Copyright TechTarget - All rights reserved ComputerWeekly’s best articles of the day https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html Techtarget Feed Generator en Sat, 25 Apr 2026 06:41:49 GMT https://www.computerweekly.com editor@computerweekly.com <p data-end="3972" data-start="3847">E-signature software is now a standard business tool for contracts, approvals and customer-facing forms.</p> <p data-end="4203" data-start="3974">Since the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce, or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/Electronic-Signatures-in-Global-and-National-Commerce-Act">ESIGN</a>, Act passed in 2000 and set <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/answer/Are-electronic-signatures-legally-binding">legal requirements for e-signatures</a>, the market has shown no signs of slowing down. With legal frameworks in place and a mature vendor market, organizations now evaluate e-signature platforms less as a convenience tool and more as part of a broader <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/7-key-stages-of-enterprise-content-lifecycle-management">document workflow</a>, compliance and customer-experience strategy.</p> <p>E-signature software has various benefits for organizations, like improved performance and reduced costs. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/How-to-build-a-successful-paperless-office-strategy">Paper usage also decreases</a>, which is better for the environment, and e-signatures are convenient and avoid having users print out, sign, scan and mail documents.</p> <p>However, not all e-signature software is the same. As organizations evaluate options, they should consider signing volume, integrations, workflow automation, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/6-enterprise-content-management-best-practices-for-deployment">compliance features</a>, mobile support and whether the software fits internal approvals, customer-facing transactions or both.</p> <p>The unranked, alphabetical list of platforms below was created based on reports from leading analyst firms, such as Gartner and Forrester, and user reviews on G2 and Capterra, plus additional research by TechTarget editors.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="1. Adobe Acrobat Sign"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>1. Adobe Acrobat Sign</h2> <p>Most Adobe Acrobat users understand its e-signature capabilities, but full access to those features requires a purchase. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/definition/Adobe-Sign">Adobe Acrobat Sign</a> lets recipients sign documents without downloading anything. Like other e-signature platforms, Adobe Acrobat Sign integrates with various tools, including Salesforce, Zoho CRM, SAP SuccessFactors, Microsoft and Box, among others.</p> <p>Users can create digital forms on their websites and integrate Adobe Acrobat Sign for e-signatures. The software also offers a mobile app to scan and upload PDFs, along with customizable templates, notifications and reminders. Adobe Acrobat Sign is easy to use, has responsive customer support and simplifies how users upload a signature.</p> <p>However, the mobile app can be clunky, and its features can overwhelm some users -- making Adobe Acrobat Sign a better choice for enterprise customers. It also lacks integration capabilities beyond its existing choices.</p> <p>Adobe Acrobat Sign's pricing for the Acrobat Standard for teams starts at $14.99 per user monthly.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="2. Docusign"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>2. Docusign</h2> <p>Docusign offers standalone eSignature plans as well as its broader Intelligent Agreement Management platform. Organizations that handle a high volume of contracts should distinguish between Docusign’s basic e-signature plans and its more advanced IAM suite. The software has a mobile-responsive web app to simplify how parties sign agreements. It also supports document routing to multiple parties and lets users create reusable templates with standard and customizable fields.</p> <p>Docusign uses APIs to integrate with over 350 apps, including Microsoft, Salesforce, Zoom, SAP, Google and Oracle products. The platform is user-friendly, offers multilanguage support and enables visibility into who views and signs documents. However, users can't download multiple documents at once with this tool, and it can't integrate with other PDF apps.</p> <p>When billed annually, Docusign’s standalone eSignature pricing starts at $10 per month for the Personal plan and $25 per user monthly for the Standard plan for small-to-medium-sized teams. Docusign’s IAM plans start at a higher price point, with IAM Starter at $40 per user monthly and IAM Standard at $45 per user monthly.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> E-signature software has various benefits for organizations, like improved performance and reduced costs. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="3. Dropbox Sign"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>3. Dropbox Sign</h2> <p>Formerly known as HelloSign, Dropbox Sign is part of the Dropbox suite. It offers document templates for commonly used forms, like nondisclosure agreements and tax forms, and sends automated reminders so unsigned documents don't fall through the cracks.</p> <p>Dropbox Sign also integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Workspace, Box and SharePoint. Users can embed e-signatures into websites or apps using APIs, and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/feature/How-RPA-can-simplify-the-onboarding-process">automate employee onboarding</a> and hiring processes. It also encrypts data during transfer and at rest to protect user privacy.</p> <p>The platform is mobile-friendly, with notification and reminder options. However, some challenges include difficulty editing documents and limited customization.</p> <p>Dropbox Sign’s current pricing centers on an Essentials plan for individuals and a Standard plan for small teams. Essentials is listed at $15 per month, and Standard is listed at $25 per user per month when billed annually.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="4. Jotform Sign"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>4. Jotform Sign</h2> <p>Jotform Sign is e-signature software that includes workflow automation to let users sign documents on any device. It also lets users <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/How-to-add-digital-signatures-to-a-PDF">turn PDFs into documents with e-signature capabilities</a>, automate processes and reuse document templates. Users can create approval workflows, embed documents for signatures in websites and receive alerts about document status through Jotform Sign Inbox.</p> <p>Users said Jotform Sign is easy to use and set up, with an intuitive UI. However, customization is limited, and the number of signatures it collects is limited based on the pricing tier.</p> <p>Jotform Sign offers a free version for users to collect 10 signatures per month. The paid tiers start with Bronze, which starts at $34 per month and is described in terms of broader monthly submission and active-form limits rather than just a simple signature cap.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="5. PandaDoc"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>5. PandaDoc</h2> <p>Organizations looking for e-signature software with a lot of features might consider PandaDoc. It <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/tip/7-reasons-why-businesses-need-mobile-apps">offers a mobile app</a> so users can track documents' statuses and get notified when someone opens, views, comments on or signs a document. The tool also offers a template library with over 450 contract, proposal and invoice templates, and users can drag and drop elements of them into documents to create their own templates.</p> <p>The PandaDoc API lets users integrate with third-party apps, and users can add it to PDFs and Word documents. It offers prebuilt integrations with apps like Salesforce, Zapier, Zoho, HubSpot and Dropbox.</p> <p>The software is easy to use, especially for creating documents. However, the signing space is small and can benefit from more out-of-the-box integrations.</p> <p>PandaDoc still offers a free tier, Starter at $19 per user monthly and Business at $49 per user monthly.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="6. ReadySign"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>6. ReadySign</h2> <p>Like its counterparts, ReadySign's e-signature software includes customizable templates and forms. It can also create an AnySign link, which lets signers opt in to sign the forms they need. Other features include bulk sending, notifications, reminders, custom signatures, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/Document-management-vs-content-management-How-they-differ">document management to organize signed forms</a> and user management with role-based permissions.</p> <p>ReadySign is easy to use, cost-effective, enables a comprehensive audit trail and offers responsive customer service. However, users might struggle to control the reminders, and the search features are not easy to use. Also, the vendor's website lacks integration information.</p> <p>ReadySign's pricing starts at $25 per user monthly for 10 users. The 40-user plan is $10 per user monthly, and the 100-user plan is $6 per user monthly -- all when billed annually.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="7. SignNow"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>7. SignNow</h2> <p>As a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/private-cloud">private cloud</a> e-signature software provider, SignNow lets users add e-signatures to various forms, documents and templates, including PDFs, Word documents and contracts. The software uses APIs for website, CRM and other app integrations.</p> <p>SignNow enables conditional documents, which means organizations can set documents to route by role. It also lets teams collaborate to create documents and templates and add custom branding to content. The platform is easy to use and supports e-signature management for multiple documents. It's also easy to sign documents from mobile phones.</p> <p>Yet, the tool presents challenges. The documents don't open immediately and instead prompt the recipient to download the file. It also lacks a commenting feature for users to provide feedback before signing.</p> <p>SignNow’s plans still start at a lower entry price point than many competitors, with current pricing beginning at $8 per user per month.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="8. Zoho Sign"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>8. Zoho Sign</h2> <p>Zoho Sign enables users to upload PDFs, Microsoft Word or other documents and add e-signature fields. It also offers reusable templates for frequently used documents and enables public URLs for <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/customer-self-service-CSS">self-service</a> document signing. The tool also includes features for bulk sending, document status tracking, identity verification and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/answer/252523027/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-electronic-signatures">regulatory compliance</a>. It can be used on mobile devices.</p> <p>Users said Zoho Sign offers good security, is easy to use and can easily integrate with other products and place e-signatures. However, the tool offers limited customization, and customer support is lacking.</p> <p>Zoho Sign still offers a free tier and entry-level paid pricing starting at $10 per user monthly billed annually. Its current paid tiers extend upward through Professional and Enterprise plans.</p> <p><b>Editor's note: </b><em>This article was originally published in 2022 and was updated in 2026 to reflect current e-signature software pricing, packaging and market positioning.</em></p> <p><i>Christine Campbell is a freelance writer specializing in business and B2B technology.</i></p> </section> E-signature software enhances workflows and reduces paper use. Organizations should compare integrations, workflows, compliance features, and pricing before choosing a platform. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/container_g1294273513.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/Top-e-signature-software-providers Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:02:00 GMT <p>Chi Onwurah, chair of the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology committee, has released correspondence with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) about UK technology sovereignty policy that raises fundamental questions.</p> <p>On 10 March 2026, Onwurah, the MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West, opened a <a target="_blank" href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-03-10/debates/A91DF2A1-6231-4A38-AF17-56B742D06E95/TechnologySovereignty" rel="noopener">Technology Sovereignty Debate</a> in the House of Commons, putting into question the independence of the UK’s technology strategy and approach.</p> <p>During the debate, she spoke about the NHS’s involvement with US data management supplier <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640417/Health-workers-call-for-Palantir-to-be-booted-from-NHS-contracts">Palantir</a>, stating that its chairman and founder, Peter Thiel, holds “a political worldview which is at odds with British values”.</p> <p>Following the debate, Onwurah sent a <a target="_blank" href="https://chionwurahmp.com/wp-content/uploads/CO-to-Kinishka-Narayan-Technology-Sovereignty.pdf" rel="noopener">letter to Kanishka Narayan</a>, minister for science, innovation and technology, seeking clarification about technology sovereignty. In it, she asked about the government’s plans for technological self-reliance and data governance.</p> <p>Her questions included: “Can you confirm that the UK does not seek to treat the Big Tech companies as sovereign states?” and “have ministers or officials in the department [for Science, Innovation and Technology] discussed the impact of the US Cloud Act, the Patriot Act, and entity list tools, with Microsoft, AWS [Amazon Web Services], and Palantir in regard to UK data sovereignty?”</p> <p>In a <a href="https://chionwurahmp.com/wp-content/uploads/Dame-Chi-Onwurah-Tech-Sovereignty-Letter-Response.pdf">response letter</a>, dated 15 April, Narayan said: “Although some global technology companies operate at significant scale and across multiple jurisdictions, which may require a strategic and coordinated approach, they remain private sector actors and do not possess sovereign authority. Companies operating in the UK are subject to UK laws and regulatory frameworks, which are set by Parliament and enforced by independent regulators.”</p> <p>He highlighted DSIT’s ongoing and upcoming investments and investigations, such as the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA’s) designation of Google and Apple with Strategic Market Status in mobile ecosystems, which led the tech titans to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638907/Apple-and-Google-pledge-to-improve-app-fairness" rel="noopener">commit to fairer app store practices</a>.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about UK technology sovereignty</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Everything you need to know about <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Sovereign-AI-explained">AI sovereignty</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641650/Finance-regulators-to-address-AI-risks-after-MPs-say-they-are-not-doing-enough">MPs tell finance regulators</a> they aren’t doing enough to address AI risks.</li> <li>Three quarters of British IT leaders <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641979/Three-quarters-of-UK-IT-leaders-without-strong-AI-governance-plans">don’t have strong AI governance plans</a>.</li> <li>Tech companies <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639695/Transnational-AI-regulation-needed-to-protect-human-rights-in-the-UK">bid for international regulations</a> on AI sovereignty.</li> </ul> </div> </div> <p>Narayan wrote about economic strategies to expand Britain’s place in international tech. On 16 April, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641682/UK-governments-50m-sovereign-AI-fund-bids-to-commercialise-research">DSIT launched the Sovereign Al Fund</a> to invest in early-stage Al companies, in the hope that it would attract startups to the UK.</p> <p>Highlighting “foundational relationships” with the US, European Union, Japan, India, China and others, he&nbsp;insisted on the importance of international collaborations towards AI. However, Narayan did not answer whether the government intends to monitor how much public service infrastructure depends on “foreign-based cloud technology”, and made no specific reference to Palantir.</p> <p>During the parliamentary debate, Onwurah mentioned Elon Musk’s decision to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown-starlink-satellite-service-ukraine-retook-territory-russia-2025-07-25/" rel="noopener">turn off Ukraine’s Starlink capacities</a> during a crucial attack against Russia as an example of the risks of cloud dependance.</p> <p>Currently, AWS and Microsoft dominate British cloud use, making up almost <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-independent-inquiry-group-publishes-provisional-findings-in-cloud-services-market-investigation">80% of the market</a>, with Google coming in third.</p> <p>An <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366628185/CMA-told-to-expedite-action-against-AWS-and-Microsoft-to-rebalance-UK-cloud-market">investigation into AWS and Microsoft</a> by the CMA led UK cloud providers to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639822/Regulate-AWS-and-Microsoft-says-UK-cloud-provider-survey">demand stronger regulation</a>. In July 2026, the Government Digital Service (GDS) will publish a National Cloud Strategy.</p> <p>Onwurah said that Narayan’s letter fails to set out a “coherent strategy for achieving technology sovereignty”. Instead, she said the UK must identify how it can become self-reliant, and what risks are linked to situations where “interdependence is unavoidable”.</p> <p>“It is impossible to judge whether the £22bn spent annually on public sector research and development is serving the UK’s long‑term interests if we do not know how it is contributing to our technology sovereignty,” said Onwurah.</p> House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee chair Chi Onwurah questions the UK’s approach to tech sovereignty https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/London-Westminster-Parliament-government-sunset-Ekaterina-Pokrovsky-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642254/Science-Innovation-and-Technology-committee-chair-questions-UKs-tech-sovereignty-approach Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:45:00 GMT <p>For decades, engineering teams treated code like a vintage Ferrari – expensive to build, painstakingly maintained and too precious to ever throw away. Every line represented a significant investment of human capital and time, and has led to a culture where code was cherished and its longevity was a marker of success.</p> <p>But at the AWS Summit in London this week, Ryan Cormack, principal engineer at online used car marketplace Motorway, consigned that philosophy to the scrapyard. In the age of <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/resources/Software-development-tools">agentic artificial intelligence (AI-)driven software development</a>, he says, engineering teams can become more productive and are able to build, revise and maintain code at speeds previously unthinkable.</p> <p>In this article, we look at Motorway’s radical shift from manual coding to an AI-first development pipeline powered by AWS Kiro. Cormack talks about how the company achieved a 4x increase in engineering output, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640859/Advancing-to-the-next-frontier-of-AI">the challenges that come</a> with the ability to produce more code, why the future of software development lies in treating code as disposable, and the core benefits of codifying organisational culture into AI steering files.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The mindset shift: Disposability vs polish"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The mindset shift: Disposability vs polish</h2> <p>The most profound change at Motorway is speed of delivery but also a psychological break from the past. Historically, writing code was a “time-expensive process”, Cormack says, adding: “We wanted to have code that was so good that we could cherish it for years to come, because we had invested so much time into making it.”</p> <p>But since starting to use Kiro – <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/AWS-launches-Kiro-IDE-for-real-agentic-development-at-scale">AWS’s agentic AI-capable IDE</a> – that mindset became a bottleneck. “We shifted away from, ‘We need the most well-polished code for every line we write, all the time’, because we can rewrite it again tomorrow at a speed that’s never been possible before,” says Cormack.</p> <p>This has led to a strategy of “evaluation over production”. Motorway now generates vast amounts of code – a million lines a month – much of which may never reach a customer, says Cormack. Instead, it is used to test and evaluate multiple different ways to solve a problem before committing to it.&nbsp;</p> <p>The lesson for other organisations is clear. Don’t aim for a perfect first pass. Use AI to cycle through iterations, then use human expertise to refine exactly what you want from the options the AI helps provide.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Managing the ‘volume crisis’: Rigour over speed"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Managing the ‘volume crisis’: Rigour over speed</h2> <p>While <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/CW-Developer-Network/When-AI-workflows-generate-vulnerabilities-too-fast-for-developers">a 4x increase in output</a> sounds like an engineering dream, it creates a real “review bottleneck”. If you write 400% more code but maintain 100% manual review processes, the system collapses. To combat this, Motorway hollowed out the “manual middle” of the development process and moved human energy to the ends of the process – namely, the spec and the review.</p> <p>“We find ourselves spending more time planning code and the whole process up front, and a little bit more time reviewing what comes out,” Cormack says. “But we lose all this time in the middle where we previously had to manually write all the code.”</p> <p>To ensure AI doesn’t just produce any code but “Motorway code”, the team utilises “steering files”. These files augment the AI’s system prompts with the company’s specific DNA. They are specific to Kiro and are markdown documents that contain instructions, standards and preferences to guide the AI behaviour and coding style.&nbsp;</p> <p>They include, for example, naming conventions that standardise how application programming interfaces (APIs) are labelled across Motorway’s 7,500-dealer network, and design patterns that enforce specific software architectures.</p> <p>By injecting these rules via the AI, generated code looks and feels like it was written by a veteran Motorway engineer.&nbsp;</p> <p>And AI isn’t just used for the build; it’s used for the full lifecycle. “We need to use AI to help us debug, analyse, understand, and evaluate systems as they run,” Cormack adds, noting that agents now monitor logs and metrics to help humans manage a massive fleet of services.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="The ‘Kiro’ engine and model agnosticism"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>The ‘Kiro’ engine and model agnosticism</h2> <p>A critical component of Motorway’s success is that Kiro acts as an agentic loop rather than just a simple “autocomplete” tool.&nbsp;</p> <p>“Kiro knows how our CI pipelines work,” says Cormack. “It knows how our infrastructure is code-driven and it knows how our internal applications work together. It’s able to help guide us every step of the way.</p> <p>“We’re using Kiro across our full software development lifecycle. Our product and UX teams can ship real prototypes into our customers’ hands quicker than we’ve ever been able to before. What would take weeks now takes hours.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Motorway’s top tips for AI integration</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Don’t automate in isolation: If your code volume increases 4x, your testing and monitoring must scale at the same rate, or you are simply building a larger pile of bugs.</li> <li>Codify your culture: Use steering files to ensure AI follows your specific organisational standards.</li> <li>Align the roadmap: AI speed means UX and product teams must be in lock-step. “What would take weeks now takes hours,” Cormack says, citing how UX teams now ship car-profiling prototypes directly into customers’ hands almost instantly.</li> </ul> </div> </div> <p>His team can leverage its model agnosticism too. Cormack explained they aren’t locked into a single LLM: “We use Kiro with Claude’s latest Opus 4.7 model, we use it with some of the open weight models, things like Meta’s Llama models ... we’re able to selectively pick the LLM that we know is going to be able to best perform the specific task.”</p> <p>This flexibility helps to mitigate the risk of hallucinations. Motorway relies on a spec-driven approach where the AI must think through the problem and generate a technical design before writing a single line.</p> <p>“It will help us write automated tests that are able to prove that each of these points has been accurately done,” Cormack says. This means the AI provides its own proof of work before a human ever touches it.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Legacy transition from Heroku to AWS"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Legacy transition from Heroku to AWS</h2> <p>Motorway wasn’t always this agile. The company was “born in the cloud”, on Heroku, which Cormack acknowledges was “great for scaling and getting going”. But as the company grew, it hit friction points.</p> <p>The transition to AWS was driven by a need for “flexibility, adaptability, and scalability”, says Cormack, who views their Kiro-enabled AI-first pipeline as the ultimate tool for such transitions.&nbsp;</p> <p>If he were to do things all over again, Cormack says he would “adopt this model of thinking much earlier on”. The ability to use AI to map migration logic and service dependencies would have saved months of manual effort during the move off their legacy platform, he believes.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Lessons for the boardroom"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Lessons for the boardroom</h2> <p>For organisations that want to replicate Motorway’s 250% increase in deployment frequency, Cormack warns against automating the grind of coding without also automating the rigour of testing.</p> <p>“If you try to build just by writing code faster, it doesn’t solve the problems,” he says. “I don’t think our customers necessarily want code; they want features and functionality.”</p> <p>The winners of the AI era won’t be the ones who write the most code, but the ones who build the most rigorous frameworks to manage its disposability.&nbsp;</p> <p>As Cormack says: “Kiro’s now writing over a million lines of code for us every single month. So, before we start any new piece of work, our engineering team chooses Kiro to help understand exactly what it is that we want to build.</p> <p>“The rigour at the start of this process helps enable the precision we want in our engineering at the end. So, every piece of work that we do starts with a spec, understanding the intent of what it is that we’re building and why.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about AI and software development</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638839/Half-of-Googles-software-development-now-AI-generated">Half of Google’s software development now AI-generated</a>: In a bid to free up budget to spend on artificial intelligence infrastructure, Google parent Alphabet is using AI to improve operational efficiency.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639364/How-AI-code-generation-is-pushing-DevSecOps-to-machine-speed">How AI code generation is pushing DevSecOps to machine speed</a>: Organisations should adopt shared platforms and automated governance to keep pace with the growing use of generative AI tools that are helping developers produce code at unprecedented volumes.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> We talk to Ryan Cormack of used car marketplace Motorway about how AI-driven development increases the speed and productivity of engineering and the challenges it brings https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Fotolia-cars.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/AI-drives-software-productivity-and-challenges-for-Motorway Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:56:00 GMT <p>Medical data belonging to half a million British citizens has been offered for sale on a Chinese website following a security breach at health information database UK Biobank.</p> <p>Technology minister Ian Murray said that data obtained from UK Biobank had been advertised for sale by several sellers on Alibaba e-commerce platforms in China, in what he called an “unacceptable abuse”.</p> <p>UK Biobank, a non-profit charity, collects medical data provided by volunteers and shares it with researchers around the world to further medical research in cancer, heart disease and ways of predicting dementia.</p> <p>The charity informed the UK government on Monday that it had identified anonymised data from its volunteers for sale by three sellers on Alibaba, including at least one listing that appeared to offer anonymised data from its 500,000 volunteers.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Unacceptable abuse of data"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Unacceptable abuse of data</h2> <p>“This has been an unacceptable abuse of the UK Biobank charity’s data and an abuse of the trust that participants rightly expect when sharing their data for research purposes,” Murray said in a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/minister-of-state-statement-to-the-house-of-commons-23-april-2026">statement to Parliament</a>.</p> <p>UK Biobank has assured its volunteers that the data contained no participants’ names, addresses, contact details, or telephone numbers. The charity does not believe that any of the data was sold.</p> <p>UK Biobank said it had now revoked access to research institutions identified as the source of the breach of its UK data cloud.</p> <p>Murray said the UK government had worked quickly with Biobank, the Chinese government and Alibaba to take down the listings offering the data.</p> <p>“We have asked the Biobank charity to pause further access to its data until they have put in place a technical solution to prevent data from its current platform from being downloaded in this way again,” he said.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Biobank will improve security"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Biobank will improve security</h2> <p>Rory Collins, chief executive of Biobank, told volunteers in a <a href="https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/news/a-message-to-our-participants-uk-biobank-data-security-update/">statement</a> that personally identifiable information (PII) was safe and that it would put additional security measures in place to prevent the incident from happening again.</p> <p>He said that researchers go through a rigorous access review process and institutions sign a contract committing to keeping data secure before they are given access to Biobank.</p> <p>“This is a clear breach of the contract signed by these academic institutions, and they, along with the individuals involved, have had their access suspended,” he added.</p> <p>Biobank has temporarily suspended all access to its UK cloud-based research platform, and plans to introduce a limit on the size of files that can be taken off the platform. It will also monitor files exported from the platform for suspicious behaviour.</p> <p>The charity said it was developing an automated checking system to prevent de-identified data from being taken off its research platform, while still allowing scientists to conduct research. The system will be in place by the end of the year.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="UK government to issue guidance"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>UK government to issue guidance</h2> <p>Murray said the government would soon be issuing guidance on controlling data from research studies, and urged businesses and charities to ensure their systems and data-sharing processes are as secure as possible.</p> <p>The charity has reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).</p> <p>An ICO spokesperson said: “People’s medical data is highly sensitive information. Not only do people expect it to be handled carefully and securely, organisations also have a responsibility under the law. UK Biobank has made us aware of an incident, and we are making enquiries.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">What companies should do</h3> <p>All organisations should map and “baseline” their edge device traffic, especially VPN and remote access connections. They should adopt dynamic threat feed filtering that includes known covert network indicators.</p> <p>Potential victims of Chinese infiltration should implement two-factor authentication for remote access and, where possible, apply zero-trust controls, IP allow lists and machine certificate verification.</p> <p>Larger or high-risk entities should consider active hunting of suspicious traffic from home office devices or traffic from the internet of things, geographic profiling, and machine learning-based anomaly detection.</p> <p style="text-align: right;"><em>Source NCSC</em></p> </div> </div> </section> Biobank operator is taking steps to improve security after biological, health and lifestyle information from its database was offered for sale on a Chinese website https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/healthcare-medical-statistics-stethoscope-adobe.jpeg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642041/Medical-data-about-half-a-million-Britains-on-sale-in-China-after-Biobank-breach Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:59:00 GMT <p>Consumers are being urged to replace passwords with passkeys as a simpler, more secure method of accessing online services.</p> <p>The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of the signals intelligence agency GCHQ, said today that it would no longer recommend that individuals use passwords for logging on where passkeys are available as an alternative.</p> <p><a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Passkey-vs-password-What-is-the-difference">Passkeys</a>, which are securely stored on people’s phones, computers, or in third-party credential managers, are quicker and easier to use than passwords and offer stronger security.</p> <p>The NCSC’s recommendation follows a technical study that shows passkeys are at least as secure – and generally more secure – than a password combined with two-factor authentication, such as an authorisation code sent by SMS.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Resilience against phishing"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Resilience against phishing</h2> <p>The agency claims that a move to passkeys would boost the UK’s resilience to phishing attacks and other hacking attempts, the majority of which rely on criminals stealing or compromising login details.</p> <p>The UK government <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366623776/UK-government-websites-to-replace-passwords-with-secure-passkeys">announced last year</a> that it would roll out passkey technology for digital services as an alternative to current SMS-based verification systems, which incur additional costs for sending SMS messages.</p> <p>The NHS became one of the first government organisations in the world to use passkeys to give patients secure access to hospital and pharmacy websites.</p> <p>Online service providers, including Google, eBay and PayPal, also support passkeys. According to Google, over 50% of active Google users in the UK have a registered passkey – the highest uptake. Microsoft is also introducing passkeys for Hotmail.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more from CyberUK 2026</h3> <ul type="square" class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641875/CYBERUK-26-UK-lagging-on-legal-protections-for-cyber-pros">CyberUK ’26: UK lagging on legal protections for cyber pros</a>: Ahead of next week's CyberUK conference, the CyberUp Campaign for reform of the UK's hacking laws proposes a four-pillar framework that would protect cyber professionals from prosecution</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642032/Nation-states-responsible-for-nationally-significant-cyber-attacks-against-UK-says-NCSC-chief">Nation states responsible for ‘nationally significant’ cyber attacks against UK, says NCSC chief</a>: The UK is facing four nationally significant cyber attacks a week, the majority from hostile states, NCSC chief, Richard Horne, will warn at the CyberUK conference.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641790/UK-to-build-national-cyber-shield-to-protect-against-AI-cyber-threats">UK to build ‘national cyber shield’ to protect against AI cyber threats</a>: Security minister Dan Jarvis calls for artificial intelligence companies to work with government to develop AI-driven cyber defences</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Better security than 2FA"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Better security than 2FA</h2> <p>Passkeys offer a greater level of security than passwords and SMS two-factor authentication (2FA), both of which can be compromised by hackers.</p> <p>They allow people to log into websites securely, using their own mobile phones, tablets or laptops to verify their identity by entering a PIN or using facial recognition.</p> <p>The use of passwords with two-factor authentication for SMS can be vulnerable to “SIM swapping” attacks, where criminals allocate a victim’s phone number to a phone SIM card to intercept authentication keys.</p> <p>The NCSC said that it stopped short of endorsing passkeys last year because there were still key implementation challenges.</p> <p>However, it said that progress with the technology over the past year, including the ability to move passkeys between Android and Apple phones, has now made the technology viable.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Passkeys not yet recommended for business"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Passkeys not yet recommended for business</h2> <p>The centre said it can now recommend passkey technology to the public as a more secure and user-friendly login method, and to businesses as the default authentication option for consumers.</p> <p>The NCSC is not yet recommending <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/How-to-roll-out-an-enterprise-passkey-deployment">passkeys for business applications</a>, which will take longer to phase in. Many organisations rely on old IT systems that do not support passkeys or two-factor authentication.</p> <p>The NCSC said that where services do not support passkeys, it advises consumers to create strong passwords and use two-factor authentication.</p> <p>Jonathon Ellison, director for national resilience at the NCSC, said moving to passkeys would accelerate the UK’s resilience against cyber attacks.</p> <p>“The headaches that remembering passwords have caused us for decades no longer need to be a part of logging in, where users migrate to passkeys – they are a user-friendly alternative, which provides stronger overall resilience,” he said.</p> <p>Phasing out passwords will be gradual, with the first step being for people to become comfortable with using passkeys. Big banks are expected to phase in the technology over the next three to five years.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">How passkeys work</h3> <p>When people sign up for accounts using passkeys, their device creates a private key, which remains on the device, and a public key, which is stored by the service they wish to access.</p> <p>The device will prove to the website that it has the correct private key when the owner signs into a service, without disclosing the private key to the service provider.</p> <p>Passkeys are designed to synchronise across different devices, so a passkey stored on an iPhone would be automatically shared with the owner’s iPad.</p> <p>If a person loses a device and does not have a copy of the passkey on a second device, they will be able to recover it by going through an account recovery process.</p> <p>Unlike passwords, passkeys are cryptographically generated and do not need to be changed regularly to remain secure.</p> <p>They are stored in a “secure enclave” on phones and computers, which means they cannot be accessed if the device is compromised or lost.</p> </div> </div> </section> UK National Cyber Security Centre is urging consumers to replace passwords and two-factor authentication with passkeys, following a technical study that shows they are more secure and easier to use https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/German/article/easy-password-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642156/NCSC-heralds-end-of-passwords-for-consumers-and-pushes-secure-passkeys Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:01:00 GMT <p>The UK government has declared its intention to modernise payment services regulation, updating it to support innovations in money and payments, according to an HM Treasury statement. It is also set to publish a consultation inviting feedback from the payments sector.</p> <p>Lucy Rigby, economic secretary to the HM Treasury, said: “Fintech is a true British success story, and we are backing the industry to maintain its competitive edge and go even further and faster in driving growth"</p> <p>Rigby will attend events during Fintech Week in London to promote the government’s efforts in maintaining the UK as the leading destination for fintechs to start, scale and succeed, said the Treasury.</p> <p>“Today’s package is our latest stake in the ground as we build a payments ecosystem that is secure, competitive and fully equipped to harness the opportunities created by rapid technological change,” said Rigby.</p> <p>Britain is a world-leading destination for fintech, second only to the US in <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366636986/UK-regains-second-spot-in-global-fintech-investment-ranking">global fintech investment rankings</a>. More than 3,000 fintech firms operate in the country, which account for tens of thousands of jobs.</p> <p>Revolut – a UK-headquartered fintech firm – <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366634852/UK-digital-bank-Revolut-sees-value-jump-23bn-in-a-year">reported a £23bn value jump last year</a>, bringing the company to £57bn. The digital bank has since been called Britain’s “leading technology company” by <a href="https://thefinanser.com/"><em>The Finanser</em></a> CEO Chris Skinner. But in 2025, fintech investment in the UK fell to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639023/UK-fintech-investment-slumped-in-2025">its lowest level since 2020</a>.</p> <p>Now, during this week’s UK Fintech Week, the government is announcing strategies to grow Britain’s fintech industry, keep pace with technological progress and protect consumers. As part of <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-fintech-backed-to-embrace-future-payments-technology">the announced plan</a>, the government has committed to spending a additional £1m to fund the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) from April to continue the centre’s work facilitating collaboration across the fintech sector.</p> <p>The plan includes:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Bringing the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) into the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA);</li> <li>Laying out a single framework for both traditional and tokenised payment;</li> <li>Setting guidelines on how payment service regulation should respond to AI agents conducting purchases for customers and businesses;</li> <li>And regulating stablecoins use while cutting administrative burdens for companies who want to provide stablecoins payments.</li> </ul> <p>Alongside this, the government is appointing Chris Woolard CBE as wholesale digital market’s champion in a bid to make the country’s financial sector more competitive.</p> <p>Woolard praised British investment in the sector, claiming the country offers “a thriving startup ecosystem, global banks and insurers, and leading universities”, as well as regulators who keep up with innovation to let firms “test, learn and scale responsibly”.</p> <p>Ultimately, he called for open dialogue between the private and public sectors to create a tokenised wholesale financial markets ecosystem. To improve communication, the government will publish a consultation, asking the payment sector for feedback.</p> <p>This isn’t the first step in Britain’s path to fintech leadership. A few months ago, the government decided to establish itself as globally competitive by creating a financial service regulatory regime for crypto assets. Recently, the FCA <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641736/Finance-regulator-outlines-its-open-finance-vision">outlined its open finance plan for 2030</a>, which set out <a href="https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/corporate-documents/open-finance-roadmap">a roadmap</a> aimed at giving consumers and businesses more control over their financial data.</p> <p>In a press release, Philip Belamant, co-founder and CEO of Zilch, said: “The UK has a real opportunity to lead globally in enabling agentic finance, helping consumers benefit from smarter, more efficient ways to manage their money.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about UK fintech</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Artificial intelligence is now <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638913/Artificial-intelligence-now-finance-sectors-connective-tissue">the “connective tissue” of the finance sector</a>.</li> <li>Why <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639023/UK-fintech-investment-slumped-in-2025">UK’s fintech investment slumped in 2025</a>.</li> <li>British government <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366637579/UK-government-appoints-banking-tech-bosses-as-AI-champions">appoints fintech leaders as AI champions</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> UK government announces open banking strategies during London Fintech Week, including regulation and £1m investment https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/digital-online-banking-finance-fintech-ipopba-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642036/UK-government-beats-drum-for-fintech-industry-at-London-Fintech-Week Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:00:00 GMT <p>According to a survey from Red Hat, 87% of UK business IT decision-makers use agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems, yet only a quarter of them have strong governance in place.</p> <p>Currently, Red Hat claims that companies feel they do not have enough control over data, infrastructure and relationships with AI providers. Instead, their survey respondents seem to want governments to put in place stronger AI policies for industries.</p> <p>Run by Censuswide, the survey questioned 500 IT decision-makers across the UK, France, Germany and Italy about <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Sovereign-AI-explained">AI sovereignty</a>. The supplier concludes that there exists a control “gap” at organisations between their deployment of AI and their visibility into it. Whereas AI was, until recently, an aspiration, now most respondents view AI governance and regulation as a priority, now that AI deployment is more of a reality.</p> <p>Most major AI suppliers are based in the US, making AI sovereignty a major concern for non-US governments. AI sovereignty means systems are run under the control of sovereign states, which allows for greater data privacy and control. As the technology advances, regulators are still playing catch-up, leaving some companies uncertain as to policy strategies.</p> <p>Despite concerns over AI providers restricting access for customers to their deployed AI systems, only 67% of British IT decision-makers have an AI “exit strategy”. For many, this would have a “moderate to significant” impact on their businesses (43%).</p> <p>“Executing a switch [from one AI technology supplier to another] without disruption remains difficult,” says Joanna Hodgson, UK country manager at Red Hat, which commissioned the survey. “To close that gap, enterprises need greater control over how and where AI runs, and a consistent way to govern fast‑moving technologies like agentic AI.”</p> <p>Across the west European region, British respondents were most vocal in their demand for AI sovereignty regulation, with 89% of those surveyed wanting public policy and regulation to enforce the adoption of open source principles. Behind them, only 70% of French IT decision-makers and 72% of German respondents call for regulatory direction. This would mean stronger government guidelines on transparency, auditability and open source licensing.</p> <p>For eight out of 10 decision-makers, this also involves letting companies have greater control over building these systems through open AI. While the demand for AI sovereignty increases, the gap between business and proprietary AI providers must be addressed, according to Red Hat.</p> <p>In 2026, less than half of those surveyed (48%) have complete visibility of where their data is stored, processed and accessed. As such, letting businesses decide where AI is run could improve trust in the systems.</p> <p>Hans Roth, senior vice-president and general manager for EMEA at Red Hat, pointed out that businesses want clear policy frameworks for AI. “Organisations are not looking for another closed, one‑size‑fits‑all stack,” he said. “They want the freedom to combine different models, accelerators and clouds while staying in control.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about AI sovereignty and regulation</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Everything you need to know about <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Sovereign-AI-explained">AI sovereignty</a>.</li> <li>Tech companies <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639695/Transnational-AI-regulation-needed-to-protect-human-rights-in-the-UK">bid for international regulations</a> on AI sovereignty.</li> <li>How to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/Data-Matters/Sovereign-stress-test-how-do-I-know-Im-in-control-of-my-AI-and-data">check if you’re in control of your AI and data</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641650/Finance-regulators-to-address-AI-risks-after-MPs-say-they-are-not-doing-enough">MPs tell finance regulators</a> they aren’t doing enough to address AI risks.</li> </ul> </div> </div> Almost one in nine British IT leaders say their organisations use agentic AI, but with few putting in place strong governance plans, according to a Red Hat survey https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/German/Hero-Robot-human-AI-jobs-Aliaksandr-Marko-adobe.png https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641979/Three-quarters-of-UK-IT-leaders-without-strong-AI-governance-plans Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:44:00 GMT <p>Artificial intelligence (AI) companies focused on supercomputing and drug discovery are among the first cohort of startups to get money and computing resources from the UK government’s £500m Sovereign AI unit, which was <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641682/UK-governments-50m-sovereign-AI-fund-bids-to-commercialise-research">officially launched on 16 April</a> at the King’s Cross headquarters of self-driving car company Wayve.</p> <p>The government’s stated intention is that “by backing [startups] early, the UK is keeping expertise, decision making and economic value at home – and reducing reliance on a small number of foreign tech giants for critical AI that matter for our economic prosperity and national security”.</p> <p>Technology secretary<b> </b>Liz Kendall said in support of the fund: “Sovereign AI is unlike anything government has ever done before. Its unique approach will help to break down the barriers that have too often held back British enterprise and innovation. This is how we ensure Britain’s economic prosperity and national security in the modern age.</p> <p>“My message to British founders and innovators is clear – we will ensure you never have to choose between your ambition and your home, because Britain will give you both.”</p> <p>Rachel Reeves, chancellor of the exchequer, said: “We have the right economic plan – backing business so the technologies of the future are invented, built and deployed here in Britain.</p> <p>“A thriving domestic AI sector is one of my three big choices for the economy, and by supporting strategic national champions we can ensure internationally competitive companies start, scale and stay here in Britain.”</p> <p>The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT)&nbsp;has said the fund has made its first compute allocations through the <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366627724/UK-government-plans-to-ramp-up-sovereign-computer-capacity">AI Research Resource (AIRR)</a>.</p> <p>The six recipients are in the fields of biological foundation models, world simulation, sovereign inference infrastructure, agentic AI, engineering biology and AI for national security.</p> <p>Alongside the compute, the fund has agreed Right of First Refusal (ROFR) investment options with some of the recipients, according to DSIT. This is said to create a creating “pathway from early support to follow-on funding”. The fund will continue, said DSIT, to assess applications for compute said to be worth tens of millions of pounds to British startups over the course of this year.</p> <p>The DSIT statement maintains that the UK has ingredients needed for success: “Top talent, stability, leading institutions, world-class universities and a culture of entrepreneurialism. Sovereign AI is the government betting on Britain to succeed, so our country can shape the AI revolution. This is ultimately how we unlock this technology’s potential for building a stronger and more prosperous society.”</p> <p>It added that the funding unit will operate like a venture capital entity, backed by the state: “It will invest directly in the UK’s most promising AI startups, help them scale quickly, and give them the support they need to compete with the best in the world.”</p> <p>Sovereign AI’s first equity investment will be in an AI infrastructure startup Callosum, while six more startups will get access to supercomputing capacity.</p> <p>Danyal Akarca, founder of Callosum, said: “There’s a fundamental shift underway in how AI systems are built and run. The future of compute is heterogeneous, and making that complexity usable is the next frontier. The UK already understands where this is heading, and with its depth of talent across universities and labs like DeepMind, it is the natural place to build Callosum”, which he described as an “orchestration platform that allows models and chips to work together as one system”.<b>&nbsp;</b></p> <p>The other companies supported are Prima Mente, Cosine, Cursive, Doubleword, Twig Bio and Odyssey.</p> <p>Ravi Solanki, co-founder of Prima Mente, said: “Our deep research collaborations with Oxford, Imperial and Edinburgh are a testament to the UK’s world-class strength in the life sciences. The combination with world-class compute infrastructure from the Sovereign AI Fund has made the UK the right place to work at the frontier of AI and the life sciences.”</p> <p>Prima Mente is said to use AI to decode the “languages of biology – from DNA sequence to gene expression and epigenetic regulation – to better understand and tackle brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s”.</p> <p>Cosine develops advanced models and coding agents for defence, national security and regulated industries where foreign-built AI is inadmissible.</p> <p>The companies supported by the fund are said to benefit from fully funded access to the UK’s largest AI supercomputers, with up to 1 million GPU hours available per startup. Each company getting investment will get visa decisions within a working day, plus access to an initial 10 cost-free visas.</p> <p>They will get “hands-on government support: help navigating access to data, early procurement opportunities, independent product validation and routes into new approaches to regulation”.</p> <p>Sovereign AI is also currently in discussions with around 30 firms over potential AIRR access, according to DSIT.</p> <p>James Wise, a venture capitalist and chair of the Sovereign AI Unit, said: “AI as a technology could be transformational for both our wealth and security. Britain has the foundations be a global AI leader in many fields, with a unique and enviable mix of talent, capital and infrastructure which make this country the natural home for world-leading innovation. Now, through Sovereign AI, we can use the state’s unique capabilities to double down on these strengths, backing Britain’s founders to scale here in the UK and globally.”</p> <p>Alex Kendall, CEO of <a href="https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=000538068201538516906:yfye0gb_e3i">Wayve</a>, said: “As a business that has successfully grown and launched in the UK, we’re thrilled to support the launch of the Sovereign AI Unit, which will help support emerging companies, attract talent and ultimately ensure UK AI champions can compete on the global stage. We’re excited to see the next generation of British AI companies benefit from the funding opportunities available and join us in supporting the UK’s expanding AI ecosystem.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about UK government AI and technology ventures</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641682/UK-governments-50m-sovereign-AI-fund-bids-to-commercialise-research">UK government’s £500m sovereign AI fund</a> bids to commercialise research.</li> <li>The <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366628066/The-UK-governments-AI-Growth-Zones-strategy-Everything-you-need-to-know">UK government’s AI growth zones strategy</a>: Everything you need to know.</li> <li>Kendall names <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638556/Kendall-names-Barnsley-as-UKs-first-tech-town">Barnsley as UK’s first tech town</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366636163/Google-DeepMind-partners-with-UK-government-to-deliver-AI">Google DeepMind partners with UK government</a> to deliver AI.</li> <li>UK’s AI plan of action <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366636810/UKs-AI-plan-of-action-needs-to-shift-into-overdrive">needs to shift into overdrive</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> The UK government’s £500m Sovereign AI fund announces first cohort of startups backed to boost economic growth and national security https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/London-Westminster-Houses-of-Parliament-exflow-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641874/UKs-Sovereign-AI-supports-supercomputing-and-drug-discovery-AI-startups Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:30:00 GMT <p data-end="4631" data-start="4440">Document version control is no longer a niche enterprise content management (<a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/definition/enterprise-content-management-ECM">ECM</a>) discipline. In modern content platforms, version history is a day-to-day collaboration, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/Biggest-document-management-challenges">recovery and governance</a> control.</p> <p data-end="4903" data-start="4633">The harder question for IT and content leaders is not whether version history exists. It is how long versions should be kept, who can restore them, how milestone or approved versions should be marked and where version history ends and retention or records policy begins.</p> <p data-end="5102" data-start="4905">A sound <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/Why-is-document-version-control-important">version control strategy</a> reduces accidental overwrites, supports audits and approvals, and helps teams recover from mistakes without turning every shared library into an unmanaged archive.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How does document version control work?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How does document version control work?</h2> <p data-end="6649" data-start="6598">Here's how it typically works:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><strong>Version history.</strong> Most content platforms automatically retain earlier versions so teams can review what changed and when.</li> <li><strong>Restore and comparison.</strong> Users can open earlier versions, compare changes and restore a prior copy when needed.</li> <li><strong>Permissions and access control.</strong> Teams can limit who edits, approves, restores or discards earlier versions.</li> <li><strong>Optional check-out/check-in workflows.</strong> Some environments still require files to be checked out before editing, but that is one control option rather than the only model.</li> <li><strong>Named, approved or official versions.</strong> Teams can mark milestone drafts, approvals or publication states so employees know which copy is authoritative.</li> <li><strong>Centralized storage.</strong> Documents remain easier to retrieve, manage and govern when version history lives in the same platform as the working file.</li> <li><strong>Retention-aware governance.</strong> In regulated environments, teams also need to decide which versions must be preserved, hidden or removed over time.</li> </ul> <figure class="main-article-image full-col" data-img-fullsize="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/what_document_version_control_looks_like-f.png"> <img data-src="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/what_document_version_control_looks_like-f_mobile.png" class="lazy" data-srcset="https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/what_document_version_control_looks_like-f_mobile.png 960w,https://www.techtarget.com/rms/onlineimages/what_document_version_control_looks_like-f.png 1280w" alt="Infographic titled “What document version control looks like” showing five approaches: balancing autosave and manual strategies, major and minor versioning, controlled documents, adding labels and purging old copies." height="280" width="560"> <figcaption> <i class="icon pictures" data-icon="z"></i>This graphic shows five common document version control approaches. The full article also covers archiving, parallel documentation and AI-assisted review. </figcaption> <div class="main-article-image-enlarge"> <i class="icon" data-icon="w"></i> </div> </figure> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Document version control examples"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Document version control examples</h2> <p>Content teams can take several approaches to document version control. Each approach corresponds to specific business needs, and organizations often use multiple approaches based on different requirements.</p> <p>The following high-level strategies fit most business cases.</p> <h3>1. The autosave balancing act</h3> <p data-end="8817" data-start="8607">A basic, incremental versioning scheme makes sense for collaborative content that is still in progress, especially when multiple editors are working at once.</p> <p data-end="9084" data-start="8819">But autosave and generous version counts can create more history than teams actually need. Organizations should decide how much version history they need for collaboration, recovery and auditing before default settings create unnecessary review and storage sprawl.</p> <h3>2. Iterative documentation</h3> <p>Documentation often has its own versioning scheme or a tie-in to an external numbering system. Employees can use both major -- 1.0, 2.0, etc. -- and minor -- 2.0, 2.1, etc. -- versions to see which iteration correlates with which state of the editing process.</p> <p>Organizations often use minor versions for iterative drafts, while major versions represent final, approved documents. Afterward, content teams can purge minor copies, which become irrelevant when the major version publishes.</p> <h3>3. Controlled documentation</h3> <p>For controlled documents, the organization has one official version of a document. Even if one is newer, every other copy is either a draft or a historical record. When an approved version becomes the current one, content teams can place it in a central location, and it <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/opinion/Avoid-data-sprawl-with-a-single-source-of-truth">becomes the source of truth</a> going forward. Content teams should keep a history of these copies to show when each version was effective if questions about past states arise.</p> <p>While this approach is like iterative documentation, controlled documentation has a single location for the official version and archives previous official editions. These approaches also differ by the effective date, as published versions remain valid for some time. If content teams know which one was official during a specific time, this versioning can help with audit trails.</p> <h3>4. Labeling</h3> <p>Content teams can label specific versions in this scenario to represent status and relevance. This approach enables people to find a specific version for a particular state in the editing process. Used well, labels can also help teams distinguish between working drafts, milestone reviews and officially approved versions.</p> <p>While <i>approved</i>, <i>original</i> and <i>current</i> are obvious labels, other naming conventions may be useful. For example, a team might use <i>CEO comments</i> to track a document where the CEO gave specific guidance. Labels can also mark key variations of a document. If an HR policy applies to employees in a specific country, the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/tip/Best-practices-for-HR-data-compliance">HR department could label the document</a> to specify that location. Specific labels can ensure content teams don't mistakenly purge useful older documents.</p> <h3>5. Purging old versions</h3> <p>This example is part of most version control approaches. Old drafts lack value for organizations, and unapproved or unofficial statements risk losing context and causing confusion.</p> <p>Even for collaborative content, content teams should determine if they must keep all drafts for any time. Organizations can benefit from a strategy to dispose of outdated and unnecessary documents and know which older versions to keep. Labeling and major versioning also come into play here. If the ECM system doesn't support those capabilities, content teams can move key versions out of working directories into a published, or archived, location.</p> <h3>6. Automatically archiving versions</h3> <p data-end="10247" data-start="10033">Organizations with stricter governance or audit requirements can automate how older versions are handled after a milestone such as approval or publication.</p> <p data-end="10453" data-start="10249">The goal is not simply to move drafts into an archive folder. It is to keep active workspaces clean while preserving the versions the organization may still need for audit, policy or operational reasons.</p> <h3>7. Creating parallel documentation for specialized teams</h3> <p>During complex projects, multiple teams may work on different aspects of the same document. For example, a product manual might require input from both technical writers and marketing teams.</p> <p>To speed up document creation and editing, organizations can create parallel versions labeled by team or purpose. When all teams finalize their contributions, they can merge those final versions into a single document.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> AI can help teams review document changes faster, but it should support rather than replace formal version history. </figure> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <h3>8. Using AI to summarize changes</h3> <p data-end="11245" data-start="11074">AI can help teams review document changes faster, but it should support rather than replace formal version history.</p> <p data-end="11507" data-start="11247">In high-volume environments, AI summaries can help users understand what changed between drafts more quickly. But organizations still need authoritative version history, clear approval states and a documented policy for what gets preserved, labeled or purged.</p> <p>Not every type of document can fit into a specific bucket. Sometimes, content teams need a hybrid approach and may use many of these examples in their version control strategy. Yet, when these teams understand the purposes of different types of documents, they can identify the proper versioning approach.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">What leaders should decide about version history</h3> <p>Version control is not just a collaboration convenience. Leaders should decide how much history teams need for recovery, which versions count as official, who can restore older drafts and when older versions should be archived or removed.</p> </div> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Questions to ask before deployment"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Questions to ask before deployment</h2> <p>When picking the appropriate document versioning strategy, content teams should ask several questions in advance. Those questions are the following:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>What goal does the organization want to achieve?</b> Knowing the goal is the most critical step. Sometimes, the goal is to revisit older versions as documents evolve. Other times, organizations want to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/Why-version-control-is-necessary-in-digital-asset-management">preserve specific versions</a>.</li> <li><b>What does the organization's ECM software do by default?</b> Default behavior shows a vendor's plan when it implements versioning. If the software allows 50 or more versions, the vendor likely plans for collaborative content. Also, versioning for formal processes may require additional effort. Adopting a <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/Best-enterprise-content-management-software">new ECM service</a> to improve versioning is rarely cost-effective, so content teams should understand their software's features to form a strategy.</li> <li><strong>How should version history support governance and recovery?</strong> Teams should decide which versions matter most, who should be able to restore them and when older versions should be hidden, archived or removed.</li> <li><b>Where should people look for documents?</b> Content teams must determine where employees should search for official versions and if everyone should have access to drafts. For authorized employees, content teams should keep the search simple.</li> <li><b>How important are old versions?</b> If old versions have little value after a week or a month, organizations can benefit from a strategy to delete or hide these documents.</li> <li><b>Can IT teams automate the versioning strategy?</b> Teams may find success with automation. Requiring multiple people to take extra actions and follow specific versioning controls poses risks. People forget, rush and may not see value in taking the extra step. An unfollowed versioning strategy is worse than not having one.</li> </ul> <p>IT and content leaders should treat version control as a governance decision, not just a platform feature. The right approach balances collaboration speed, recovery, approvals and compliance without turning every document library into a permanent archive.</p> <p><b>Editor's note: </b><i>This article was updated to reflect current collaboration, governance and version-control practices.</i></p> <p><i>Laurence Hart is director of consulting services at CGI Federal and has more than 20 years of IT experience.</i></p> <p><i>Christine Campbell is a freelance writer specializing in business and B2B technology.</i></p> </section> Document version control strategies help teams manage collaboration, approvals, retention and recovery across modern content platforms. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/folder-files08.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/tip/5-examples-of-document-version-control Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:19:00 GMT <p>On 27 April, the government backed security certification scheme, <a href="https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/cyberessentials/overview">Cyber Essentials</a> v3.3, takes effect and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/Multifactor-authentication-Examples-and-strategic-use-cases">multi-factor authentication</a> (MFA) becomes a pass-or-fail requirement for the first time.</p> <p>If a cloud service your organisation uses offers MFA and you have not enabled it, you fail. No discretion, no partial credit, no route to remediate inside the assessment cycle.</p> <p>This is the right call. I want to say that clearly, because what follows is a problem with the implementation, not the policy. MFA is the single most effective control against credential-based attacks, and the scheme has needed to stop tolerating its absence for a long time. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, which developed <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366626069/Cyber-Essentials-certifications-rising-slowly-but-steadily">Cyber Essentials</a> and certification company, <a href="https://iasme.co.uk/">IASME</a> have got this decision right.</p> <p>But in the assessments we have conducted this year, I have seen two organisations that will hit a wall on 27 April, and I do not think they are unusual.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Train company could not deploy MFA"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Train company could not deploy MFA</h2> <p>The first is a train operating company in the South East. Station operations rooms run on shared terminals where staff rotate through shifts in time-critical conditions. A transport union raised formal concerns that MFA would introduce delays at the keyboard that could affect train operations and, in their view, the safety of train movements.</p> <p>The company listened and chose not to enable MFA in those environments. Under v3.2 they passed, with the relevant questions marked as non-compliant but not fatal. Under <a href="https://iasme.co.uk/articles/upcoming-changes-to-the-cyber-essentials-scheme-april-2026-update/">Cyber Essentials v3.3</a> they will fail.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Charity run by volunteers faces MFA hurdle"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Charity run by volunteers faces MFA hurdle</h2> <p>The second is a nationally known charity with hundreds of high street shops. The shops are staffed largely by volunteers many of whom work a few hours a week, and staff turnover is high.</p> <p>The cost and management overhead of enrolling every volunteer onto MFA, using personal phones they may not have and authenticator apps they would not keep, was considered prohibitive. So MFA was never switched on. Same story: they passed under v3.2. Under v3.3 they fail.</p> <p>Neither of these organisations is ignoring security. Both made considered decisions based on how their people actually work. The problem is not that they do not want to comply. It is that the standard toolkit of MFA methods, including SMS codes, authenticator apps on personal phones, and push notifications, does not fit a six-person shared terminal that has to be available in seconds, or a volunteer workforce that changes every week.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="FIDO2 could offer solutions"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>FIDO2 could offer solutions</h2> <p>The frustrating part is that there is a solution, and it is already proven in healthcare, manufacturing and retail. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/feature/Apple-Microsoft-Google-expand-FIDO2-passwordless-support?">FIDO2 authentication</a> delivered through NFC badge-taps lets a staff member authenticate in under two seconds: tap a badge, enter a short PIN, session opens.</p> <p>It satisfies the MFA requirement by combining possession of the badge with knowledge of the PIN. It is faster than typing a password. Crucially, it is compliant, because each badge is enrolled as that individual's unique FIDO2 credential, so the Cyber Essentials requirement for unique user accounts is met. Shared keys or shared PINs would not work. Individual badges do.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Need for better guidance"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Need for better guidance</h2> <p>v3.3 explicitly recognises FIDO2 authenticators and passkeys as valid MFA methods. The compliance path is clear. What is missing is anyone telling the organisations most affected that this path exists.</p> <p>That is the gap that must&nbsp;close. The NCSC and IASME have made the right policy decision; the scheme would be weaker without it.</p> <p>&nbsp;But implementation guidance for shared-terminal, shift-based and high-turnover environments is thin, and these organisations are running out of time to find their way through it. Many of them hold Cyber Essentials because it is required for government contracts or in their supply chains; losing certification has a direct commercial cost.</p> <p>The answer is not to soften the requirement. The answer is to make sure no one fails for lack of information about how to meet it.</p> <p><i><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathankrause/">Jonathan Krause</a> is Founder and Managing Director of Forensic Control</i></p> </section> Some organisations risk losing their Cyber Essentials certifications because of difficulties implementing multi-factor authentication, but there is a solution. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/German/Hero-Authentifizierung-By-Have-a-nice-day-Adobe-02.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641782/Cyber-Essentials-closes-the-MFA-loophole-but-leaves-some-organisations-adrift Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:03:00 GMT <p>The UK government has set up a £500m Sovereign AI Unit to turn British artificial intelligence (AI) research into companies that can stoke economic growth.</p> <p>Technology secretary <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638556/Kendall-names-Barnsley-as-UKs-first-tech-town">Liz Kendall</a> is launching the unit today, at the King’s Cross headquarters of self-driving car company Wayve. In a speech to an invited audience of investors, founders, researchers and policymakers, she will say: “If we believe AI is absolutely critical to our economic prosperity and our national security, which I do, then this fund, and the even bigger ambition behind it, is one of the single most important things this government will do for the future of this country.</p> <p>“We believe in Britain and we are betting on Britain. We are backing our brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs so we seize the benefits of this technology to reshape Britain for the benefit of all.”</p> <p>Kendall is expected to announce the first companies receiving backing from the fund at today’s event.</p> <p>The <a target="_blank" href="https://www.sovereignai.gov.uk/" rel="noopener">website</a> in support of the fund features the standard icons of British computer science – <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366627664/Ada-Lovelace-use-market-forces-to-professionalise-AI-assurance">Ada Lovelace</a>, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366637589/Alan-Turing-Institute-fellowship-programme-boosted-by-1m-from-Meta">Alan Turing</a> and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Tim-Berners-Lees-Solid-explained-What-you-need-to-know">Tim Berners-Lee</a> – with the tag line “built here”.</p> <p>The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said, in a statement: “The UK already has world-class research, talent and strong data assets. UK AI startups raised £6bn in venture capital last year and, just three months into 2026, have already raised more than half of that figure again.”</p> <p>The Sovereign AI Unit will, said DSIT, act as a venture capital fund, making investments in UK AI firms, using the “unique capabilities of the state to go beyond traditional funding models”.</p> <p>The fund was trailed in November 2025 in a <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366634738/UK-government-outlines-next-wave-of-AI-investment-plans">raft of government AI investment plans</a> aimed at positioning the UK as an “AI superpower”. Those included the creation of the Sovereign AI Unit, chaired by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.balderton.com/team/james-wise/" rel="noopener">venture capitalist James Wise</a>.</p> <p>The idea seems to be to use the state strategically to boost the commercial potential of UK AI startups and early-stage companies. “Too many high-potential firms still struggle to make the leap from breakthrough research to large-scale commercial success. Sovereign AI is designed to close that gap,” said DSIT.</p> <p>The unit is said to betoken a shift in approach, from fragmented support to focused, long-term backing of AI firms operating in strategically important areas, including those relevant to economic growth, public services and national resilience.</p> <p>DSIT drew attention in its statement to the launch event’s host, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366583672/Government-jumps-on-Wayve-self-drive-funding-boost">Wayve</a>, which is said to have grown from two engineers with a smartphone attached to the roof of a Renault Twizy to a £6.6bn British AI success story.</p> <p>Wayve is focused on AI for self-driving vehicles. It attracted <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366583672/Government-jumps-on-Wayve-self-drive-funding-boost">$1bn investment from Nvidia, Softbank and Microsoft</a> in May 2024. At that time, the government linked the funding to its promotion of self-driving vehicles.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Bridging the gap between investment, innovation and real-world outcomes will be critical if the UK is to see meaningful returns and maintain its edge in an increasingly competitive global landscape </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Rupal Karia, Celonis</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>Then transport secretary for the Conservative government, Mark Harper, said at the time: “<a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366550892/Government-pumps-185m-into-autonomous-vehicles">Self-driving cars</a> will revolutionise road travel, making it safer and more convenient for everyone. Our Automated Vehicles Bill paves the way for their safe use in the UK, and opens the door for investment into innovative British companies like Wayve.”</p> <p>As well as the investment money, DSIT said sovereign AI would provide direct access to the UK’s fastest AI supercomputers, specialist research and development (R&amp;D) support, and grants. There will also be on offer “direct engagement with government on procurement opportunities”, alongside help to deal with and shape regulation.</p> <p>The Sovereign AI Unit’s chair has been describing its development and ethos on his website. In February, Wise wrote: “We are … not a grant-making institution. We are here to invest our resources and capital on a commercial basis. There are many well-funded programmes to support R&amp;D in the UK, such as Innovate UK, Aria and others. Every decision we make is with the view that the taxpayer should be rewarded for taking a risk and supporting AI companies.”</p> <p>From a business software industry perspective, Rupal Karia, general manager for Northern Europe and MEA at process mining company <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/news/252527309/Celonis-aims-to-deepen-and-democratize-process-mining">Celonis</a>, said the launch of the funding unit was a clear statement of intent that the UK government wants the country to push forward in the AI race, at a time when global powers are competing hard to attract and retain AI innovators.</p> <p>“The UK already has many of the right ingredients in place, from world-class research and a vibrant startup ecosystem to a deep bench of talent. Initiatives like this help turn that potential into lasting economic impact,” said Karia.</p> <p>“The next challenge will be pace. The real economic prize lies in how quickly research breakthroughs are translated into tangible improvements, whether that’s higher productivity, better public services or more competitive industries. Bridging the gap between investment, innovation and real-world outcomes will be critical if the UK is to see meaningful returns and maintain its edge in an increasingly competitive global landscape.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about UK government AI and technology ventures</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>The <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366628066/The-UK-governments-AI-Growth-Zones-strategy-Everything-you-need-to-know">UK government’s AI growth zones strategy</a>: Everything you need to know.</li> <li>Kendall names <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638556/Kendall-names-Barnsley-as-UKs-first-tech-town">Barnsley as UK’s first tech town</a>.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366636163/Google-DeepMind-partners-with-UK-government-to-deliver-AI">Google DeepMind partners with UK government</a> to deliver AI.</li> <li>UK’s AI plan of action <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366636810/UKs-AI-plan-of-action-needs-to-shift-into-overdrive">needs to shift into overdrive</a>.</li> </ul> </div> </div> The UK government is launching a £500m Sovereign AI Unit to boost artificial intelligence startups and drive economic growth through strategic and long-term investments https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/HeroImages/London-Westminster-Parliament-government-fazon-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641682/UK-governments-50m-sovereign-AI-fund-bids-to-commercialise-research Thu, 16 Apr 2026 05:35:00 GMT <p>Ordnance Survey (OS) has <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/news/366634007/Snowflake-delivers-slew-of-AI-tools-introduces-new-ones">worked with Snowflake</a> to develop Intelligent Flood Readiness, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered data model for assessing the impact of flooding. The model has identified that 1.2 million homes in England are at risk of falling outside flood protection measures, many in some of the most deprived parts of the country.</p> <p>The model’s main use is in policymaking, where it is able to support analysis of more granular data instead of treating wide, geographic areas as homogenous when assessing flood risk and remediation. According to Snowflake and OS, policymakers could use the model to identify plans for period properties with basements, for example, and apply that protocol to areas where these properties are shown to exist. It also offers policymakers the ability to assess clusters of vulnerability, especially when these areas straddle arbitrary boundaries such as local authorities or flood risk management plan (FRMP) zones.</p> <p>The model combines OS’s buildings data with a range of government data and current FRMPs. It combines six entirely separate, critical data streams into a single, shared “structural intelligence” layer.</p> <p>The initial analysis involved bringing together OS’s building datasets with the Indices of Deprivation in England. Snowflake and OS said the model was able to identify where physical vulnerability (building height and type) intersects with social risk. This was then layered against <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366579713/Environment-Agency-dumps-Fujitsu-in-sign-of-Post-Office-scandal-taking-its-toll">Environment Agency</a> (EA) flood data, the EA’s Rivers and Sea defended and undefended flood risk extents, and an AI-driven text analysis of over 3,000 pages of statutory FRMP documents.</p> <p>Snowflake and OS said the model estimated that up to 68% of the buildings identified could be highly vulnerable to the after-effects of flooding – at elevated flood risk, but also located in deprived areas and potentially lacking the resources and social infrastructure to help recover quickly. A contributory factor is likely to be that as much as 84% of these undefended buildings pre-date 2001 – before legislation ensured flood risk was factored into planning permissions.</p> <p>Yorkshire and the Humber region were idenified by the model as having some of the highest concentrations of vulnerable, undefended properties.</p> <p>Additionally, the analysis based on the model suggests that 15% of the at-risk premises date from before 1919, and 23% from 1919 to 1959, so were potentially built before their location became a flood risk – underlining just how dynamic England’s natural and built environment is, as captured by OS’s <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searcherp/podcast/Is-geospatial-data-the-real-game-changer-for-digital-twins">geospatial data</a>.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about Ordnance Survey</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Interview: Manish Jethwa, chief technology officer, <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366624713/Interview-Manish-Jethwa-chief-technology-officer-Ordnance-Survey">Ordnance Survey</a>: The UK mapping service has moved on a long way from paper maps as it now looks to use artificial intelligence to understand, interpret and derive insights from geographical data.</li> <li>How data sharing and collaboration can solve great challenges: Daniel Hirst and Arjan Dhaliwal from <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/How-data-sharing-and-collaboration-can-solve-great-challenges">Ordnance Survey</a> argue for the value of data sharing, collaboration and data skills enhancement to address social, ecological economic problems.</li> </ul> </div> </div> <p>Tim Chilton, managing geospatial consultant at OS, said: “Ordnance Survey is excited to collaborate with Snowflake to develop an innovative AI model that could help Local Authorities better understand, plan for and manage floods.</p> <p>“Built on OS’s authoritative and trusted geospatial data and developed using Snowflake’s technology, the model provides insights into how well areas and properties are protected and where to prioritise investment in critical flood defences,” he added.</p> <p>“By delivering geospatial intelligence difficult to derive manually, decision-makers can access data-driven, actionable insights – without the burden of analysing endless spreadsheets. The model maps vulnerable zones and identifies areas at greatest risk, helping local government shape policy, direct resources and safeguard communities.”</p> <p>The data also suggests that 85% of at-risk, undefended buildings are vulnerable to surface water flooding, rather than river or coastal flooding. Snowflake and OS said this implies that high-density, multi-unit residential buildings may account for more at-risk households than those in more obviously threatened seafront or riverside locations.</p> <p>Fawad Qureshi, global field chief technology officer at Snowflake, said: “Data is at the heart of making informed decisions. As this project shows, it’s rare that one body holds all the relevant data or that this data is in the same format. But we’re now in an era where technology can bring together the right people and the right data to collaborate on making better-informed decisions.”</p> <p>Such data could be used, for instance, to assess surface water infrastructure investment such as better drainage, given that most properties are at risk from surface water flooding.</p> AI-based tool developed with Snowflake improves policymakers’ understanding of properties at risk of flooding https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Car-Flooding-Fotolia.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641815/Ordnance-Survey-works-with-Snowflake-to-tackle-flood-risk Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:30:00 GMT <p>Salesforce is disclosing more of its agentic AI “ecosystem” at its TDX developer conference in San Francisco this week, as its executives reject common IT industry talk of <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Low-code-and-AI-challenge-the-reign-of-SaaS">software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise applications being imperilled by artificial intelligence (AI)</a>.</p> <p>The supplier said, in a general news statement for the conference, that its decision – taken “two-and-a-half years ago”, in late 2023 – to rebuild its code base for agentic AI has taken it beyond traditional user interface navigation of business software.</p> <p>“Instead of burying capabilities behind a UI [user interface], we now expose them so the entire platform is programmable and accessible from anywhere,” it said in the statement.</p> <p>“Sales workflows, service processes and every other capability Salesforce has built over 25 years” can now be built on by agents, as well as humans, according to the company.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Headless 360 platform is next generation of enterprise development"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Headless 360 platform is next generation of enterprise development</h2> <p>In a pre-conference press briefing, some Salesforce executives indicated how the supplier’s thinking is developing in the face of the growth of AI in enterprise applications.</p> <p>Joe Inzerillo, president of enterprise and AI technology at Salesforce, said: “The biggest thing that we’re working on right now is the next generation of the platform, which is the Headless 360 platform. This really leans into the fact that coding agents have just gotten really good.”</p> <p>He said Salesforce envisages “humans and agents working together to build other agents”.</p> <p>In its news statement, the company said: “For developers, headless means you can build on Salesforce any way you want. More than 60 new <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/How-the-Model-Context-Protocol-simplifies-AI-development">MCP</a> [Model Context Protocol] tools and 30+ preconfigured coding skills give your coding agent complete, live access to your entire platform, directly in the tools you already use.”</p> <p>Madhav Thattai, executive vice-president and general manager for Agentforce, said, about coding agents: “We hear from our community that they’re starting to use these tools a lot more. Whether it is our admins [or] our Salesforce developers, they are starting to shift a lot of development to using these coding agents to perform a lot of their work.</p> <p>“And so it’s really important that we set up an infrastructure that works well with these coding agents and that requires that composability. It requires that headless architecture at every single level.</p> <p>“There are also people who traditionally have not developed in the Salesforce ecosystem, who are now very involved in the use cases. There are now new people who are engaging with [us], and they tend to use these tools quite significantly across that development ecosystem.</p> <p>“So, that’s really exciting for us because it means that the tent is expanding.</p> <p>“And the people that are deep in Salesforce are now starting to use some of these new tools, and so it’s really important that we set up our infrastructure in a way that everyone can now participate effectively using these coding agents, because we really believe that is what the future of development is going to look like.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Challenging the ‘SaaS is dead’ narrative"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Challenging the ‘SaaS is dead’ narrative</h2> <p>In response to a question about how Salesforce’s so-called Headless 360 initiative challenges the narrative that SaaS is dead, Thattai said: “As a business, the experiences we build with SaaS applications are really evolving, but we believe very strongly that our customers rely on Salesforce for the context, for the workflow, for the engagement layer, to build these agentic systems using incredible tools like [Agentforce] Vibes and with this headless platform to drive outcomes.”</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> SaaS is evolving, but there’s still real value to be delivered at scale because not everybody’s going to build everything themselves; it just doesn’t make any sense for them to do so </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Joe Inzerillo, Salesforce</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>Inzerillo added: “I think it comes down to the core principle of what companies do and how they differentiate themselves. Maybe you could vibe code yourself a SaaS application, but who’s going to maintain it? Who’s going to add features?</p> <p>“I think the notion that every company is just going to build everything that they need to use themselves seems pretty crazy when you think about it, because it’s just a huge amount of expense, and a huge amount of time and energy and brain power, that companies would be focusing on [outside] their core business.</p> <p>“We feel our job is to lift companies up. By making our platform headless, by participating in that ecosystem, it makes it easier for companies to drive their value proposition and their business value using our tools.</p> <p>“SaaS is evolving, but there’s still real value to be delivered at scale to people, because not everybody’s going to build everything themselves; it just doesn’t make any sense for them to do so.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Unified marketplace for agentic tools"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Unified marketplace for agentic tools</h2> <p>At TDX, the supplier is ramping up AgentExchange, which it describes as a unified marketplace that brings together Salesforce <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/AppExchange-acquisitions-key-to-the-future-of-Salesforce">AppExchange</a>, Slack Marketplace and the Agentforce ecosystem. It was originally <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620372/TDX-2025-Salesforce-vaunts-Agentforce-2dx-as-evolved-agentic-AI-platform">launched in 2025</a>.</p> <p>Its stated rationale for AgentExchange is: “In the agentic enterprise, work often extends beyond one team, channel, system, or solution. A sales agent might need a data connector to access Salesforce data, a workflow to coordinate approvals in Slack, and a sub-agent to surface account insights and next best actions through Slackbot. Until now, finding and activating each of those solutions meant navigating different surfaces and flows, breaking momentum across teams.”</p> <p>The supplier said that AI agents on Slack have grown by 300% since January 2026. “Slackbot is the front door to the agentic enterprise. It knows your users, knows your agents and orchestrates them to get work done. Your people do not need to know which agent handles which task. They ask, and Slackbot calls the right one.”</p> <p>Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021 and has been pushing <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366637263/Slackbots-agentic-AI-makeover-gives-users-their-copilot">Slackbot forward as an agentic AI assistant technology</a> for Slack users since Dreamforce 2025, but with fresh vigour since January 2026.</p> <p>AgentExchange is said to bring together 10,000-plus Salesforce apps and experts from companies like DocuSign for AI agreements and Zoom for collaboration and meetings.</p> <p>Salesforce says it includes more than 2,600 Slack apps and agents from technology companies like Notion for surfacing knowledge, Linear for tracking development work and Cursor for executing code changes.</p> <p>One of the customers endorsing the AgentExchange initiative is Siemens. Kurt Kuelz, senior vice-president of global customer success at Siemens Digital Industries, said: “Our workforce spans 4,500 professionals globally supporting six major commercial software platforms, managing thousands of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366614323/Certinia-co-founder-discusses-generative-AI-for-ERP-Salesforce">Certinia</a> projects. The imperative is clear: identify deliverable discrepancies early to minimise risk. Certinia’s Project Agent, built on Salesforce, is making that a reality.”</p> <p>Salesforce has also launched an AgentExchange Builders Initiative, which it described as a $50m pledge to help its partners turn ideas into revenue. This initiative is coupled with an AgentExchange Go-To-Market App, which enables private offers, unified billing and automated provisioning.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about Salesforce TDX</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li> <p>Salesforce releases Agentforce dev tools, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/news/366641853/Salesforce-releases-Agentforce-dev-tools-updates-Agent-Fabric">updates Agent Fabric</a>: providing more observability, availability and some declarative control over AI agents.</p> </li> <li> <p>At TDX 2025, Salesforce executives presented its <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620471/Salesforce-execs-at-TDX-25-Agentforce-a-whole-system-AI-play">Agentforce agentic AI technology as a ‘whole system’ approach</a> not hung up on large language models, and <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620372/TDX-2025-Salesforce-vaunts-Agentforce-2dx-as-evolved-agentic-AI-platform">unveiled Agentforce 2DX as further development of it autonomously agentic AI platform</a>.</p> </li> <li>The soaraway success of GenAI has obscured <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/opinion/Salesforce-TDX-reveals-how-consumer-and-enterprise-AI-differ">how enterprise AI differs from consumer AI</a>. At TDX 2024, Salesforce threw those differences into some relief.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> Salesforce paints a picture of software as a service evolving in an agentic direction, at its developer conference in San Francisco, with AgentExchange as an ecosystem lubricant https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Salesforce-tower-sanfrancisco-adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641628/TDX-2026-Salesforce-depicts-Saas-as-in-agentic-evolution Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 GMT <p>The UK is over-reliant on a small number of big tech companies to provide critical datacentres, software and digital infrastructure, placing national security at risk, according to a report by the Open Rights Group (ORG).</p> <p>The report, which is backed by a number of MPs, warned that the UK’s dependency on US big tech companies places the UK at risk, as relations between the two countries have become strained.</p> <p>Rifts between the UK and the US over the conduct of the US and Israel’s war with Iran, if they are exacerbated, could expose the UK to threats of US sanctions that could impact critical infrastructure, the report said.</p> <p>Big tech companies have used their power and resources to control markets, limit innovation and lobby government, allowing them to capture the market for UK’s critical infrastructure, said the lobbying group, adding: “This over-reliance on foreign companies has become an urgent issue of national security as US foreign policy actions are creating geopolitical uncertainty.”</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Risk of sanctions"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Risk of sanctions</h2> <p>The US has powers to issue sanctions that can be used to stop companies supplying technology services to government institutions or individuals, which could place critical services at risk in the event of a dispute with the US.</p> <p>The US used its powers to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2p19l24g2o">sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC)</a>, leading Microsoft to <a href="https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-triggers-dutch-concerns-dependence-us-tech">block the email account of the ICC’s chief prosecutor</a> after the US objected to the ICC issuing warrants targeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.</p> <p>“If the UK’s relationship with the US were to deteriorate – for example, over Greenland or Iran – the US could leverage power through its corporate dominance of the UK’s critical infrastructure,” the report said.</p> <p>The UK also risks exposure to surveillance of sovereign data through US cloud services, which US agencies can access under the US Cloud Act, and Chinese tech companies, which under China’s national intelligence laws, must assist the Chinese government and intelligence services.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Risk of lock-in"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Risk of lock-in</h2> <p>The UK government is dependent on strategic IT suppliers and consultancies that have led to government departments being “locked in” to a particular supplier’s technology, while being vulnerable to overcharging and cost overruns, the report argued.</p> <p>The Competition and Markets Authority estimated in a <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688b8891fdde2b8f73469544/final_decision_report.pdf">report last year</a> that the UK could be paying up to £500m a year more for cloud services than it would if the market were more competitive.</p> <p>The Open Rights Group urged the UK government to follow EU countries, including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark, which are making strategic investments in technology that is based on open standards and publicly available open source software. It argued that investing in open source software, which must be made publicly available free of charge, will boost the economy and boost innovation, citing EU research that suggested that every £1 invested in open source technology produces £4 in economic payback.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="UK should promote sovereign cloud"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>UK should promote sovereign cloud</h2> <p>Lib Dem MP Tim Clement-Jones told Computer Weekly that the government should change its procurement rules to assist UK cloud providers to scale up: “We need to change our procurement rules to actually discriminate in favour of UK providers.”</p> <p>He added that the government should provide more encouragement to open source software providers and to the development of sovereign AI models: “There seems to be very little real holistic sort of strategy on all of this,” he said.</p> <p>Labour MP Clive Lewis said that the UK government’s dependence on big tech companies, such as Palantir, had left the UK “dangerously vulnerable”, saying: “With increasing geopolitical uncertainty as a result of US and Israeli military actions, the UK must ensure that it has control over its critical digital infrastructure. Digital sovereignty must be a priority.”</p> <p>Sian Berry, an MP for the Green Party, said that digital sovereignty should be a top government priority. “As global events continue to cause instability, we must build much more resilience to protect our critical digital infrastructure from the potential threat of sanctions and service withdrawal,” she added.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about UK data sovereignty&nbsp;</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366627724/UK-government-plans-to-ramp-up-sovereign-computer-capacity">Isambard-AI and Dawn are two of the supercomputers</a> that mark the beginning of the UK’s goal to deliver 420 Exaflops of computing power by 2030.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640828/CMA-to-launch-strategic-market-status-investigation-into-Microsoft-Amazon-Web-Services-off-the-hook">CMA to investigate whether Microsoft should be given strategic market status</a>. Amazon escaped, but both companies will need to make changes to egress fees and interoperability.</li> <li>We look at the political and government <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Breaking-the-stranglehold-Responses-to-data-sovereignty-risk">responses to risks around data sovereignty and massive dependence on the three US hyperscalers</a> – AWS, Azure and GCP – in the UK and Europe.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> UK government urged to follow European countries by backing technology based on open standards https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/German/Hero-Data-Sovereignty-Natalia-03.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366641487/UK-reliance-on-US-big-tech-companies-is-national-security-risk-claims-report Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:00:00 GMT <p>The AI debate right now centres almost entirely on models - which LLM is smarter, whether they'll be commoditised, whether <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366628322/OpenAI-now-offers-open-AI-models-but-CIOs-need-to-assess-the-risk">OpenAI</a> or <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/What-CIOs-can-learn-from-Anthropics-safety-pullback">Anthropic</a> or <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366636163/Google-DeepMind-partners-with-UK-government-to-deliver-AI">Google</a> wins the arms race. These are real questions. But they're not the most important ones. The most important question is what sits between the model and the outcome. And right now, that layer barely exists.</p> <p>Call it the <i>context engine</i>.</p> <p>Here's the problem with a genius in a room. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have both used some version of this analogy - imagine having a hundred brilliant minds working on your hardest problems. It's a compelling image. But a genius without context is just a smart person operating in a vacuum. Hand them a legal brief with no background on the client, the jurisdiction, the negotiating history, the personalities involved - and their output is generic at best. The intelligence is real. The usefulness is limited.</p> <p>What changes everything isn't adding more geniuses. It's the briefing before they walk into the room.</p> <p>That briefing - the situational awareness, the organisational memory, the understanding of how a specific user or company operates in the world - is what a context engine provides. And it's almost entirely missing from how most people are using AI today. We are essentially handing brilliant minds a task with no background and wondering why the outputs feel impressive but imprecise.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Lessons from Google's history"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Lessons from Google's history</h2> <p>Think about how Google evolved. In the early days, the metric everyone tracked was index size - how many websites had Google crawled. More pages meant better search. That was the commodity race, and Google won it. But analysts eventually realised, that did not give Google a long-term sustainable advantage. That came from the fact that Google knew you. It understood what you were actually looking for in the context of everything else you'd ever searched for. The index was replicable. The user relationship wasn't.</p> <p>We are in the index phase of AI right now. Everyone is measuring parameters, benchmarks, reasoning scores. These matter. But they are not where the lasting value will accumulate. The context layer is.</p> <p>Consider what context unlocks in practice. <a href="https://informaplc-my.sharepoint.com/personal/bill_goodwin_informa_com/Documents/Documents/Computer%20Weekly%20Files/2026%20Documents/2026%20Opinions/Judah%20Taub/%20Unloxcking%20Hidden%20Talent%20LinkedIN%20Post.%20docx.docx">A law firm's AI</a> doesn't just need to know the law - it needs to know this client's risk tolerance, this partner's drafting style, twenty years of case history, and how the opposing firm tends to negotiate. A <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366638839/Half-of-Googles-software-development-now-AI-generated">software team's AI</a> doesn't just need to write clean code - it needs to understand the architecture decisions made three years ago, the technical debt the team has chosen to live with, and what "done" means in this organisation. The raw intelligence of the underlying model matters far less than whether it knows where it is.</p> <p>Here's why this is also a business story. LLMs, for all their impressiveness, are ultimately replicable. Given enough capital and talent, you can train a competitive model. That's not a dismissal of what OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have built - it's an observation about the nature of the asset. The race between them is real, and the outcome matters. But it's a race.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Why context matters in AI"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Why context matters in AI</h2> <p>Context is different. Context requires users and organisations to actively choose to share information - their workflows, their history, their preferences, their institutional knowledge. That act of sharing creates switching costs. Once an organisation's context lives inside a system, leaving that system means starting over. The context doesn't transfer. That's an advantage that compounds over time in a way that model performance alone does not.</p> <p>This is also why organisational context is more valuable than individual context. An individual user can rebuild their relationship with a new tool relatively quickly. An organisation cannot. The switching cost is institutional - it lives across teams, processes, and years of accumulated data. Whoever captures that first, and earns the trust required to hold it, is sitting on something that looks less like software and more like infrastructure.</p> <p>The LLM debate will continue. It's not unimportant. But the next phase of AI value creation won't be won by whoever builds the smartest model in isolation. It will be won by whoever figures out how to make these models truly situationally aware - equipped not just with what they've learned, but with where they are, who they're serving, and what actually matters in this specific moment.</p> <p>The context engine is coming. The question is who builds it, and who owns what it learns.</p> <p><i><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/judah-taub-3773247b/">Judah Taub</a> is the founder and managing partner of <a href="https://www.hetz.vc/">Hetz Ventures</a>, an Israeli early-stage venture capital firm specialising in cybersecurity, data, and AI infrastructure.</i></p> </section> Organisations don’t need more powerful AI models they need AI that can understand context of problems https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/German/Ai-KI-robot-hand-globe-human-hand-PB-Studio-Photo-Adobe.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/AIs-dumb-genius-problem Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:15:00 GMT <p>With its data processing and analytical power, AI is making business intelligence more productive and transforming it from a primarily retrospective data analysis process to one that also provides proactive, forward-looking analytics.</p> <p>In the past, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/feature/5-valuable-business-intelligence-use-cases-for-organizations">BI applications</a> mostly focused on analyzing current and historical data to understand the state of the business -- descriptive analytics. But that's only part of the story data analytics can tell. More advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics offer insights into future business scenarios and recommend actions to achieve desired business outcomes. AI has lowered the barriers to deploying BI systems with these capabilities. It also better enables <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/tip/Examples-of-real-time-analytics-for-businesses">real-time data analysis</a> that gives decision-makers more up-to-date information on business developments and trends.</p> <p>In addition, AI streamlines the analytics process for BI users. Generative AI (GenAI) tools and simplified UIs based on natural language processing reduce manual BI query coding and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/tip/Generative-AI-capabilities-increase-data-analytics-value">help users explore data sets</a>. Agentic AI goes a step further, autonomously monitoring data, identifying patterns and running analytics. AI agents can also be configured to initiate actions based on analytics results.</p> <p>AI's potential to revolutionize BI applications is real. The technical and management challenges are also real, but not insurmountable. Successfully integrating AI technology into BI systems is achievable and promises to increase the value of an organization's <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/tip/How-to-build-an-effective-business-intelligence-strategy">business intelligence strategy</a>, as explained in more detail below.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Benefits of using AI in BI initiatives"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Benefits of using AI in BI initiatives</h2> <p>AI brings new value to BI applications in various ways. Most notably, organizations can gain these benefits:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Increased productivity.</b> AI effectively automates data analysis tasks and repetitive, time-consuming <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/data-preparation">data preparation</a> work, enabling BI teams to handle more applications. It also frees business users <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/tip/Best-practices-for-self-service-analytics">running self-service BI applications</a> to focus on strategic analytics work that requires their business knowledge and experience. This improves not only BI and analytics efficiency but also overall business productivity.</li> <li><b>Enhanced decision-making.</b> Companies use machine learning (ML) algorithms to identify complex patterns in data sets and explore various analytics scenarios. Though most common in <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/feature/8-top-data-science-applications-and-use-cases-for-businesses">data science applications</a>, ML is now being applied in BI initiatives to detect trends and changing business conditions. Other AI tools identify issues for BI users to analyze and suggest data visualizations to explain analytics findings. These various uses enable more insightful analytics, leading to better-informed business decisions.</li> <li><b>Improved real-time data insights.</b> AI's ability to rapidly analyze data at scale expands real-time BI and analytics opportunities in companies. Previously, real-time BI applications had to be relatively simple to avoid overcomplicating the flow of data streams through an often-fragile infrastructure of processing engines, storage devices and data pipelines. AI tools can <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/opinion/Real-time-data-streaming-for-AI-invest-where-it-matters">handle more complex data streams</a> with higher performance, making real-time BI more viable -- and more effective, especially when supported by agentic AI.</li> <li><b>Democratization of data analysis.</b> The natural language query interfaces supported by AI provide a much simpler UX for BI users, who no longer need to learn query or scripting languages. AI also generates explanations that make analytics results easier to understand, and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/feature/Examples-of-augmented-analytics-in-the-enterprise">AI-driven augmented analytics features</a> create data visualizations and write SQL or natural language queries for further analysis. This increases access to analytics capabilities for nontechnical users, broadening the scope of BI initiatives.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Examples of AI applications in BI systems"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Examples of AI applications in BI systems</h2> <p>At a higher level, incorporating AI into BI initiatives provides greater opportunities to optimize the customer experience (CX), improve internal operations and build more successful businesses. Here are some potential applications of AI in BI to achieve those goals.</p> <h3>Predictive market and customer insights</h3> <p>Predictive analytics powered by ML algorithms and other AI technologies helps companies anticipate market shifts, business opportunities and customer behavior. Those predictive insights guide strategic decision-making on business initiatives.</p> <h3>Anomaly and fraud detection</h3> <p>Because AI tools can identify patterns and anomalies in data sets, they provide <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/The-benefits-of-using-AI-in-risk-management">early warnings of potential business risks</a>, such as cybersecurity threats and fraudulent transactions. That better informs risk management efforts and helps prevent business problems.</p> <h3>Sentiment analysis</h3> <p>GenAI tools can analyze text from surveys, social media posts and transcripts of customer service interactions to understand people's concerns, preferences, needs and emotions. Sentiment analysis enables companies to prioritize product development and marketing plans and fine-tune customer service responses for different individuals, ideally improving CX.</p> <h3>Supply chain optimization</h3> <p>Ongoing geopolitical turmoil, expanded tariffs and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatabackup/tip/Avoid-data-loss-in-a-natural-disaster-with-the-right-backups">increasingly severe weather events</a> make the complexity and vulnerability of modern supply chains ever more apparent. By using AI to analyze real-time data on customer demand, logistics and suppliers, companies can optimize supply chain operations and manage issues more agilely.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Challenges of implementing AI in business intelligence"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Challenges of implementing AI in business intelligence</h2> <p>The following are key challenges that data leaders, BI teams and business stakeholders should be aware of when planning AI-driven BI applications, along with advice on how to overcome them:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Data management and governance.</b> AI needs access to suitable data for effective analysis. The cleansed and curated data used in conventional BI applications might be too highly aggregated for AI to do its best work on trend and pattern detection, requiring new data sets to be prepared specifically for AI tools. Data must also be managed and governed effectively to avoid misuse or exposure, such as potential data security and data sharing issues when AI <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/tip/AI-analytics-push-data-in-use-protection-up-priority-list">analyzes customer data or other sensitive information</a>.</li> <li><b>The black box problem.</b> Unlike regular BI queries, the complexity of many AI models makes it difficult for users to understand how they arrive at their conclusions. This often leads to concerns -- and skepticism -- about the accuracy, consistency, fairness and transparency of AI-driven analytics results. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/How-to-ensure-AI-transparency-explainability-and-trust">Explainable AI techniques</a>, effective data management and <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/feature/Data-and-AI-governance-must-team-up-for-AI-to-succeed">strong AI governance</a> are required to solve this problem.</li> <li><b>Ethical and data privacy issues.</b> AI implementation in BI applications also raises questions about data privacy and ethical issues, such as bias and the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/feature/Why-ethical-use-of-data-is-so-important-to-enterprises">responsible use of data</a>. Customers must be comfortable with an organization's AI use, and regulations increasingly require compliance with privacy, AI ethics and data usage rules. Conventional BI systems face similar issues, but the increased autonomy of AI tools makes <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/Leading-AI-with-ethics-The-new-governance-mandate">ethical analytics practices</a> an urgent priority. To avoid business problems, companies need to create an ethical framework for AI decision-making.</li> <li><b>A lack of shared semantics.</b> Without common definitions of business terms and metrics, AI applications or agents might get different answers to the same question across multiple data sources. For example, revenue could mean one thing in a sales dashboard and another in a financial report, leading an AI tool to produce inconsistent or misleading analytics results. This issue can't be resolved in a traditional data warehouse. A <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/tip/Assemble-the-layers-of-big-data-stack-architecture">well-governed semantic layer</a> with consistent business terminology is required between AI and data sets. It also enables users to query BI data in their own shared business vocabulary through natural language interfaces.</li> <li><b>AI skills gaps.</b> BI teams need specialized skills to design, deploy and maintain AI tools in BI systems. But workers with AI expertise are in high demand and command accordingly high salaries. Companies can upskill BI developers, analysts and administrators for AI work -- usability is one of modern AI's big advantages. Training current employees, including business users, on AI technologies also reduces internal resistance to their use. In some cases, though, hiring new employees is necessary to obtain the required skills.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Best practices for deploying AI tools in BI systems"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Best practices for deploying AI tools in BI systems</h2> <p>The following are some additional best practices for integrating AI into BI processes:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>Align the AI in BI strategy with business goals.</b> Technology of any sort isn't an end in itself. An effective AI implementation in BI applications begins with a clear understanding of the organization's overarching business goals. Every tactical step in deploying AI tools should advance those goals.</li> <li><b>Invest in data quality and data governance.</b> High-quality data is crucial for successful AI use. A <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/tip/5-benefits-of-building-a-strong-data-governance-strategy">strong data governance program</a> is also required to ensure high data quality, effective data security and appropriate privacy protections on an ongoing basis.</li> <li><b>Start small with pilot projects and scale gradually.</b> Initially implementing AI in small, manageable projects encourages experimentation, demonstrates business value and enables processes to be refined for broader rollouts. Data and BI leaders can also build up internal AI skills and identify issues before committing to more substantial deployments.</li> <li><b>Continuously monitor and improve AI deployments.</b> Both AI technologies and processes are evolving rapidly. Regularly update AI models in BI systems to maintain or improve accuracy. BI managers and their teams must also be aware of AI developments to ensure internal processes, policies and skills keep pace with the technology.</li> </ul> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Future trends to watch for"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Future trends to watch for</h2> <p>A common question is whether AI will completely replace current BI processes. Agentic AI is a potential step in that direction, but it's more likely that AI tools will continue to augment BI software with additional capabilities, while human involvement remains a key part of many BI applications. These are some further technical developments to expect.</p> <h3>Conversational analytics as the new standard UI</h3> <p>Natural language querying for analytics will become mainstream, simplifying interactions with BI data so they resemble those with chatbots today. Eventually, query languages and data visualization tools will be used only for the most advanced BI needs in certain use cases.</p> <h3>Domain-specific AI models for industries</h3> <p>The emerging development of domain-specific AI models will enable analytics insights that reflect a deep understanding of the business dynamics in individual industries. For example, AI-driven BI systems for the retail industry will understand the entire retail business process for more insightful reporting and both predictive and prescriptive analytics.</p> <h3>Increased agentic analytics deployments</h3> <p>As agentic AI tools <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/opinion/Why-agentic-AI-demands-both-structured-and-unstructured-data">continue to advance</a>, organizations will increasingly deploy them in BI and analytics environments. Enabling AI agents to make decisions and take actions autonomously is also likely to become common practice. Agentic analytics changes the responsibilities of BI users to some degree. In such applications, a data analyst's role shifts from hands-on analysis work to reviewing an AI agent's findings and conclusions.</p> <h3>Multimodal AI use in BI applications</h3> <p>While the <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/opinion/Why-multimodal-AI-is-reshaping-enterprise-intelligence">use of multimodal AI in BI</a> isn't widespread yet, it's no longer experimental. Multimodal AI software analyzes images, documents, audio and video alongside traditional structured data, enabling users to incorporate unstructured data sources into BI applications. For example, a manufacturer could combine images from product inspections with production-line data to analyze quality issues.</p> <p><b>Editor's note:</b> <i>This article was updated in April 2026 for timeliness and to add new information.</i></p> <p><i>Donald Farmer is a data strategist with 30-plus years of experience, including as a product team leader at Microsoft and Qlik. He advises global clients on data, analytics, AI and innovation strategy, with expertise spanning from tech giants to startups.</i></p> </section> AI tools are becoming a key part of BI systems, both to streamline tasks and add new analytics capabilities. Here's how to successfully integrate AI into BI processes. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/iot_g1182604383.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/feature/AI-in-business-intelligence-Uses-benefits-and-challenges Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT <p>We’re living through a genuinely groundbreaking moment in technology. Every week brings new breakthroughs in AI agents – capabilities that seemed impossible just months ago are now becoming reality. Organisations are rushing to adopt them, and they’re right to.</p> <p>But there are important security considerations beneath the enthusiasm. According to our research, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.okta.com/newsroom/articles/ai-at-work-2025--securing-the-ai-powered-workforce/" rel="noopener">at Okta</a>, 91% of organisations are now adopting <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Getting-started-with-agentic-AI">AI agents</a>, yet only 10% have governance strategies in place. Closing this gap will require intentional focus and effort.</p> <p>The reason comes down to something more fundamental than most people realise. We’re shifting from one architectural model to something fundamentally different and we haven’t fully reckoned with what that means for security.</p> <p><b>When applications stop following the script</b></p> <p>For decades, we’ve built applications that operate within predictable boundaries. Think of a travel booking application. You navigate defined screens and execute a transaction. What’s possible is finite. Security works because users move through guarded corridors deep inside the application’s logic.</p> <p>But AI agents operate differently. They’re conversational. They accept natural language input from anywhere and make autonomous decisions we can’t entirely predict. The access point isn’t buried in application code anymore. It’s right there at the front end, in the conversation itself.</p> <p>This is an architectural shift, and it means the security controls we’ve relied on are now being tested in ways we’re only beginning to understand.</p> <p><b>Security at the frontline</b></p> <p>This shift exposes internal APIs and data surfaces in ways traditional applications never did. When you compromise a deterministic application, damage is typically contained. But when you compromise an AI agent, you’re looking at potential access across your entire infrastructure and actions that ripple in unpredictable ways.</p> <p>What used to be hypothetical is now happening, and the complexity compounds when agents work together. We’re moving beyond single agents to agent-to-agent communications. That introduces permission and identity challenges we’ve genuinely never had to think about before.</p> <p><b>Rethinking identity in an AI-driven world</b></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="https://www.verizon.com/business/en-gb/resources/reports/dbir/" rel="noopener">80% of breaches</a> today involve compromised identity or credentials, which remains a key attack surface for threat actors. But, solving this in an agent-driven world requires thinking about identity differently.</p> <p>For developers and organisations deploying agents, four identity requirements have become non-negotiable:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li><b>First,</b> genuine agent and user authentication. You must securely link each agent’s actions back to the human user who authorised them.</li> <li><b>Second,</b> standardised, secure API access. Agents connect to dozens of applications. Those connections need hardening against token leakage and credential compromise.</li> <li><b>Third</b>, human validation in the loop for anything high-risk or sensitive. This isn’t about lack of faith in AI; it’s about maintaining human agency while these systems mature.</li> <li><b>Fourth,</b> fine-grained permissions. An agent should access only the data it needs, only for the time it needs it, with every action logged and auditable.</li> </ul> <p><b>Learning from past mistakes</b></p> <p>I’ve watched this pattern before with cloud, APIs, and microservices. Security considerations often come in later in the development of new architectural models, not earlier.</p> <p>We’re seeing it again with agent protocols. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/feature/One-year-of-MCP-Support-a-must-for-data-management-vendors">MCP, agent-to-agent frameworks</a>, and cross-app access standards are developing rapidly with genuine effort to embed security from the start. But security still feels like it’s catching up rather than leading design.</p> <p>The practical reality is that you can’t wait for perfect standards. You need to implement governance with available frameworks today, while remaining flexible to adapt as standards mature.</p> <p><b>What leaders must do now</b></p> <p>Business leaders face real pressure to unlock AI’s potential and genuine concerns about security. These aren’t mutually exclusive. Here’s what needs to happen.</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>Complete visibility into every agent running in your environment and what it’s doing. No shadow agents. No hidden permissions.</li> <li>Apply identity and permission strategies with the same rigour you’d use for human users.</li> <li>Ensure agents connect through secure, auditable channels. Whether building customer agents or using MCP servers, the same principles apply.</li> <li>Finally, log everything. Agent activity will operate at a scale that might surprise you but if every action is captured, you’ll meet regulatory requirements and investigate incidents quickly.</li> </ul> <p><b>Be proactive, not reactive</b></p> <p>Breaches linked to agents are happening now and will continue to happen. That’s not a reason to slow AI adoption – it’s a reason to be serious about security from the start.</p> <p>The encouraging part is that the foundational principles we’ve relied on – identity governance, least-privilege access, encryption, comprehensive auditing – still work. In fact, they’re more important than ever. We just need to scale them intelligently for this non-deterministic world.</p> <p>The technology exists and the frameworks are emerging. What matters now is whether we approach this thoughtfully or spend the next couple of years managing preventable incidents.</p> <p>I’m betting we’re smarter than that.</p> <p><i>Shiv Ramji, is Auth0 President at Okta</i></p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about agentic AI and security</h3> <p>What <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/What-agentic-AI-means-for-cybersecurity">agentic AI means for cybersecurity</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Generative-and-agentic-AI-in-security-What-CISOs-need-to-know">Generative and agentic AI in security</a>: What CISOs need to know</p> <p>Agentic AI requires <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366637022/Agentic-AI-requires-rethink-of-cloud-security-strategy">rethink of cloud security strategy</a></p> </div> </div> Agentic AI adoption may be surging, but security is lagging behind and its fundamental principles need to be intelligently re-scaled for a non-deterministic world https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/chess-strategy-game-intelligence-1-adobe.jpeg https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/AI-agents-are-here-Are-we-ready-for-the-security-implications Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:51:00 GMT <p>Thierry Martin, head of enterprise data and analytics at <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366617487/How-Toyota-is-transforming-its-digital-employee-experience">Toyota Motor Europe</a>, is a man of varied talents. As he talks to Computer Weekly on a video call, it’s possible to make out the fine lines of some detailed illustrations on the shelves behind him.</p> <p>“My way of relaxing is sketching,” says Martin, referring to the art. “That’s how I can go from a high-intensity brain, where I’m focused on data, and then move to a state where I can let go and let my hand draw. It’s enjoyable.”</p> <p>More than that, Martin believes there are parallels you can draw between a high-quality illustration and an effective enterprise data platform: “They’re both about aesthetics, simplicity and extracting the essence of what you want to achieve.”</p> <p>In his role at Toyota Europe, Martin has spent the past few years building the company’s <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/tip/Assemble-the-layers-of-big-data-stack-architecture?_gl=1*hqs5ni*_ga*MTQyNTQ1NjY0NS4xNzQxMzYzOTc3*_ga_TQKE4GS5P9*czE3NzQzNDc5NjUkbzEyNjEkZzEkdDE3NzQzNDk2OTIkajUzJGwwJGgw">data stack</a>. An engineer by trade, he became interested in technology and developed his data skills with the firm. With almost 25 years in the business, Martin says Toyota Europe is a great place to work with a strong sense of belonging and identity.</p> <p>“Company values are very strong,” he says. “If you look for the Toyota Way and our values, there is respect for people, teamwork and so on. It’s a company where you can grow and find your way. But what you also must do is to carry the Toyota jacket.”</p> <p>While Martin says that phrase is a figure of speech, it also rings true. Employees wear personal Toyota jackets when they go to the company’s manufacturing facilities. He says that sometimes staff even wear these jackets in the office: “So, there is a strong identification with the company.”</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Moving into data"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Moving into data</h2> <p>Martin’s career journey at Toyota Europe has taken some intriguing twists and turns. He recognises that his early roles at the company had nothing to do with data – and certainly not artificial intelligence (AI). In these initial positions with the firm, Martin was firmly focused on engineering. He spent 15 years designing cars before turning towards technology.</p> <p>“Data and AI came after that because I wanted to learn a new skill,” he says, reflecting on the transition. “When you reach a certain level where you have mastered a skill, you want to move to the next one and pass a new boundary. And that’s what I did.”</p> <p>For five years, between 2017 and 2022, Martin worked in research and development (R&amp;D), moving from body engineering to powertrain simulation. During this period in R&amp;D, his interaction with IT increased. In 2022, he became a senior manager for data analytics. In this role, Martin was charged with building a data analytics team.</p> <p>“When I arrived in that position, there was no data platform, so I had to build it from scratch,” he says. “That’s the kind of challenge that I like to have. The company gives possibilities to people who are ready to put in the effort. You get the chance to take a jump.”</p> <p>Unlike some companies that might have a forced management rotation every few years, Martin says Toyota Europe encourages people to hone their skills in a single area if they’re confident. However, for those who want to try something new, the right candidates are given new opportunities to excel in other areas.</p> <p>“For people who are ready to jump, learn and invest in themselves, there is a possibility,” he says. “But you must create the opportunity – that’s important. No one asked me to do data. No one asked me to move to AI. I proposed the shift. Then it’s a process of what we call <em>Nemawashi</em>”, a Japanese business practice of building consensus for a proposal among key stakeholders before a formal decision.</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Building a platform"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Building a platform</h2> <p>Martin’s priority during the past few years has been to create an enterprise-wide data mesh. He says <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366593752/How-Snowflake-is-tackling-AI-challenges">Snowflake’s cloud-based technology</a> is the cornerstone of Toyota Europe’s platform.</p> <p>“Everything relies on strong data foundations and governance,” he says. “It’s important to have role-based access control, encryption and data available on the platform, but only for people who are authorised to access it. That’s all something we have built on Snowflake.”</p> <blockquote> <div class="imagecaption alignLeft"> <img src="https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/Thierry-Martin-Toyota-PR-140px.jpg" alt="Headshot of Thierry Martin."> </div> <p><strong><span style="color: #34495e;">“For people who are ready to jump, learn and invest in themselves, there is a possibility – but you must create the opportunity”</span></strong></p> <p><em><span style="color: #34495e;">Thierry Martin, Toyota Motor Europe</span></em></p> </blockquote> <p>Rather than a traditional data warehouse, Martin describes Snowflake as a scalable computation engine for analytics and AI initiatives. Other key technologies in the organisation’s data stack include Calibra for governance, Dataiku for collaboration, Qlik for ingestion, DBT for transformation, Monte Carlo for observability, and Sigma for analytics.</p> <p>To ensure compliance was baked into their processes from the beginning, his team worked with internal enterprise architects and Snowflake professional services to define the right approach to data integration. Across all organisational areas, from design to logistics, his team has created a backlog of between 300 and 400 data projects.</p> <p>In January, they passed the milestone of launching 100 data products in their internal data marketplace. Martin says the company continues to <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366621057/Snowflake-founders-reveal-cuckoo-cloud-vision-that-disrupted-big-data">explore Snowflake features</a>. Toyota Europe is already using Snowflake Intelligence, the tech company’s agent that allows users to exploit enterprise knowledge using natural language. A close working relationship with the business makes it much easier to create tightly focused data solutions, says Martin.</p> <p>“My team can answer questions about data architecture, such as, ‘What’s the enterprise data model or the logical data model?’ If someone wants to understand data governance, protection or privacy, my team can answer. My team can also answer questions about optimising the model or building a data pipeline to get data into Snowflake.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Leading from the front"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Leading from the front</h2> <p>Martin says his promotion to head of enterprise data and analytics at Toyota Europe in 2024 was a recognition of the growing importance of emerging technologies.</p> <p>He says his role overseeing data and AI corresponds with Gartner’s description of a chief data officer (CDO). The responsibilities of his role include dealing with governance, building business relationships, upskilling and training people, and managing data science and platform teams.</p> <p>“That is all part of my job description,” he says. “Now I’m an executive, that status gives me budget accountability, and the right to make decisions around my budget. It’s a new kind of job. It sounds cool, but it’s also a role that will become mandatory.”</p> <p>Martin says CDO is generally viewed as a challenging role. Industry experts agree, with technology specialist DataIQ suggesting that <a href="https://www.dataiq.global/articles/what-short-cdo-tenure-says-about-your-organisation/">the average tenure of a data chief in Europe is 1.9 years</a>. The research suggests it often takes three to five years for the conditions associated with a data transformation to mature, including building trust, embedding governance, evolving operating models, and reshaping decision-making practices.</p> <p>Given these complex demands and a 1.9-year average tenure for European CDOs, it’s unsurprising that many organisations never reach maturity before a change in data leadership. Thankfully, Martin, with his long history of driving data-enabled digitalisation at Toyota Europe, is rising to the task at hand – and he has advice for other would-be CDOs.</p> <p>“It’s a very challenging role intellectually. You need to understand the significance of data, AI and governance. You need to understand the importance of architecture, to link that awareness with a vision and to link that vision with a budget – and then to execute your strategy,” he says, before outlining how successful CDOs seek out continuous development.</p> <p>“The intellectual challenge means that you need to be eager to learn. You also need to find time to run. Personally, if I stop running, then in two years, with the rapid pace of change, there’s a risk I won’t be relevant anymore.”</p> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Looking ahead"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Looking ahead</h2> <p>Martin says an important KPI for his organisation is utilisation of Snowflake and the rest of the data stack across the business. Several factories have already been onboarded to the Snowflake platform. Now, his team is exploring how the technology is used in individual European operations, such as Toyota France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK.</p> <p>“We’re making sure the markets themselves use Snowflake, so that’s what we are actively working on,” says Martin, suggesting that data centralisation through the platform presents new opportunities. Before Snowflake, staff relied on API calls to pull data from Toyota Europe and would then sync the data into their systems.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> Let’s use data to help run the business with the best efficiency first – and then we can begin to transform </figure> <figcaption> <strong>Thierry Martin, Toyota Motor Europe</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> <p>“Now they can take data directly from Snowflake,” he says. “And they don’t just access the platform to download data, they can also build inside it.” This integrated approach makes it much easier for operations across Toyota Europe to exploit new ways of working.</p> <p>“If one market, for instance, is building something useful, then it means it might be interesting for another market to use the same adaptation,” he says. “So, it’s about adding markets that historically had different systems and converging them onto one platform. And then we can create economies of scale and save time in development.”</p> <p>Martin’s team continues to seek opportunities associated with AI and data. Snowflake Intelligence, the tech company’s agent for exploiting enterprise knowledge with natural language, allows business users in Toyota Europe to generate insights rapidly. However, Martin recognises that emerging technology in all its forms remains a work in progress.</p> <p>“Data quality is important, and we will see what AI brings,” he says. “In the short-to-medium term, I see more data for various uses inside of our business, improving people’s work, vehicle quality and manufacturing processes.”</p> <p>For example, Martin says the team is investigating how agents might use data to help boost maintenance processes. “When you look at the power of what you can achieve, it’s quite amazing,” he says, referring to the potential of AI and data to enable long-term change across multiple business areas.</p> <p>“The first transformation is inside our business. Let’s improve first how we work. Every consultant will say, ‘Let’s transform the business.’ But, actually, let’s use data to help run the business with the best efficiency first – and then we can begin to transform.”</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more interviews with data leaders</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640174/Interview-Huy-Dao-director-of-data-and-machine-learning-platform-Bookingcom">Interview: Huy Dao, director of data and machine learning platform, Booking.com</a> - Effective use of technology has already delivered significant cost savings at the online travel giant, and greater use of AI and machine learning promises to bring even greater opportunities to improve.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366637309/Interview-Barry-Panayi-group-chief-data-officer-Howden">Interview: Barry Panayi, group chief data officer, Howden</a> - The fast-growing insurance firm wants data insights and artificial intelligence to give customer-facing employees all the information they need at their fingertips through data-powered conversational interfaces.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366634047/Interview-Ian-Ruffle-head-of-data-and-insight-RAC">Interview: Ian Ruffle, head of data and insight, RAC</a> - Real-time data insights and artificial intelligence are central to supporting the RAC’s motoring services and to getting drivers back on the road as quickly as possible.</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> A sketch artist by night, and a vehicle engineer by training, Toyota Europe’s data chief is bringing elements of both capabilities to bear in delivering better data insights and building a foundation for AI https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/ComputerWeekly/Hero%20Images/Toyota-car-interior-hero-clrcrmck.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640716/Interview-Thierry-Martin-head-of-enterprise-data-and-analytics-Toyota-Motor-Europe Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:08:00 GMT <p>After a working life of nearly a quarter of a century, the London Internet Exchange (Linx) has announced the completion of a large project refreshing its 17-site secondary interconnection fabric <a href="https://www.linx.net/about/network/lon2/">LON2</a> in the UK’s capital as part of a strategic investment in the future of interconnection services in the UK.</p> <p>The upgrade, for which communications tech provider Nokia has been selected as the technical partner, comes at a time where the existing technical service was reaching end of life.</p> <p><a href="https://www.linx.net/">Linx’s dual local area network (LAN) infrastructure</a> design in London has been something that the provider regards as setting them apart over the years from other internet exchange points (IXPs). The company says operating a diverse and resilient service in-house for its members means not having to look elsewhere for this critical capability.</p> <p>In 2018, Linx announced it was the world’s first IXP to deploy a disaggregated network using an Ethernet virtual provider network (EVPN), with hardware and software sourced from alternative suppliers.</p> <p>LON2 was originally launched in 2002, following the primary LON1 LAN’s increasing popularity, and was created to ensure there was no critical single point of failure in the UK’s internet connectivity. It operates in parallel with LON1 to provide its members with enhanced network resilience, redundancy and architectural diversity.</p> <p>Linx’s LON1 network moved to Nokia technology in 2021, following the demand for 400GE port access from members. LON2 has traditionally been a supplier-diverse LAN, but Linx said the decision to also move LON2 to Nokia technology followed a series of proof of concepts with a shortlist of possible suppliers.</p> <p>LON2 remains fully diverse for Linx members as it uses different hardware and software to LON1.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">Read more about internet exchanges</h3> <ul class="default-list"> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639101/Linx-upgrades-Lunar-Digital-datacentre-to-full-resilient-point-of-presence">Linx upgrades Lunar Digital datacentre to full resilient point of presence</a>: Manchester-based datacentre upgrading its network resilience with London Internet Exchange to support network traffic.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366620699/YouFibre-takes-400G-connectivity-option-at-Manchester-internet-exchange">YouFibre takes 400G connectivity option at Manchester internet exchange</a>: Full-fibre broadband provider becomes first ISP to take a 400G port at the London Internet Exchange’s regional interconnection hub in Manchester.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366618570/DE-CIX-upgrades-New-Yorks-largest-Internet-Exchange-backbone">DE-CIX upgrades New York’s largest internet exchange backbone</a>: German exchange upgrades one of the US’s largest internet exchange backbones as staying resilient and offering scale become priorities.</li> <li><a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366619560/BT-boosts-interconnectivity-with-Equinix-broadens-Optiva-partnership">BT boosts interconnectivity with Equinix, broadens Optiva partnership</a>: UK’s leading telco expands partnership with digital infrastructure company to help multinationals transform interconnectivity across digital value chain, and joins with enterprise network service company to implement B2B, B2B2X services.</li> </ul> </div> </div> <p>With LON2 approaching 25 years in operation next year, and so close to that 1Tb traffic mark, Linx stressed that it remains a key point of interconnection for the UK and Europe, and a cost-effective way to access its services in London.</p> <p>“The LON2 refresh is a cornerstone of our strategy to deliver resilient, scalable and cost-effective interconnection,” said Linx chief technology officer Richard Petrie. “Nokia’s platform not only meets our technical requirements, but also supports our long-term vision for a diverse and robust network ecosystem.</p> <p>“When looking for a new technical partner for LON2, we had criteria we needed to meet, including being able to support all our interconnection services, support EVPN, and … scale from 10GE to 100GE, 400GE and even 800GE port options for the future. Diversity to LON1 was still a crucial element for us in the decision-making process. Many of our members take complete mirrored infrastructure and Linx services on LON1 and LON2 for resilience and redundancy, so diversity was non-negotiable.”</p> <p>Paul Alexander, vice-president and country general manager for UK&amp;I at <a href="http://www.nokia.com/">Nokia</a>, said: “Linx’s networks are critical to the UK’s digital infrastructure. Its continued trust in Nokia to provide high-performance, flexible and advanced connectivity across both of its UK networks demonstrates a shared commitment to resilience, innovation and long-term scale.</p> <p>“As <a href="https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366639478/Nokia-AWS-demo-agentic-AI-network-slicing-with-du-Orange">AI [artificial intelligence]&nbsp;becomes the dominant workload shaping modern networks</a>, service providers and critical infrastructure operators need platforms that are ready for new traffic patterns, higher performance and greater scale. This investment helps ensure Linx’s members benefit from a future-ready foundation for the AI era, supporting growing capacity demands across 100GE, 400GE and beyond.”</p> <p>Linx is also working with Nokia as a technical partner in most of its operating regions from Linx NoVA in the US, to Linx sites in Kenya and Ghana.</p> Internet exchange based in UK capital completes project refreshing its 17-site interconnected network in London, with global comms tech provider selected as the technical partner to support development https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/visuals/LeMagIT/hero_article/Nokia-logo.jpg https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366640654/Nokia-joins-LINX-as-technical-partner-for-London-network-refresh Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:45:00 GMT <p>Copyright law, as it currently stands, was written at a time when humans were directly involved in fair use practices, such as citing sources and creating derivative works, which is copyrighted work that comes from other copyrighted work. However, various <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/Top-generative-AI-tool-categories">generative AI tools</a> can create text, images, songs, videos and other content. <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/A-look-at-open-source-AI-models">New AI models</a> can scan copyright-protected content at scale to distill an image's style, a novel's plot or a program's logic. Once trained on protected content, these AI models can generate new content different enough from the original that some might consider it fair use.</p> <p>Yet, users of <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/AI-content-generators-to-explore">popular GenAI platforms</a> can't determine how these services were trained.</p> <p>"The problem with AI-generated content is that users don't know exactly where the AI is sourcing things from and which parts of the content it creates are from scratch or just pulled from another piece of copyrighted content, or even another person's AI-generated artwork on the platform," said Nizel Adams, CEO and principal engineer at AI consultancy Nizel Corp.</p> <p>If an organization wants to <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/feature/How-to-use-generative-AI-for-marketing">incorporate AI-generated content into its marketing</a> or content strategies, it must consider the following two questions to avoid copyright infringement.</p> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Can AI-generated content be copyrighted?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Can AI-generated content be copyrighted?</h2> <p>If users of GenAI platforms don't know what <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/How-to-train-an-LLM-on-your-own-data">content the tools were trained on</a>, then they might hesitate to adopt these platforms in case their <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/How-to-detect-AI-generated-content">AI-generated content</a> is already copyrighted and doesn't fall within fair use.</p> <p>The U.S. Copyright Office has now provided more detailed <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/ai/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">guidance</a> on this topic. In a January 2025 report, the office said AI-generated outputs can be protected by copyright only where a human author contributes sufficient expressive elements, such as through creative arrangements or meaningful modifications. A prompt by itself is generally not enough.</p> <p>Thus far, the Copyright Office, in line with existing case law, has explained that for a work to be afforded copyright protection in the U.S., it must have a human author. Yet, Siegel said he is not sure what that means in the world of AI.</p> <p>"If the only human involvement is the input of a chat prompt into ChatGPT, for example, one cannot obtain copyright protection for the raw result of that prompt," he said.</p> <p>On the other hand, if a user <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/AI-prompt">inputs a prompt into an AI tool</a>, gets a response and then modifies the result in creative ways, that can potentially result in content afforded copyright protection. However, only human-authored parts of the work can be copyrighted.</p> <p>In other words, AI can be a tool authors use to generate materials and create copyrighted works. "But that is a far cry from what most people think about when considering whether AI-generated content can be copyrighted, which is traditionally focused on copyrighting raw outputs," Siegel said.</p> <blockquote class="main-article-pullquote"> <div class="main-article-pullquote-inner"> <figure> If the only human involvement is the input of a chat prompt into ChatGPT, for example, one cannot obtain copyright protection for the raw result of that prompt. </figure> <figcaption> <strong>David Siegel, partner at Grellas Shah LLP</strong> </figcaption> <i class="icon" data-icon="z"></i> </div> </blockquote> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="What is considered copyright infringement for AI-generated content?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>What is considered copyright infringement for AI-generated content?</h2> <p>Users might wonder whether AI-generated content trained on protected intellectual property constitutes copyright infringement. That question remains unsettled, even as courts have started issuing major rulings in cases involving books, images and music. For example, in early 2023, TikTok, Spotify and YouTube <a target="_blank" href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171032649/ai-music-heart-on-my-sleeve-drake-the-weeknd" rel="noopener">removed</a> an AI-generated song that mimicked the voices of rapper Drake and R&amp;B artist The Weeknd. However, the implications for AI-generated content less similar than this example are unclear.</p> <p>A copyright infringement inquiry begins with the long-established test of access and substantial similarity, according to William Scott Goldman, managing attorney and founder at Goldman Law Group. Overall, this means the case would have to prove that the AI or a human read the content and that it's similar enough to convince a jury it was copied.</p> <p>"Although there is no established case law for generative AI just yet, I believe without clear-cut proof of access, such infringement claims will fail unless the copying in question is deemed identical to the original," Goldman said.</p> <p>However, Goldman also said he believes copyright owners and plaintiffs <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/news/365530156/Implications-of-AI-art-lawsuits-for-copyright-laws">could assert unauthorized use</a>, especially if this use is not considered <i>de minimis</i> -- too small to be considered meaningful -- and the resulting work is substantially similar to the original.</p> <p>Once both issues have been demonstrated, the case would turn on a fair use defense. GenAI could be considered a derivative work under existing copyright law if it contains sufficient original authorship, Goldman said.</p> <p>Courts now grapple with whether AI-generated content differs enough from the originals under existing fair use precedents.</p> <p>In June 2025, federal judges <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/news/366626775/Fair-use-rulings-favor-Meta-and-Anthropic-but-are-limited">ruled for Anthropic and Meta in separate lawsuits</a> over using books to train AI models. Those rulings were important, but both were narrow and fact-specific. The Anthropic decision found fair use for training on lawfully acquired books while leaving piracy-related questions for trial, and the Meta ruling emphasized that unauthorized AI training could still be unlawful in many circumstances.</p> <div class="youtube-iframe-container"> <iframe id="ytplayer-0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QujlAnLR2eQ?autoplay=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;widget_referrer=null&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.computerweekly.com" type="text/html" height="360" width="640" frameborder="0"></iframe> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="Lawsuits over AI-generated content"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>Lawsuits over AI-generated content</h2> <p>Various lawsuits regarding AI-generated content and GenAI tools have started to make their way through the courts -- both related and unrelated to copyright.</p> <p>In November 2022, programmers filed a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI focusing on breach of contract and privacy claims. In January 2023, the same law firm also filed a class-action lawsuit related to AI-generated image services, such as Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DreamUp, which raises copyright infringement issues.</p> <p>A few days later, Getty Images also <a target="_blank" href="https://copyrightlately.com/pdfviewer/getty-images-v-stability-ai-complaint/" rel="noopener">filed</a> a lawsuit relating to Stable Diffusion, arguing the service had "copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images' collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images," according to the lawsuit. In July 2023, Sarah Silverman and other authors sued <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/OpenAI">OpenAI</a> and Meta, claiming the GenAI training process <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/news/366547835/AI-copyright-lawsuits-are-a-warning-to-business-users">infringed on the copyright protection of their works</a>.</p> <p>These lawsuits differ in important ways, according to Siegel. Stability AI allegedly uses images from the web to train its models. As a result, Getty's customers arguably have less need to license more images from Getty. This gets at the heart of copyright law, which is to incentivize people to develop creative works. Photographers and artists might be less willing to spend time and resources developing photos and images if those are used to train AI to replace them.</p> <p>"If you are a photographer, would you be willing to spend your time and resources creating photos if those photos were going to be used to train an AI model, without compensation or permission, and potential licensees of your images could simply go to the AI model instead? Doubtful," Siegel said.</p> <p>The Silverman case against OpenAI and Meta centers around the ability to provide summaries of books without permission to create derivative works from the authors. Siegel said this case differs from the Getty Images one because its use is similar to CliffsNotes, which is considered fine because people can still buy the book to get the full story.</p> <div class="extra-info"> <div class="extra-info-inner"> <h3 class="splash-heading">To use or not to use?</h3> <p data-end="7427" data-start="7148">In 2025, U.S. courts issued important but limited rulings in copyright cases involving Anthropic and Meta, while the U.S. Copyright Office released additional guidance on AI-generated works and AI training. Even so, organizations still face major unresolved questions, including:</p> <ul class="default-list"> <li>whether a license is needed to train a GenAI model on copyrighted material</li> <li>when AI-generated output is substantially similar enough to infringe copyright</li> <li>how much human contribution is required to secure copyright protection</li> <li>whether training on pirated or unauthorized copies changes the legal analysis</li> <li>how future rulings may affect publishing, marketing and content workflows</li> </ul> </div> </div> </section> <section class="section main-article-chapter" data-menu-title="How will AI change copyright laws?"> <h2 class="section-title"><i class="icon" data-icon="1"></i>How will AI change copyright laws?</h2> <p>In the near term, AI copyright disputes will likely continue to be shaped by a combination of court rulings and Copyright Office guidance on authorship, fair use and AI training. Most AI companies still rely on fair use to justify how they train their models, but that remains a contested and highly fact-specific area.</p> <p>"To the extent the U.S. wants to foster the development of AI businesses, the laws around the use of copyrighted works in training AI models need to be sufficiently clear that even an early-stage startup can predictably determine whether their business model will run afoul of copyright laws. We are not even close to that point," Siegel said.</p> <p>Overall, <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/feature/AI-copyright-and-fair-use-What-you-need-to-know">AI is changing copyright law</a>. It is causing the legal system to define what constitutes authorship and how to protect human-generated content even if it contains AI-generated content, said Robert Scott, managing partner and Scott &amp; Scott LLP.</p> <p>In the U.S., the Copyright Office <a target="_blank" href="https://copyright.gov/laws/hearings/USCO-Letter-on-AI-and-Copyright-Initiative-Update-Feb-23-2024.pdf" rel="noopener">guidance</a> states that works containing AI-generated content are not copyrightable without evidence that a human author contributed creatively. Future guidance and court rulings may further clarify the level of human contribution needed to protect works containing AI-generated content.</p> <p><strong>Editor's note:</strong> <em>This article was updated in March 2026 to reflect current U.S. Copyright Office guidance and recent court rulings on AI-generated content and copyright questions. </em></p> <p><i>George Lawton is a journalist based in London. Over the last 30 years, he has written more than 3,000 stories about computers, communications, knowledge management, business, health and other areas that interest him.</i></p> </section> AI-generated content can sometimes be copyrighted, but only when a human contributes enough creative expression. Recent court rulings still leave major questions open. https://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/onlineimages/ai_a352095729.jpg https://www.techtarget.com/searchcontentmanagement/answer/Is-AI-generated-content-copyrighted Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:13:00 GMT 60 editor@computerweekly.com