A few thoughts on the UK Government’s AI announcement

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Most of the text in this post previously appeared on my LinkedIn feed. I thought it should have been here…

Sometimes, I read something on LinkedIn and repost or comment, before realising I’ve pretty much written an entire blog post. On my phone. Twice, because I navigated away and lost the first attempt. Maybe I should have put in here, but it probably gets seen by more people on LinkedIn. Still, I own this platform, so I’m putting it up for posterity.

The post in question was one from the BBC’s Technology Editor, Zoe Kleinman. Zoe had posted insights about the UK Prime Minister’s “bold and ambitious plans to support the UK’s AI sector”.

Zoe’s post and articles are well worth a read, but I wanted to add some more:

“[…] I can see why the UK wants to position itself as an innovative place for growth, without being (quite as) reliant on US tech behemoths, but most of us have yet to establish what we want to use AI for.

Sure, “AI” is the perceived answer to everything at the moment – and there are some very large companies with very deep pockets pouring billions into “AI” – but it’s an arms race. “Big tech” hasn’t worked out how to make money from its AI investments yet. The tech giants just want to make sure they have a big slice of that pie when we do finally get there.

Putting aside the significant environmental and social challenges presented by AI (as mentioned in Zoe’s post […]), “we” (our companies and our countries) haven’t got a solid business case. We just know we can’t afford to be left behind…

We’ve used some AI technologies in a variety forms for years (for example Machine Learning) – and the recent advances in generative AI (genAI) have democratised access to AI assistants and opened a huge opportunity. But genAI is just one type of AI, and we don’t fully understand the large language models that underpin it.

One thing that sticks in my mind is something I heard on a recent podcast, when Johannes Kleske commented something along the lines of “when it’s in the future, it’s AI. Once we have worked out what to do with it, it’s just software.”

More on the UK Prime Minister’s AI announcement

Artificial Intelligence: Plan to ‘unleash AI’ across UK revealed [BBC News]

UK Government Protective Marking and the Microsoft Cloud

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I recently heard a Consultant from another Microsoft partner talking about storing “IL3” information in Azure. That rang alarm bells with me, because Impact Levels (ILs) haven’t been a “thing” for UK Government data since April 2014. For the record, here’s the official guidance on the UK Government data security classifications and this video explains why the system was changed:

Meanwhile, this one is a good example of what it means in practice:

So, what does that mean for storing data in Azure, Dynamics 365 and Office 365? Basically, information classified OFFICIAL can be stored in the Microsoft Cloud – for more information, refer to the Microsoft Trust Center. And, because OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE is not another classification (it’s merely highlighting information where additional care may be needed), that’s fine too.

I’ve worked with many UK Government organisations (local/regional, and central) and most are looking to the cloud as a means to reduce costs and improve services. The fact that more than 90% of public data is classified OFFICIAL (indeed, that’s the default for anything in Government) is no reason to avoid using the cloud.