Such a move could “double the size” of manufacturing projects, said Stephen Phipson CBE at the Advanced Engineering event in Birmingham yesterday (29 October), potentially playing an important role in British efforts to boost the industry and outpace international competitors.
“The real challenge, the real opportunity for AI is in compliance,” said the CEO during a State of the Nation address at the NEC. “We’ve got regulated manufacturing for aerospace, for medical devices… Very often that compliance route can take five years to get approval for that product to launch. Most of that is manual interventions, lots of paperwork.”
He continued: “If you can apply AI to that – and that’s where a lot of focus is at the moment – and reduce that by half, you can double the size of that manufacturing by doing that. And there’s a very big prize to be had… I’m going to say a lot more about that over the next two years.”
For manufacturers, compliance means adhering to a wide array of laws, regulations and standards, including certifications. Those are issued by the UK Civil Aviation Authority for aerospace manufacturers, while biomedical companies are regulated by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
Adoption of AI could speed up compliance by processing huge amounts of historical data and scanning new regulations, automatically updating requirements and freeing up human workers for other tasks.
Compliance is a major focus for the 70% of Make UK members deciding how to apply AI in their business, Phipson said.
Elsewhere, lots of large manufacturers are already adopting the technologies to boost productivity, with applications including predictive maintenance and redesigning production lines.
“That’s working quite well and it’s yielding some benefit,” Phipson said. But he continued: “It’s not the enormous benefit you might imagine from AI, because actually most of our manufacturing organisations are very productive anyway. We have to be globally competitive… these are incremental improvements for these very large companies.”
Phipson also discussed topics including the upcoming autumn budget, where he said Make UK hoped to avoid any “surprises”. “We are pushing very hard on a few big themes with [the] Treasury at the moment; first of all, to make sure there are no further cost increases whatsoever. Last year, we were surprised by what happened with the National Insurance increase, the minimum wage increase, and we don’t want to see any more of that in this budget.”
With challenges including the highest industrial energy costs in the world and the persistent threat of tariffs, Phipson said the organisation wants the budget to include energy discounts for an additional 7,000 manufacturers through the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme. Protection for the Growth and Skills Levy is another key aim, with 48,000 industry vacancies reportedly accounting for £6bn of lost output a year.
Promising new companies also need more financial backing, Phipson said. “We’re extremely good at starting up new manufacturing companies… one of the top places in the world for coming up with new ideas,” he said. But, despite being the 11th largest manufacturing country in the world, those ideas rarely bear fruit in the UK.
“I did a roundtable with a bunch of big manufacturers in America a couple of months ago, and I asked them their view of the UK, and they said: ‘It’s very simple: you’ve got all the ideas, all the inventions come from the UK. We’ve got all the money. So we take your ideas and we scale them up into big businesses in the United States.
“And that’s really a symptom of the challenge we’ve got as a country – great at innovating, very poor track record of scaling up.”
This is because the financial system does not reward risk, he said – but £4bn for a new fund in the British Business Bank, announced in this year’s Industrial Strategy, could start to address the issue.
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