UK Digital Economy Conference 2026

Registration and Networking

Welcome remarks

Opening Keynote

Digital infrastructure is the backbone of the future economy. This panel explores how gigabit connectivity, 5G deployment, and compute capacity shape regional competitiveness and prosperity.

Has connectivity become a precondition for attracting advanced manufacturing, tech talent, and digital services? And what does regional parity and collaboration look like?

Can devolved nations and regions attract AI infrastructure investment, or will it reinforce London and the South East dominance?

Are we connecting everyone everywhere? And is this allowing us to deliver inclusive growth?

Coffee Break

Fireside Chat

"What decision-making power do we actually need to grow a local digital economy?" — fiscal devolution, procurement freedom, and skills funding as growth levers

Networking Lunch

AI is changing what work looks like in every part of the country, but the UK's skills system is still built mostly around national programmes that don't fit local labour markets. This panel asks who should lead the workforce response to AI, and whether Mayoral Strategic Authorities now have the powers, funding and employer relationships to do it. Speakers will look at what works on the ground: Local Skills Improvement Plans that keep up with the technology, employer-led routes into digital and AI roles, and reskilling for workers whose jobs are most exposed.

The session will also address questions like how do regions avoid an AI skills divide that widens existing gaps in prosperity? What should government devolve, and what should it keep national? And what does a good partnership between tech businesses and local leaders look like in practice?

Building on techUK's AI Adoption Coalition—which brings together eight trade bodies the Industrial Strategy sectors—this session asks what practical AI adoption actually looks like once you move beyond the M25.

The Coalition has identified five recurring barriers to scaling AI from pilot to production: skills gaps, leadership capability, governance, data access, and the perennial challenge of moving beyond experimentation. But do these barriers present the same way in areas like Glasgow, Belfast, Cardiff and the West Midlands as they do in London?

The conversation will turn to delivery: how do we ensure practical AI adoption is actively incentivised not just diagnosed? How does this build or conflict with what’s already in place? And where do central government levers match, complement or conflict with regional industrial composition so we move from strategy documents to measurable adoption on the factory floor or in the office.

Coffee Break

The Modern Industrial Strategy allocates support by sector. Reindustrialisation, as this Government describes it, allocates by place. This panel examines what happens where those two logics disagree, and whether a devolved industrial strategy can deliver productive capacity that a centrally-set sector list cannot.

techUK's position is that reindustrialisation is not the restoration of what closed, but the rebuilding of productive capacity: the ability of places to make, power, move, maintain, design and export things at scale. Advanced technology is the mechanism for that, not a risk to be managed alongside it. The UK is the only G7 economy that has persistently sat below the world average for industrial robot density, and installations fell sharply in 2024. Britain's industrial towns did not lose work to machines; they lost it to underinvestment, and then to competitors who had both machines and cheaper labour.

Five things determine whether industrial technology actually gets deployed in a place: a committed customer, an affordable cost base, capital, capability, and connection. Mayors control some of them. This session asks which, and what has to happen at the centre for the rest

Closing Keynote