Agency in the Agentic Era: how AI agents can make the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan deliver
The growing capabilities of AI agents are often framed in negative terms, a type of "us versus the machines" discussion.
This false dichotomy attracts a lot of attention but distracts us from the more important question: how to use AI agents to expand human agency. That means doing more without demanding more from stretched resources.
This is where the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan comes in. It sets out an important ambition for AI: not just to champion frontier innovation, but to drive economy-wide adoption. One year on, the focus is shifting to delivering value at scale as more and more organisations become Agentic Enterprises, where humans and AI work together.
Embedding AI in everyday workflows, at scale, and in ways people trust and know how to use, is what will define success. At Salesforce, we know from experience, autonomous agents can free up humans to focus on what they do best, connect and create, while supporting productivity.
The UK is uniquely positioned to lead the Agentic Era. Salesforce’s 2025 Global AI Readiness Index found that Britons are among the best placed in the G7 to incorporate new tools and reshape old ones in their daily lives, with core strengths in both government and business adoption.
In addition, there are three fundamental reasons why Salesforce is betting big on Britain in this Agentic Era: capital, capability, capacity.
1. Capital
The UK is the best place in Europe to be in AI when it comes to capital, with £68 billion pledged since January 2025, exceeding France and Germany combined. Salesforce alone is committing to a $6 billion investment in the UK through 2030, officially establishing London as our AI hub for the region and expanding our AI Centre to drive local innovation.
2. Capability
The UK has a real pedigree in all the skills required to make a tech ecosystem. Our UK universities are producing world-leading talent that is consistently outperforming leading institutions in the US. But technology without talent is just code.
That is why the government’s newly expanded AI Skills Boost (of which Salesforce is a founding member) is critical. Training 10 million workers by 2030 democratises AI skills so this technological leap benefits every community across the UK. Pairing the AI Skills Boost with the AI Growth Zones promises to scale AI adoption where it’s needed most.
2. Capacity
In the face of increasing pressures to serve citizens and customers as resources tighten, AI offers innovative ways to deliver more responsive and scalable solutions.
Today, government and businesses have laid the foundations for a successful AI transition. Through Agentforce, Salesforce has moved beyond chatbots to autonomous digital colleagues. This is already helping the NHS, the Civil Service, and British businesses automate administrative heavy-lifting, freeing up human workers to focus on what they do best: empathy, strategy, and care.
Take for example three police forces’ teaming up to put a new ‘Bobbi’ on the beat. On a given day, it’s not unusual for these three forces to receive 5,000 calls, everything from emergencies to simple follow-up questions about cases. These three forces built Bobbi, an AI agent, trained on the forces’ procedures, which can determine when to escalate to humans for emergencies or complex queries. Bobbi can now handle up to 90% of non-urgent queries in a given day, meaning highly trained call-handlers can focus on triaging complex and urgent calls, providing human connection and problem-solving when it matters most.
This is the Agentic Era: police forces with more agency to respond to citizens. Call handlers put their irreplaceable judgement to its highest use, supporting people through difficult and stressful situations. Authorities can then deploy limited resources more strategically to improve public safety.
If we can change pockets of excellence to ordinary best practice with strategically deployed agents, we all gain more agency.
The UK has the ambition, the infrastructure (including policy infrastructure) and the talent to achieve these goals. Now it’s about execution.
