£100m Competition Backs British AI Firms to Transform Public Services

British AI companies are being given the opportunity to tackle some of the UK’s biggest public-sector challenges through a new £100 million Sovereign AI R&D Procurement Scheme.

The programme aims to help promising British AI start-ups start, scale and grow in the UK, while developing technology that could improve public services, strengthen national security and support economic growth.

Key aims include:

• Backing British AI start-ups to tackle challenges ranging from NHS waiting lists and patient care to cyber and national security.
• Providing £100 million through procurement competitions to help promising UK companies develop and prove their technologies.
• Making it easier for smaller companies to compete for government contracts by removing barriers around turnover, cash reserves and track record.
• Allowing successful businesses to retain the intellectual property they create, enabling technologies to be commercialised in the UK and internationally.
• Expanding international cooperation through the Government’s AI Economics Institute, including planned collaboration with G7 countries.

The scheme is designed to address a particular problem for innovative smaller businesses. Start-ups can struggle to secure public-sector contracts because they lack the financial resources or established track record of larger organisations.

Under the new approach, upfront payments will be available where appropriate, providing early-stage funding to develop and demonstrate technology.

Successful companies will work alongside government departments to create demonstrator-stage solutions with the potential to be deployed more widely across the public sector and commercially.

Four initial AI challenges

The first competitions will focus on:

• NHS productivity: Working with the Department of Health and Social Care to develop AI capable of automating workflows, coordinating care and supporting decision-making, with the aim of improving productivity and staff experience.
• Driving compute efficiency: Supporting technologies that improve the efficiency of AI computing infrastructure, helping expand UK public AI computing capacity while reducing costs for researchers and businesses.
• Defence AI: Working with the Ministry of Defence to securely connect data and advanced AI capabilities across defence systems, strengthening operational effectiveness and national security.
• AI agent security and resilience: Working with the National Cyber Security Centre to develop technologies that help organisations understand, manage and mitigate risks associated with increasingly capable AI agents.

The competitions will concentrate on technologies that have progressed beyond early research but require funding and a suitable environment to demonstrate their commercial potential.

By becoming an early customer, the Government hopes to help companies bridge one of the most difficult stages of growth: turning a promising prototype into proven technology with a credible route to wider adoption.

The four competitions are the first under the Sovereign AI R&D Procurement Scheme, with further challenges expected as the £100 million programme expands.