With the NHS still struggling, a prisons crisis still teetering and Britain's borrowing costs soaring, there are few easy jobs going in Keir Starmer's cabinet at present. But even in such difficult times, the task of convincing Silicon Valley's finest to help make Britain a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution – all while one leading tech boss uses the Labour government as a regular punching bag and others ostentatiously move closer to Donald Trump – is among the most challenging. This is the mission that has fallen to Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary, who has become an important figure in Starmer's cabinet. If balancing the concerns over online free speech, AI's impact on the climate crisis and the threat it poses to wiping out humanity are not enough, the economic headwinds Britain is now experiencing makes the launch this week of the government's AI action plan even more important. And Kyle is worried Britain could miss the boat.

"When we met with the [Deci] team we found they were able to help companies, especially at the junction between training the data on deployment and deploying the models into production, there's so much pain at that junction and this company really helps close that gap." Square Peg has made several investments in the field like radiology AI startup Aidoc and has seen portfolio companies like weather forecasting startup ClimaCell increasingly use AI models. "It's very much in our sweet spot," Mr Schwartz said. "We are pretty much focused on, Australia, New Zealand Israel and Southeast Asia, so it fits our geographic purpose, and the size of the company... it's at the early stage of its commercialisation, it's pre-revenue or early revenue and beginning (to get) commercial traction, so all that fits pretty well with us." Mr Geifman said Deci was working to make AI more accessible for more companies.

If it seems like AI dominates today's conversation, you would be right. It's been featured prominently in the news, dominates the business pages, entire books are devoted to it, and even entire conferences. What does AI have to do with HR? Whether you consider yourself an AI aficionado or novice, rapid advances in technological development and ease of implementation allow the benefits to be experienced by all, not just those with deep, specialized expertise. So where do you get started? The first step is to understand exactly what AI is, and what it is not.