AI
Gen AI is still a hype but will become a utility
FIGURE 40: HOW BUSINESSES ADOPT AI % of all UK businesses adopting AI
%
10 15 20 25 30 35 40
0 5
Developed in-house Outsourced provider Purchased software Remaining respondents not sure/not applicable Source: ONS, January 2025 Base: 10,070 UK businesses 38% 18% 12%
have moved to a second level, doing prototypes, but they haven’t necessarily implemented the technologies out there. “Retail and consumer clients have
a long list of use cases, but these are not necessarily Gen AI use cases. If trying to automate certain processes, these are more use cases for advanced analytics, machine learning or robotics, not fully automated generative AI. Many organisations look at small pieces of problems they’re trying to solve as opposed to saying, ‘How can we transform this overall process?’” Gauld emphasised the point, arguing:
“‘Proper’ AI is about rethinking a whole process. At the moment, people are
Everyone thinks AI reduces headcount. If done properly, it should increase productivity and efficiency, with the potential to deploy people to something else
experimenting on how to adjust stages two to three in an A-to-B process rather than thinking how to get from A to B differently.” Nonetheless, generative AI is in
use. Ratz noted: “A key use case is in marketing-content generation. The product descriptions on retailers’ websites used to be manually or semi-manually generated. Now they can be automated.” A second key use is in software
engineering, where “the delivery process has changed enormously in the last year with augmentation, auto- generation, testing code and producing documentation automatically”, according to Ratz. “Even code can be generated and just reviewed by an engineer. Technology vendors are offering these capabilities, and it’s becoming a utility for engineers and developers. The same will probably happen in aviation maintenance.” A third area of use is contact-centre
MOST business AI users
are purchasing AI software (Figure 40), and improving business operations is the main reason for its use, but most smaller businesses are not yet using AI (Figure 41)
UK BUSINESS USE OF GEN AI % by type of use case
Data processing Image processing Text generation
Visual content creation
1 2 3 4 5 6.2%
Source: ONS, January 2025 Base: 10,070 UK businesses 0
6 7 2.6% 7.7% 5.4%
FIGURE 41: BUSINESS USE OF AI % pt
change YoY
change YoY
+1 -0.5 +1.9 +1.9 8 % pt %
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
0 -9 76% 77% 73% 64% 56% 45%
UK BUSINESSES NOT USING AI
By size of workforce
AI. Gauld noted: “In aviation, it’s about the end-to-end customer experience and airlines improving their touchpoints via webchat. This has been failing in not reading sentiment, for example, when a customer is annoyed and told, ‘Have a nice day.’ There is experimentation looking at that. I’ve started to see AI explored in operations efficiency as well, around predictive maintenance.” %RWK DFNQRZOHGJH WKHUH UHPDLQVbD
PROPOSED BUSINESS USE CASES FOR AI All UK businesses & by size of workforce
%
10 20 30 40 50
All 0-9 10-49 50-99 100-249 250+ 0 45% 40% 39% 24% 25% 15% 16% All 0-9
Improve business operations
50-99 250+
Personalise products/services
44%
24 Travel Weekly Insight Report 2025
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