utilities-draws-NCSC-alert">cyber attacks on Poland’s energy infrastructure</a> last year, which targeted <a href="https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/poland-stops-cyberattacks-on-energy-infrastructure">two combined head and power plants and an energy management system</a> for renewable energy.</p> <p>GCHQ and allies need to fend off cyber attacks, “counter reckless sabotage and assassination attempts”, and attempts by Russia to smuggle Western technology, as the UK continues its support for Ukraine, the director will say.</p> <p>“Putin is going backward on the battlefield,” she is expected to say.</p> <p>The spy chief acknowledges that the pace of technological change is the highest it has ever been throughout her 30-year career in national security, and says that the UK and its allies have only a narrow window to stay ahead.</p> <p>“China is now a science and tech superpower – with sophisticated capabilities across their intelligence, cyber and military agencies,” she will say. The rapid development of AI technology means the “ground beneath our feet is shifting”.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Need to accelerate cyber security"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Need to accelerate cyber security</h2> <p>In an inaugural annual lecture, Keast will argue that everyone in the country “from board rooms to living rooms” has a role to play in national security.</p> <p>“At home, that means taking important action now to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642156/NCSC-heralds-end-of-passwords-for-consumers-and-pushes-secure-passkeys">switch passwords for passkeys</a>; and for wider society, it means hardwiring security into new technologies, protecting supply chains and making cyber security 10 times more urgent,” she will say.</p> <p>Nation states – such as China or Russia – were responsible for the majority of “nationally significant” cyber security attacks against the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642032/Nation-states-responsible-for-nationally-significant-cyber-attacks-against-UK-says-NCSC-chief">disclosed in April</a>.</p> <p>China’s intelligence and military agencies were capable of an “eye-watering level of sophistication” in offensive cyber operations, its CEO Richard Horne said.</p> <p>The Chinese hacking group Volt Typhoon has targeted multiple operators of critical national infrastructure (CNI) in Asia and across the US, as it <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640484/UK-Cyber-Monitoring-Centre-plans-expansion-in-US-amid-risk-of-Category-5-attack">pre-positions for future cyber attacks</a>.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Need for partnerships"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Need for partnerships</h2> <p>GCHQ’s director, marking the 80^th anniversary of the UKUSA intelligence sharing agreement, the origin of the special relationship between the UK and the US, will argue that partnerships “are the crux of our resilience and prosperity”.</p> <p>Referring to letters from <a href="https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/dennistons-x-factor-what-made-him-stand-out">Alastair Denniston</a>, the first director of what became GCHQ, Keast-Butler will say that during its more than 100-year history, GCHQ has always prided itself of “foresight, practicality…and partnerships” to protect the UK and its allies. “When humanity is at its worst, we are at our best,” she will say.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more on nation-state cyber threats</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641790/UK-to-build-national-cyber-shield-to-protect-against-AI-cyber-threats">UK to build ‘national cyber shield’ to protect against AI cyber</a> threats: Security minister Dan Jarvis calls for artificial intelligence companies to work with government to develop AI-driven cyber defences.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642032/Nation-states-responsible-for-nationally-significant-cyber-attacks-against-UK-says-NCSC-chief">Nation states responsible for ‘nationally significant’ cyber attacks against UK, says NCSC chief</a>: The UK is facing four nationally significant cyber attacks a week, the majority from hostile states, NCSC chief, Richard Horne, will warn at the CyberUK conference.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> UK needs to treat cyber security 10 times more urgently in the wake of threats from Russia, China and other adversaries, says GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/cyber-security-attack-virus-malware-Skorzewiak-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366643654/UK-has-narrowing-window-to-stay-ahead-of-tech-threats-says-GCHQ-chief-Keast-Butler Wed, 27 May 2026 09:39:00 GMT 60 editor@computerweekly.com