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"ICS.AI was founded in 2018, born out of the belief that AI was finally ready to thrive at scale, particularly with the introduction of AI on Microsoft platforms, which brought the cost down to pennies per transaction."
"I’d always been passionate about AI, and it felt like the right moment to build a business that was completely focused on AI and the public sector. The environment had matured, and the opportunity was there to create a company dedicated to making AI genuinely work for public services."
"What we see consistently is a real willingness among UK public sector organisations to adopt AI in meaningful and strategic ways. I speak to a lot of chief executives and senior leaders, and almost all of them are actively looking to begin or accelerate their AI journeys."
"A major reason for this is the strong pro-AI stance taken by central government, starting with Rishi Sunak and continuing with the current administration. Their support has effectively de-risked adoption for individual public sector organisations. Of course, this isn’t entirely altruistic: with an ageing population and long-standing funding pressure, the UK government needs technologies that can reduce the cost of public service delivery and boost national productivity."
"Some European countries have implemented restrictive legislation around privacy and large language models, which has slowed AI adoption. The EU is often among the last to receive new LLM capabilities, whereas the UK remains a strong early-adoption environment."
"The UK also benefits from our heritage as a major technology and AI hub. DeepMind, for example, effectively laid the foundations for modern large language models. While some regions, such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai, are even further ahead due to long-term investment, the UK remains one of the leading global markets for real-world public sector AI."
"Our central objective is to achieve our second consecutive year of 100% growth. This is an expansion that requires not only scaling the organisation but also putting in place the infrastructure needed to grow again the following year, up to £24 million."
"Commercially, we aim to deepen our market-leading position in local government, significantly scale our strong early traction in higher education, and formally launch into the police sector. We also plan to expand our partner ecosystem substantially, enabling partners to deliver our full transformation stack so we can scale more quickly through them."
"From a technology perspective, 2026 is also about laying groundwork for transformational capabilities, especially in agentic AI."
"Five years in AI probably equates to a couple of thousand in ‘dog years’, so it’s difficult to predict with precision, but our ambition is to realise the full potential of our AI transformation model."
"Our approach allows us to guarantee value for customers by delivering organisation-wide AI transformation, rather than the usual slow, fragmented ‘one use case at a time’ approach that rarely leads to meaningful change. This model is globally relevant, and we see a significant opportunity to become, effectively, the Palantir of the mid-market and public sector. This is a segment that is currently underserved."
"Success, to us, would look like our platform being deployed across all major international markets and delivered at scale through a strong partner network."
"The current generation of AI will continue to improve, and tasks that today require two or three attempts will increasingly be right first time. Agentic technology will become pervasive, enabling AI systems to take more proactive actions with minimal supervision."
"We’ll also see AI and robotics converge, bringing today's digital intelligence into the physical world. Wearables and other real-world interfaces will play an increasingly significant role."
"However, I don’t believe we’ll reach true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) simply by iterating on current techniques. Achieving AGI will require another breakthrough on the scale of GPT itself, and while enormous sums are being invested in pursuit of that, it’s impossible to predict when (or if) that breakthrough will occur."
"Ultimately, we’ll see ‘super-versions’ of today’s systems with near-perfect vision, video, and content creation, but also clearer evidence of the limits of this generation of technology."
"The question I get most is: “Will AI take all of our jobs?”. Overall, I have an optimistic view of AI’s impact on the workforce. I’m increasingly confident in the answer: no, AI will not take all of our jobs."
"AI automates tasks, not roles. Every job is made up of a collection of tasks, and humans will remain essential because AI systems – no matter how good – need human guidance to achieve the right outcomes. Only roles that are entirely automatable are at direct risk, and there are relatively few of those."
"What is far more likely is that people will continue performing their roles but will be able to do more of the job, better than before, because routine tasks are automated. Expectations will rise, productivity will increase, and roles will evolve rather than disappear."
"Some job reductions will occur, of course, but I suspect AI will often be used as the reason for reductions that would have happened anyway under traditional workforce rationalisation. It simply becomes the easiest explanation."
"Success in business ultimately depends on two things: a great team and tenacity. It’s not about avoiding setbacks – because you get knocked down constantly when building a company – but about getting up again."
"Having a strong team makes that possible. They move things forward while you focus on the areas that most need your attention. I’m very proud of the team we’ve built at ICS.AI, and I credit them for everything we’ve achieved so far."
Credits: Martin Neale, Founder and CEO of ICS.AI.