Why UK businesses aren’t seeing AI results

AI dominates most discussions and headlines in 2026. Just this week, the Bank of England warned that the Iran War could shepherd in a burst of the AI bubble, the tech is being deployed in hospitals to cut wait times and a Reform politician has been dubbed MattGPT amid accusations he used OpenAI’s tool to write his new book.

But did you know that only one in six UK businesses is using artificial intelligence in their business? Shockingly, 80 per cent of the country’s companies neither use nor have plans to adopt AI. The number itself is striking but what matters more is what sits behind it. This is not simply a question of adoption, but rather one of how deeply AI is being embedded into the way organisations actually work.

There is a moment in almost every technology shift where the chatter moves from possibility to proof. Many would argue that AI has not quite reached its potential yet. Spend time with most leadership teams or speaking to company leaders right now and the same pattern emerges. There is curiosity, experimentation and pockets of enthusiasm. But there is also a lingering sense that, for all the noise, something isn’t quite landing where it matters.

This was the backdrop last week as I had the honour of moderating a panel on the topic at the 2026 Business Leader Summit. These are my takeaways from the session, looking into why so many companies aren’t nailing adoption, and crucially, revealing the trap most leaders fall into.

Shivani Menon, an economist at Public First, which specialises in the impact of AI and frontier technologies, set the stage highlighting the gap between individual productivity gains and business-level impact. Firstly, it was how quickly UK workers have adopted AI.

And in fact, workers in the UK rank in the top 10 globally…

However, company-wide adoption and integration has lagged. This is magnified by the government’s AI adoption research released earlier this year, showing that only 16 per cent of businesses are using at least one AI tool. Menon highlights a study from MIT that found that just 5 per cent of businesses have started to see any material gains on their profit and loss statements.

For a tool so revolutionary, why are so few organisations seeing results? Part of the answer is time or more precisely, what happens before the payoff. Menon describes this as what economists call the “enterprise J curve”.

When companies first adopt AI, performance often dips because teams are retraining, workflows are being redesigned and tools are sometimes slowly integrated. This means that effort increases without immediate financial impact, creating a period where AI feels ineffective or even disruptive.

However, once organisations move past this phase, embedding AI into core processes, aligning systems and redirecting saved time into higher-value work, performance improves sharply and real business gains begin to appear.

How do you break through the dip of the figure J? Saasha Celestial-One, the co-founder and COO at Olio, says that the food waste-tackling company’s approach didn’t treat it as a tool but rather as a system. Instead of encouraging broad, shallow experimentation, the focus has been on understanding how time is actually spent.

The responsibility was placed in the hands of AI champions who sit in the build and go-to-market sides of the business. Celestial-One looks after the latter, where one of the champions is an engineer. Their job is to try out new AI tools or test new functions on the tools they already use, with a focus on staying at the cutting edge.

The company’s chief of staff is also tasked with looking for what they call “automations and efficiencies”. They conduct regular auditing and shadowing of all functions across the company to identify time sinks, using structured time audits to prioritise where AI can have the biggest impact. The chief of staff also oversees AI policies within the business, subscription tiers and feedback on the tools from fellow employees.

AI adoption is even baked into performance management reviews and career progression frameworks for an extra incentive. And the kicker? The company has halved its engineering team largely due to improvements from AI. Celestial-One says that 18 months ago, the operations team was a team of 12. Today, thanks to AI, it’s doubled its scale with just three people in the department.

Ben Warner, whose company Electric Twin creates synthetic audiences for instant consumer insights, warns of the trap many leaders fall into: innovation theatre. This is when businesses focus on what AI could do, rather than what actually drives value.

“It’s very easy to get fixated on what we could do or things that if they were deployed could add value,” he says, “but they never actually get deployed because they don’t solve the crux of the problem.”

He also suggests having a “North Star”, a sharp focus on where the business creates value and using AI strictly in service of that.

Katie Langdon, the co-founder of Skin and Blister, says that the healthcare communications agency proactively engaged with customers (often large pharmaceutical companies) to bring them along on the company’s AI journey.

They actively went to clients early and asked, “Are you aware of how your suppliers are using AI?”, highlighting that many hadn’t yet considered the implications. From there, Skin and Blister positioned themselves not just as a service provider but as a guide. They run full workshops with clients to help them instil AI across their business.

Langdon also throws down the gauntlet for leaders: “The best time to learn about AI was two years ago and the next best time is now… It's evolve or die.”

Guess the company

• It was founded as Aircraft Transport and Travel Limited in 1919
• Its team has worn over 400 different uniforms since the 1930s
• It employs over 30,000 people
• It operates in over 200 destinations worldwide

You'll find the answer at the bottom of this page

What happened this week?

1. The oil crisis triggered by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has prompted emergency measures around the globe to protect supply and halt rising prices. Two states in Australia have introduced free travel on trains, trams and buses to offset rising petrol prices. Egypt is dimming street lights and encouraging people to work from home at least one day a week. Bangladesh closed schools and universities as part of emergency measures to conserve fuel. Despite contradictory rhetoric from the White House and Tehran, some analysts warn that, no matter what happens from here on out, we are facing the 'worst energy crisis of our lifetime'.
2. Around 2.7 million people are set to receive a pay rise as the national minimum wage goes up by 50p to £12.71 for over 21s. However, two-thirds of hospitality businesses are planning to cut jobs as a result of “suffocating” costs imposed by the government, as new business rates and higher wage bills come into force. An industry-wide survey of 20,000 hospitality businesses has found that as a direct result of the cost increases, 64 per cent of firms plan to cut jobs, 42 per cent intend to reduce trading hours and one in seven will be forced to close.
3. OpenAI has completed a deal to raise $122bn from investors at an $852bn (£673bn) valuation, marking the company’s largest funding round to date. The bulk of the financing came from Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank. This comes a week after closing its video-generation app Sora, less than two years after its initial release.
4. A record number of megadeals were agreed in the first quarter of the year as companies shrugged off war in the Middle East and a shakeout in the software sector to propel mergers and acquisitions to $1.2tn globally. A total of 22 deals valued above $10bn were agreed in the past three months, the highest-ever quarterly figure, according to LSEG data. It cemented the third consecutive $1tn quarter for dealmaking.
5. The UK economy grew 1.4 per cent in 2025, official data has shown. The Office for National Statistics has confirmed that the UK economy grew more than originally thought but growth slowed down radically as the year passed. It found that GDP increased by 0.1 per cent in the last quarter of the year, an unrevised figure from a previous estimate.

Weekend reading

🍎 Apple at 50: The roots of a tech revolution

What does a US general landing in war-torn Japan have to do with the iPhone in your pocket? Quite a lot, it turns out. This fascinating story in the Financial Times traces how a forgotten American engineer helped rebuild Japan’s broken industries, only for those ideas on quality and manufacturing to be refined overseas, lost at home and ultimately reassembled decades later inside Apple. It’s a tale of ambition, arrogance, reinvention, the quiet systems behind world-changing products and why what looks like overnight success is often decades in the making.

⚽ Inside Wrexham’s finances: How Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney built a $450m football club

Joe Pompliano, the man behind the brilliant Substack newsletter Huddle Up, has done a deep dive into the Hollywood turnaround of a once little-known 160-year-old Welsh football club. From a $2m 2021 acquisition to a $450-500m 2026 valuation, it is quite the dragon's tale...

And finally

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Just download and print the template on their website, fill in the alphabet and symbols in both upper and lowercase, upload a scanned version back to the platform and voila.

The answer to our question is British Airways.