Technology companies need to do more to build their social licence
The gulf between how the public and business, political and cultural leaders in the UK view AI has reached a crisis point.
A year ago, I wrote for TechUK on the need to take the public on the journey when it comes to AI. The latest FGS Global Radar report, A Rewired World, released this week, shows that this need is becoming more pressing, not less.
We live in a world where AI tools are now embedded in most businesses, used daily by more than one in eight people globally and adopted by nearly a quarter of Gen-Z. However, our research found that just 28% of people in the UK believed AI would positively transform people’s lives, whether by making them better off or reducing workloads, down from 32% twelve months ago. This decline is striking as people are now more exposed to AI, they understand it and experience it much more than they did a year ago and yet they are becoming more negative about it.
This negativity makes the UK an outlier as across the US, Japan, and the EU, optimism sits on average at 38% - ten percentage points higher.
What stood out from our research wasn’t just the public’s negativity and concern but also the sharp contrast with leaders across business, the media and politics - the so-called ‘elites’. Our in-depth interviews found a marked positivity and confidence among leaders, replacing the confusion and scepticism we noted a year ago. Leaders’ optimism is coupled with a measured, thoughtful approach to adoption, describing AI’s development as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Leaders also envisage a number of important developments in their use of AI over the next year, predicting that agentic AI will become commonplace during 2026, driving transformation across customer support, back-office functions, finance, HR, procurement and software development. They also anticipate LLMs becoming more conversational, a step change in robotization and significant benefits from embodied AI, such as accelerating medical advances. The interviews revealed a focus on practical implementation and “getting AI right” in terms of teams, workflows and services.
The one area where there was consensus between “elites” and the general public was over the seismic impact AI will have on jobs, as one person put it: “The link between productivity and headcount has been fraying for some time but has now been obliterated.” Even here though, there was a disconnect between business leaders who saw this positively and the public who emphasised the downsides.
The chasm between elite optimism and public anxiety should concern us all. As one participant in our research put it: “No one has really been consulted about how much we actually want AI in our lives.” In a democracy, public consent should matter, yet too many people feel that technological innovation is being done to them, rather than with them.
This is both a communication and governance challenge, with clues in our research on how to hold a better national conversation.
The public is most favourable towards AI when focused on healthcare and life expectancy, economic productivity, transportation, quality of public services and developing economies. We need to do a better job of bringing the benefits in these areas to life, painting a picture of what they will look like and explaining how these benefits will be shared. This means spelling out specific relatable examples: how much quicker will I be able to get a GP appointment because of AI? How much more accurate is my cancer diagnosis likely to be and how many years extra on average does this mean I’m likely to live?
Conversely, people’s fears cluster around job displacement, personal relationships, online safety, equality of opportunity and democracy. Here we need stronger safeguards and genuine reassurance.
When AI policy discussions first started to take centre stage in the UK safety dominated the national conversation, more recently however the focus has shifted to investment and innovation. Meanwhile, concerns over specific issues such as copyright and privacy, data centre development, job losses and energy needs are bubbling away. The gap our research identifies makes it likely that the policy conversation will shift again, with more existential questions set to dominate again.
AI is, and will continue to be, in people’s lives whether they’ve been consulted about it or not. There is both a moral and a practical need to involve people in its rollout and for them to shape the future it creates. Otherwise, we risk building technology systems on foundations of mistrust that could ultimately undermine their potential.
