Invest in digital to usher in a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, urges industry

The UK could create around 175,000 new jobs, upskill a million workers and raise at least £455bn over the next ten years if it makes a serious commitment to digital, the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Fresh investment and support by both government and industry in sectors like robotics, 3D printing, Augmented and Virtual Reality could also address the country’s growing productivity gap, too.

Benefits to the UK economy over the next decade could also be as high as a 22% gain for UK manufacturing, increasing manufacturing growth between 1.5 to 3% per year, and reducing CO2 emissions by 4.5%, while industrial productivity could be improved by greater than 25%.

Even better – such a push could help British manufacturing deal with even the worst post-Brexit shocks, claim some of the authors.

The ideas are enshrined in a new study published today, the so-called ‘Industrial Digitilisation Review’ – but which is now being framed as the idea of ‘Made Smarter UK‘.

The Review is the work of a group led by the CEO of Siemens UK and Ireland, Juergen Maier, and which included senior representatives of British firms such as John Lewis, Cisco, IBM, Accenture UK, GSK, GKN and the CBI, though it’s claimed input from over 200 separate organisations has been assessed in order to produce the proposals.

The study was announced earlier in the year as part of the government’s announcement of an Industrial Strategy, and has just released its results.

The study lays out some specific ideas on how to deliver on these visions of success. These include a national digital ecosystem to give SME engineering companies the opportunity to test out new technologies, the setting up of 12 digital innovation hubs as part of a national innovation programme to create new technologies and companies and a new national body of industry, government and academic experts to “safeguard” a longterm commitment to the plan.

Professor Maier told the BBC’s Today programme this morning that the transition would mean job losses: “Robotics and artificial intelligence will displace some jobs [so] the best thing we can do is to make ourselves ready for it in a very proactive way, and that means training our people.

“We need to up skill one million existing workers in the industrial and manufacturing sector so they can transition from tasks that might be displaced to, for example, managing or programming robots.”

CBI director-general Carolyn Fairbairn also told the BBC that, “The UK must compete with China, the USA and much of Europe, where there are already advanced plans to embrace the fourth industrial revolution,” she said.