How hard would your job be to do without access to a search engine? A spreadsheet? A word processor?

For most people who work in a knowledge job, these digital tools are essential parts of their day to day work: enabling new skills, saving us time and helping us get more done.

In the next decade, new tools powered by generative AI could play the same role. However, the lesson of past digital technologies is that you have to be careful to avoid the creation of a digital divide: where powerful new tools are only used by confident early adopters, leaving other people who need more support behind. This requires focused efforts to ensure everyone can feel the benefits, and no one is left behind. 

Today, Google launches a new pilot programme, AI Works, to support and empower workers to use AI tools by giving them the skills, confidence and contextual knowledge (e.g. on trust and safety) to integrate AI into their working lives. 

Public First is proud to support this initiative, first by providing the research base on which the programme is built; and secondly, by monitoring and evaluating the pilots to provide an independent and thorough understanding of the impact AI training has on perceptions, attitudes and adoption rates. 

In a report published last year, we estimated that AI-powered tools could create over £400 billion in value for the UK economy by 2030, the equivalent to an annual growth rate of 2.6%. A deeper dive into this shows that this opportunity is spread across a broad range of sectors:

And, that almost two thirds of jobs across the UK could be augmented by AI, with every sector impacted if not transformed: 

However, new polling we are publishing today suggests that this opportunity may not be realised or could leave some behind thanks to an uptake gap that is already emerging. Men, the young and graduates are significantly more likely to be using LLM tools at work than women, older workers and those without a university degree. You can read more about this in a new major report we are publishing today, on the current state of UK attitudes towards AI.

Regular usage of LLMs at work (larger = more frequent)

We shouldn’t confuse adoption today with interest, for example our polling found 40% of 55-64 year olds described themselves as ‘curious’ about AI and over a third of school-leavers (36%) said they were interested. 

Crucially, a significant proportion of the British population want to learn more. 39% of UK adults said they wanted to better understand the capabilities and limitations of today’s models and over a quarter (27%) wanted to know how to better write prompts. 

These pilots will help do just that, empowering workers with the tools and knowledge to help them apply AI into their day to day. 

For policymakers, these pilots will offer immense insights into what works, and what doesn’t. With 76% wanting to see the Government sponsored skills training in how to take best advantage of AI either now or in the future it is clear that these insights will be important. 

Through Google’s partnerships with Community Union, SMBs and educational academies we can begin to understand how we get people using these new tools so that this abstract potential can be turned into a reality.  We hope the learnings from these pilots will help provide sorely needed evidence for policymakers who will be confronted with a number of decisions on AI, skills and training in the coming months and years.

Read more of our work on public attitudes and AI here.