At the Edge of ‘Peak Ambiguity’: How UK Businesses Can Harness AI Responsibly

The UK is reaching a critical point in its journey towards AI leadership, where the possibilities feel limitless, but businesses lack clarity on where scalable value lies. This is what General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja calls “peak ambiguity.”

This lack of clarity risks stalling innovation. Investors are pressing for AI strategies, workers are asking what it means for the job market, regulators are pushing for responsible adoption, and businesses are looking at their bottom lines.

Businesses that will help the UK navigate out of ambiguity and into AI leadership are those that can flex, comply, and thrive amid constant change. At Deel, we’re witnesses to how successful businesses navigate this ambiguity every day, by

The challenge: Leading through AI’s ‘peak ambiguity’

Looking at the UK’s AI landscape, we see a mix of excitement, anxiety, and confusion:

• Investor interest in AI is high. In 2024, British AI companies attracted a record £2.9 billion investment.
• Workers remain sceptical. One poll revealed that just over half of workers in the UK are concerned that AI will replace or change their jobs.
• AI adoption among UK businesses is on the rise. 70% of businesses are either implementing (39%) or actively exploring (31%) AI.
• AI education is lagging. According to IBM, 60% of UK workers’ skills are mismatched for their job, and 43 million globally will need upskilling by 2030, to keep pace with the change of innovation.
• A growing skills gap is halting innovation. 52% of businesses now report suffering an AI skills shortage in their organisation, identifying talent as the number one driver of innovation.

This paints a picture of a country eager to embrace a more modern workplace and continue building a legacy of technological advancement, but which still faces uncertainty. AI is highly experimental, and even when enterprise pilots show potential, many leaders are adopting a ‘wait and see’ attitude rather than risk losses.

So, as business leaders, how do we take advantage of the cautious optimism and overcome the challenges facing AI innovation in the UK?

How businesses can navigate the ambiguity

1. Workforce agility

Agility is the best response to ambiguity, as it allows businesses to quickly adapt to change. And when it comes to AI, change is inevitable.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to what’s going to make your organisation more agile, as it depends on so many factors. However, for the challenges facing the UK’s AI efforts, we see two clear paths to increased agility.

The first is an answer to the most pressing blocker: global hiring to overcome the talent shortage. Hiring overseas has historically been complicated, taking significant time and resources. But now borderless hiring might be the answer to the UK’s skills shortage. For example, with Deel EOR shoulders the legal and administrative burden of hiring employees in over 150+ countries, allowing businesses to hire overseas in weeks with significant cost savings.

See how Revolut streamlined employee relocation with Deel EOR.

The second is to keep AI strategies agile by not betting on a single vendor or signing expensive and lengthy contracts. Today’s leading AI model might be obsolete in six months’ time, so it’s better to build systems that are flexible enough to change when needed. One way to do this is to keep data infrastructure separate from the model or application layer. This makes it easier to swap vendors without disruption.

2. Compliance as an advantage

Regulations can be a facilitator of innovation rather than a blocker if you see them as an opportunity to build trust. The EU and the UK government are driving their own AI regulatory efforts, and businesses that actively engage with these efforts will position themselves as frontrunners.

Practically speaking, this can be done in a few different ways:

• Treating governance as a product feature, highlighting it as a key part of your value proposition.
• Auditing vendors for their compliance with UK data and bias standards. Requesting contractual clauses requiring transparency and bias testing can protect businesses from “compliance by association” risks.
• Integrating responsible AI into talent strategies. Including ethical and responsible AI training in learning and development programs ensures the entire organisation has these skills, not just tech teams.
• Participating in AI regulatory sandboxes to actively contribute to the shaping of emerging rules.
• Factor ethical AI into workforce planning. Identify ‘AI ethics champions’ within departments, and include responsible AI and AI literacy as a key skill in job postings and performance reviews.

3. Reskilling strategies

Borderless hiring can bolster the UK workforce in the short term, but to build more robust talent pipelines at home, talent needs to be trained. And organisations can’t afford to wait for traditional education to catch up. It’s up to UK businesses to train the talent needed for the future of work.

Reskilling and upskilling strategies for AI shouldn’t just target those directly involved in building and maintaining AI tools. Basic AI literacy training should be made available to all employees to develop their critical thinking and judgment concerning AI. It should cover the basics of the most commonly used AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Sora, etc.), their advantages and disadvantages, when to recognise AI outputs, and how to judge them. This should also include each organisation's individual AI policies, which tools to use, when, and how.

Human oversight will always be necessary, but employees need at least a basic understanding of AI and how it works to oversee effectively.

Combining the power of AI with a global workforce

UK businesses that balance AI adoption with agile, compliant, globally minded workforce strategies will thrive, even through ambiguity.

One of the main drivers of our success at Deel has been a winning combination of responsible and innovative AI adoption and the human adaptability of a global workforce. Internally, AI technology allows us to benefit from a huge productivity lift from automation. We’re also building solutions that win back hours and make keeping up with compliance easier for our partners, such as Deel AI, Deel AI Workforce, and our revolutionary HR platform.

Thanks to our globally distributed workforce, our people infrastructure is as adaptable as our tech stack. We’re able to hire the best talent no matter where they are, and quickly enter new markets. Innovation is boosted by diversity of thought, and with team members in more than 80 countries, we’re able to bring a global perspective to building smarter AI-driven solutions.

To see how Deel can help your business stay agile, book your 30-minute demo.