The Key to the UK's AI Success Lies in Investment in Training and Upskilling

Michael Green, Managing Director UK&I at Databricks, makes a specific and slightly uncomfortable argument for a company that sells AI infrastructure: the UK's AI ambitions will stall if training and skills investment don't keep pace with the technology spend, and right now they aren't. Around 90% of global tech leaders are investing in AI, but nearly one in five UK businesses are simultaneously cutting their staff training budgets, even as the UK Government commits £2 billion between 2026 and 2030 to AI positioning.

That combination, heavy AI infrastructure investment alongside shrinking training budgets, is the specific problem Green is pointing at. AI tools only generate real return on investment when the people using them are properly trained to use them; a powerful platform in the hands of someone who hasn't been shown how to use it productively delivers a fraction of its potential value, and the cost saving from cutting a training budget is, on this argument, false economy dressed up as efficiency.

Green's sharper point is about what short-term cost-cutting through automation actually does inside an organisation: it tends to produce employee disengagement and active resistance to further change, exactly the opposite of what a company trying to become more AI-capable needs from its workforce. He argues the better route is leveraging the domain expertise already inside a business through proper upskilling, rather than treating existing staff as something to be replaced rather than developed, and that this only works with ongoing, embedded training rather than a single one-off programme that gets ticked off a compliance list.

He also connects skills investment to inclusion directly: widening access to enterprise-grade AI tools, rather than reserving them for a small technical elite within a company, supports a broader and more diverse talent pipeline, and deploying AI into genuinely real workflows, not just pilot projects, is what actually builds organisational trust in the technology and gets teams collaborating around it rather than around it. His conclusion, aimed squarely at UK business leaders and policymakers reading the same headlines about AI investment, is that treating skills as a strategic priority rather than an optional extra is now a genuine competitiveness question, not a soft HR consideration.