IT Essentials: Getting the government off the fence

Modern tech has no mercy for wait-and-see

Image:
Image, ironically, generated with AI

Businesses need certainty in a fast-changing world. The government can’t or won’t give it to them.

It’s fair to say Labour has taken a bit of a kicking in the last year. From (more) internal party schisms and an economy stubbornly failing to improve, to the terribly received Online Safety Act and the spectre of Peter Mandelson appearing again like the ghost of scandals past. Little surprise that its polling numbers hit historic lows in November.

And in tech, the government is sitting so hard on the fence it could be mistaken for a particularly boring garden gnome.

Keir Starmer’s party has backtracked on plans for digital ID and, while publicly wringing hands about Big Tech and AI influence, is hurriedly signing new partnership deals.

Businesses are being told to adopt AI at speed, but Labour, like the Conservatives before, refuses to regulate or legislate to prevent potential harms.

That wait-and-see approach is no longer good enough, so it was encouraging to see the ICO launch an investigation into X’s Grok this week, though it falls far short of the office raid by French authorities.

But stakeholders need certainty. At the launch of a Parliamentary One-Pager this week, which our own Penny Horwood attended, peers, policy experts, senior figures from UK think tanks and academia, and business leaders all warned that without firm movement on AI, the economy will continue to flatline.

With a technology that develops as quickly as artificial intelligence, wait-and-see is simply waiting to be left in the dust.

We have three key AI pieces this week. First, Penny Horwood digs into the furore around X, Grok and regulation, explaining why the UK’s various data regulators are struggling to tackle deepfake imagery.

Second, John Leonard’s interview with Thomson Reuters CTO Kirsty Roth on why the technology is a good fit for legal, despite Anthropic’s launch of legal plug-ins for Claude Cowork this week knocking double digits off Reuters’ share price.

Third, a feature from Bev White and Andrew Neal of Nash Squared, who argue the belief that AI is killing junior jobs misses important nuance – but you still need a strategy to meet the challenge.

Sticking with the skills theme, Penny discusses the cyber skills gap – is it a myth? – with Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls, and Brian Brackenborough, CISO at Channel 4.

Our latest episode of Ctrl Alt Lead also features a security flavour: Debbie Janeczek, CISO at ING Global, tells us all about what it takes to secure a global bank and building resilience that goes beyond compliance.

Want even more security? We’ve just released the agenda for the Security Leaders Summit, coming to central London on 26th March. Register now for your free place.

And if all of that wasn’t enough, Kerstin Stief, editor of our sister site Computing Deutschland, has published an insight into the CTO role in 2026, which has evolved from lab manager to business enabler.