Call for contributions: techUK's AI Innovation Focus Week
techUK's AI Innovation programme is excited to announce that we are now seeking contributions for our AI Innovation Focus Week, taking place from 19th - 23rd October 2026.
Across the week we will explore the AI breakthroughs set to reshape the UK economy and showcase how techUK members and stakeholders are driving the innovation behind them. The week is anchored in our AI Innovation programme and structured around five themes: physical AI, industrial AI, AI for science, agentic AI and the convergence of AI with other frontier technologies.
techUK members and government stakeholders can contribute a short blog or vlog aligned with a daily theme, as per the guidelines below.
Your contribution will feature on techUK's LinkedIn page (76k+ followers) and in our monthly AI newsletter, and will live on techUK's website.
All blogs and vlogs must be submitted (to the named individuals below) by Monday 12 October.
Daily themes
Monday: Physical AI
Physical AI brings intelligence into the physical world, powering the robots, autonomous systems and machines that sense, reason and act in real environments. Advances in models, sensors, batteries and compute are making these systems more capable, more general and more useful than ever before. For the UK, physical AI is where the country's strengths in hardware, robotics and engineering can translate into world-leading innovation across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and infrastructure.
Question for contributors: Where is the UK's physical AI innovation strongest, and what is needed on skills, standards and investment to turn research and demonstrators into globally competitive products and systems?
Monday draws on techUK's three-part Innovations in Physical AI workshop series, with an industry brief forthcoming.
Tuesday: Industrial AI
Industrial AI applies AI to the core processes of industry, from design and production to maintenance, quality and supply chains. This is where AI meets the real economy, and where new approaches to how things are made and moved can unlock the most tangible productivity gains. Turning that potential into UK advantage depends on data readiness, integration with existing systems, and continued innovation on the factory floor.
Question for contributors: Where can industrial AI innovation give the UK a competitive edge across manufacturing and industrial sectors, and what role should industry play to support these innovations?
Wednesday: AI for Science
AI is accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, from protein structure prediction and materials design to drug discovery and climate modelling. It is beginning to reshape the research process itself, compressing timelines that once ran into years. With its world-leading research institutions, the UK is well placed to lead, provided compute, data and talent are aligned behind the effort.
Question for contributors: How can the UK harness AI to accelerate scientific discovery, and translate its research strength into commercial and societal impact?
Wednesday looks ahead to techUK's AI for Science event on 26 November 2026, which will convene researchers, industry and policymakers to explore how the UK can lead in this space.
Thursday: Agentic AI
Agentic AI systems can plan, decide and act across a range of tasks with limited human oversight, and coordinate with other agents to reshape entire workflows rather than simply assist with individual ones. This marks a shift from AI as a tool, to AI as an active participant in how organisations operate, and it is one of the fastest-moving frontiers in AI innovation, from agentic commerce, where agents transact and negotiate on a user's behalf, to autonomous systems that manage end-to-end processes (see techUK's recent paper on agentic AI in financial services). The opportunity for UK productivity is significant, and realising it depends on getting oversight, accountability and governance right alongside the technology.
Question for contributors: Where is agentic AI innovation heading, what new capabilities and use cases, from agentic commerce to autonomous operations, will it unlock across UK sectors, and how do we build the oversight, accountability and governance to match?
Thursday builds on techUK's four-part workshop series and industry brief on Scaling the Responsible Adoption of Agentic AI, and coincides with our Agentic Angle webinar on Agentic AI and Digital Identity, taking place the same day (Thursday 22 October). Find out more here.
Friday: AI and Tech Convergence
Transformative innovation often happens where technologies meet. As AI converges with semiconductors, quantum, robotics, and other frontier and advanced technologies, it unlocks capabilities that none of these fields could reach alone, from quantum-enhanced AI to autonomous machines. For the UK, leadership at these intersections could define the next decade of technological advantage.
Question for contributors: Where will the convergence of AI with quantum, robotics and other frontier technologies create the biggest opportunities for the UK, and what should industry and government be doing now to lead at these intersections?
Contribution guidelines
All submissions must be of broad interest to the UK's technology sector, rather than a sales pitch or case study, and be accompanied by an author headshot, a brief biography, and the logo or logos of your organisation.
Blogs must be between 600 and 1000 words. They can include links, images, infographics and videos.
Vlogs must be between 3 and 6 minutes long, submitted with a short title (10 words maximum) and intro text, and take the form of a YouTube link or MP4 file.
Submissions should be sent to usman.ikhlaq@techuk.org (for physical AI, industrial AI and agentic AI), sara.duodu@techuk.org (for AI for science) and ella.shuter@techuk.org and elis.thomas@techuk.org (for AI and tech convergence) by Monday 12 October, and will be published on their respective days throughout w/c 19 October.
Disclaimer: Priority will be given to techUK member organisations and government stakeholders over non-members. techUK reserves the right to decide whether or not a blog or vlog is published, and contributing factors include the degree of alignment with the contribution guidelines, the total number of submissions received, and the balance between member and non-member contributions.
