AIFA president publishes policy paper on AI and robotics with Tony Blair, William Hague.

As part of AIFA’s active involvement in helping draw out the future of AI at the government level, AIFA president Roeland P-J E Decorte co-authored the latest policy paper release from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change alongside Tony Blair, William Hague, Luke Stanley, Jakob Mökander and Benedict Macon-Cooney. The paper is on how the UK can catch up to other G7 nations in AI, Embodied AI and Robotics.

As one of the points particularly close to our heart, we address the UK's relative lack of #arly- and mid-stage patient capital. We believe some of the funding provided by UKRI, including for early stage ventures, has been ineffectively spent. We suggest the creation of a new £100M co-investing programme through British Patient Capital. Instead of governments picking individual ventures to support, this new programme would co-invest and follow alongside private VCs in early- and mid-stage deep and hardtech startups such as hardware, robotics, embodied and complex AI. Long-term returns from these investments could then also support and return value to the nation. This, we believe, could help close the current significant early stage funding gap in the UK for those domains.

We further suggest the use of a targeted Contracts for Innovation programme to help public bodies fund solutions, and Advanced Market Commitments (AMCs) to pull through emerging capabilities in robotics and embodied AI. This should help address needs in the public sector and simultaneously support ventures by streamlining their go-to-market.

We also feel regulators, where new uses of AI, embodied AI, hardware and robotics are assessed, need to be financially supported and bring in experts in these domains (to prevent common issues in assessment from arising), in line with suggestions from Prof Dame Angela McLean.

Overall, the report 'A New National Purpose: the UK's opportunity to lead on next wave robotics' sets out how the UK can catch up to other G7 countries in these crucial industries.

Click here to read the full paper on the Tony Blair Institute’s website: https://institute.global/insights/tech-and-digitalisation/a-new-national-purpose-the-uks-opportunity-to-lead-in-next-wave-robotics