By AIT CEO, Tola Sargeant. 9 June 2025
AI is a great equaliser
In all the excitement of London Tech Week this morning, I was struck by these words from NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, as he joined Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Poppy Gustafsson, UK Minister for Investment, to kickstart proceedings and set up a host of announcements around AI, skills and investment.
Jensen’s point was that technology used to be hard to use, with coding the preserve of computer scientists, a relatively small proportion of the global population. But now there’s a new programming language, ‘human’, that everybody knows. To paraphrase Jensen, to be able to code, you now just need to ask AI nicely.
A democratising impact
In this way, generative AI ought to have a democratising impact, opening up more opportunities and supporting social mobility.
The 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer report from PwC published last week, entitled The Fearless Future, reached similar conclusions. It found that employer demand for formal degrees is declining for all jobs, but especially quickly for AI-exposed ones.
As to the reasons, PWC speculated that:
– AI helps people rapidly build and command expert knowledge (the ‘democratisation of expertise’) which could make formal qualifications less relevant.
– Rapid skills change and knowledge turnover may mean formal degrees are more rapidly out of date.
– And strong demand for people with AI skills may encourage employers to look beyond a limited pool of workers with formal training.
That’s good news for young people with diverse skills from all different backgrounds, but it doesn’t diminish the need to increase AI training opportunities to help close the skills gap.
Government’s £187m investment
It’s therefore great to see the government’s £187m investment in a national skills programme to bring digital skills and AI learning into classrooms and communities as part of a drive to break down barriers to opportunity.
I was also pleased to hear Sir Keir Starmer say that he’s a big believer in the fact that you can’t aspire to something if you don’t really know what it is, or you think it’s only for other people.
At Archives of IT, we believe that passionately too. That’s why we’re on a mission to excite young children from all walks of life about varied STEM careers through our primary education programme powered by inspirational tech role models.
This mission is only going to become more important if, as Jensen predicted this morning: “Because of AI, every industry in the UK will be a tech industry.”
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