One year on: the Trusted Third-Party AI Assurance Roadmap
1pm – 5pm28 September 2026
London
techUK, 10 St Bride Street, London, EC4A 4AD
In September 2025, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) published its Trusted Third-Party AI Assurance Roadmap. This roadmap set out government's plan to professionalise and grow the UK's AI assurance market, in line with commitment 29 of the AI Opportunities Action Plan. The roadmap set out four immediate actions: convening a consortium to professionalise the market, developing a skills and competencies framework, mapping information access best practice between assurance providers and those they assess, and launching an AI Assurance Innovation Fund.
A year on, that consortium, chaired by BCS and supported by DSIT, with techUK leading its Industry Advisory Group, is moving from ambition to delivery: work is underway on a voluntary code of ethics, a skills and competencies framework, and a map of the information access developers need to give assurance providers to do their job properly. We also saw the launch of the Centre for AI Measurement, led by NPL, to deliver on the objectives of the AI Assurance Innovation Fund by underpinning AI assurance with metrology and helping move trustworthy technical assurance tools to market faster.
This gathering brings the ecosystem back together to take stock of what's been built, pressure-test it against the reality practitioners are seeing, and shape what comes next.
This builds on techUK's sustained work in this space, and sits alongside a wider body of work from across the ecosystem on what professionalisation should look like in practice.
Why this matters now
The UK's AI assurance market is growing fast, worth over £1 billion in GVA in 2024, with the potential to reach £18.8 billion by 2035, and already employing over 12,000 people across the ecosystem. But the sector still faces structural challenges: no agreed competency framework, unclear career pathways, and no professional body to set and uphold standards. At the same time, demand for assurance is accelerating from every direction; investors requiring assurance evidence in due diligence, insurers factoring assurance into coverage decisions, and procurement teams increasingly treating AI governance as a contractual requirement. Getting professionalisation right is now foundational to all of it.
Underpinning all of this is the need for credible, comparable measurement, without common benchmarks and metrics, assurance claims are difficult to verify or compare across providers, which is exactly the gap the Centre for AI Measurement has been established to close. Supporting innovation in how we measure and evidence AI system performance matters just as much as professionalising the people and processes that sit around it.
Ultimately, AI assurance is not a compliance exercise. Done well, it supports genuine risk mitigation and creates a stronger, safer environment for innovation, an environment of justified trust, built through evidenced action rather than assumed confidence.
What we'll cover
The summit will be structured around the roadmap's four workstreams, one year on:
Professionalising the market: progress from the AI Assurance Consortium on a voluntary code of ethics, and what a credible path to professional certification looks like, starting with AI auditing
Skills and competencies: testing the emerging skills and competencies framework against what practitioners are actually experiencing on the ground, building on the Alan Turing Institute's work on AI auditor competencies
Information and data access: working through what "good" information sharing between developers and assurance providers should look like in practice, and where the sticking points remain
Innovation and future-proofing: what the AI Assurance Innovation Fund should prioritise as it opens for applications, the role of NPL's new Centre for AI Measurement in underpinning assurance with metrology, and how the market stays ready for step-changes in AI capability
Sessions will draw on and respond to the wider body of work published over the past year, including Ada Lovelace Institute's Going Pro?, techUK's Mapping the Responsible AI Profession, BCS's work on Meeting Ethical Standards through Professional Standards, the Association of AI Ethicists' Who is an AI Ethicist?, and IAPP's AI Governance Profession Report.
Trusted Third-Party AI Assurance Roadmap (GOV.UK, September 2025)
Going Pro? – Ada Lovelace Institute
Mapping the Responsible AI Profession – techUK
Meeting Ethical Standards through Professional Standards – BCS
Who is an AI Ethicist? – Association of AI Ethicists
AI Governance Profession Report – IAPP
Tess Buckley
Senior Programme Manager in Digital Ethics and AI Safety, techUK
Tess Buckley
Senior Programme Manager in Digital Ethics and AI Safety, techUK
Tess is a digital ethicist and musician. After completing a MA in AI and Philosophy, with a focus on ableism in biotechnologies, she worked as an AI Ethics Analyst with a dataset on corporate digital responsibility (paid for by investors that wanted to understand their portfolio risks). Tess then supported the development of a specialised model for sustainability disclosure requests. Currently, at techUK, her north star as programme manager in digital ethics and AI safety is demystifying, and operationalising ethics through assurance mechanisms and standards. Outside of Tess's work, her primary research interests are in AI music systems, AI fluency and tech by/for differently abled folks.
Join us on 3rd November 2026 for techUK's fourth annual Tech and Innovation Summit, which brings together the innovators, investors, policymakers, and researchers shaping what comes next, exploring how the UK's regions, research institutions, and companies of all sizes can work together to turn scientific excellence into scaled, sovereign, commercially successful capability.
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Contact the team
Kir Nuthi
Head of AI and Data, techUK
Kir Nuthi
Head of AI and Data, techUK
Kir Nuthi is the Head of AI and Data at techUK.
She holds over seven years of Government Affairs and Tech Policy experience in the US and UK. Kir previously headed up the regulatory portfolio at a UK advocacy group for tech startups and held various public affairs in US tech policy. All involved policy research and campaigns on competition, artificial intelligence, access to data, and pro-innovation regulation.
Kir has an MSc in International Public Policy from University College London and a BA in both Political Science (International Relations) and Economics from the University of California San Diego.
Outside of techUK, you are likely to find her attempting studies at art galleries, attempting an elusive headstand at yoga, mending and binding books, or chasing her dog Maya around South London's many parks.
Usman joined techUK in January 2024 as Programme Manager for Artificial Intelligence.
He leads techUK’s AI Adoption programme, supporting members of all sizes and sectors in adopting AI at scale. His work involves identifying barriers to adoption, exploring solutions, and helping to unlock AI’s transformative potential, particularly its benefits for people, the economy, society, and the planet. He is also committed to advancing the UK’s AI sector and ensuring the UK remains a global leader in AI by working closely with techUK members, the UK Government, regulators, and devolved and local authorities.
Since joining techUK, Usman has delivered a regular drumbeat of activity to engage members and advance techUK's AI programme. This has included two campaign weeks, the creation of the AI Adoption Hub (now the AI Hub), the AI Leader's Event Series, the Putting AI into Action webinar series and the Industrial AI sprint campaign.
Before joining techUK, Usman worked as a policy, regulatory and government/public affairs professional in the advertising sector. He has also worked in sales, marketing, and FinTech.
Usman holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), a GDL and LLB from BPP Law School, and a BA from Queen Mary University of London.
When he isn’t working, Usman enjoys spending time with his family and friends. He also has a keen interest in running, reading and travelling.
Sue leads techUK's Technology and Innovation work. This includes work programmes on AI, Cloud, Data, Quantum, Semiconductors, Digital ID and Digital ethics as well as emerging and transformative technologies and innovation policy. In 2025, Sue was honoured with an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the Technology Industry in the New Year Honours List. She has also been recognised as one of the most influential people in UK tech by Computer Weekly's UKtech50 Longlist and was inducted into the Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in UK Tech Hall of Fame.
A key influencer in driving forward the tech agenda in the UK, in December 2025 Sue was appointed to the UK Government’s Women in Tech Taskforce by the Technology Secretary of State. She also sits on the UK Government’s Smart Data Council, Satellite Applications Catapult Advisory Group, Bank of England’s AI Consortium and BSI’s Digital Strategic Advisory Group. Previously, Sue was a member of the Independent Future of Compute Review and co-chaired the National Data Strategy Forum. As well as being recognised in the UK's Big Data 100 and the Global Top 100 Data Visionaries in 2020, Sue has been shortlisted for the Milton Keynes Women Leaders Awards and has been a judge for the Loebner Prize in AI, the UK Tech 50 and annual UK Cloud Awards. She is a regular industry speaker on issues including AI ethics, data protection and cyber security.
Prior to joining techUK in January 2015, Sue was responsible for Symantec's Government Relations in the UK and Ireland. Before that, Sue was senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Sue has an BA degree on History and American Studies from Leeds University and a Master’s Degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Birmingham. Sue is a keen sportswoman and in 2016 achieved a lifelong ambition to swim the English Channel.
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Sue leads techUK's Technology and Innovation work at techUK.
This includes work programmes on cloud, data protection, data analytics, AI, digital ethics, Digital Identity and Internet of Things as well as emerging and transformative technologies and innovation policy. She has been recognised as one of the most influential people in UK tech by Computer Weekly's UKtech50 Longlist and in 2021 was inducted into the Computer Weekly Most Influential Women in UK Tech Hall of Fame. A key influencer in driving forward the data agenda in the UK Sue is co-chair of the UK government's National Data Strategy Forum. As well as being recognised in the UK's Big Data 100 and the Global Top 100 Data Visionaries for 2020 Sue has also been shortlisted for the Milton Keynes Women Leaders Awards and was a judge for the Loebner Prize in AI. In addition to being a regular industry speaker on issues including AI ethics, data protection and cyber security, Sue was recently a judge for the UK Tech 50 and is a regular judge of the annual UK Cloud Awards.
Associate Director, Institute for the Future of Work
Kester is an Associate Director at the Institute for the Future of Work, a research charity focusing on how AI and automation technologies are impacting the UK labour market. As part of their 3-year Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing, IFOW recently published a series of in-depth case studies of twelve UK firms that have adopted AI and robotics technologies, and the impacts on workers.
Professor of Critical Research in Technology at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham
Bernd Carsten Stahl is Professor of Critical Research in Technology at the School of Computer Science of the University of Nottingham where he leads the Responsible Digital Futures group. His interests cover philosophical issues arising from the intersections of business, technology, and information. This includes ethical questions of current and emerging ICTs, critical approaches to information systems and issues related to responsible research and innovation.
Synoptix, and in this role leads several capability development and R&D programmes within Synoptix, focussing on novel or disruptive technologies and working from fundamental research through to commercial product development. Currently, Callum is particularly interested in AI technologies, especially Responsible AI/AI Governance, AI Assurance, Assured Capability and Cyber Resilience, and Human-Autonomy Teaming, and he is leading the development of Synoptix’s AI Assurance offering. He is an Incorporated Systems Engineer by background and trained as a Mechanical and Biomedical Engineer.
Emily Campbell-Ratcliffe is Head of AI Assurance at the Responsible Technology Adoption Unit (formerly CDEI), a directorate within the UK government that works on enabling responsible innovation in AI and data driven technologies. Emily leads the RTA’s efforts to support the growth of an ethical, trustworthy, and ultimately effective AI assurance ecosystem in the UK. She was previously a lead for the Unit’s AI monitoring function, looking at emerging transformative technologies, and has published work on the responsible publication of AI research, and how to manage its risks. Prior to working at the RAC, Emily worked in policy and strategy roles in industry, with a primary focus on AI governance.
As the AI Transformation Lead at Holistic AI, my mission is to drive responsible AI adoption, leveraging strategic partnerships and my expertise in AI and ML to deliver measurable outcomes.
Crafting narratives and deploying Holistic AI's solutions, I enable organisations to harness the power of AI effectively while ensuring operational excellence.
My recent role at PwC as a specialist in AI validation and testing for financial services use cases has honed my skills in creating transparent, explainable, and fair AI/ML models. Here, our team developed methodologies that became pivotal in advancing the AI and modelling services, setting the foundation for the strategic assets I now develop at Holistic AI.
Lara is a Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute and has led work for Ada on AI accountability approaches and public participation, including research on the role of participation in research and development in AI labs. Before joining Ada, Lara worked as a tech and internet policy consultant, and has experience in research, public affairs and campaigns for think-tanks, political parties and advocacy groups. Lara has an MSc in Democracy from UCL.
David Sully is CEO and Co-Founder of Advai, a UK leader in Red Teaming and Assuring state-of-the-art AI systems. Founded in 2020, Advai has grown to be a trusted part of the UK’s AI Safety & Security landscape. Prior to forming Advai, David worked for over a decade for the UK Government on a range of Defence and Security topics.
