The Government Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index, compiled by Oxford Insights and the International Development Research Centre, ranks the governments of 194 nations according to how prepared they are to utilise AI in the provision of public services. According to global consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCooper, AI technologies are forecast to add an additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with $6.6 trillion to come from an increase in productivity and $9.1 trillion from consumption-side effects. The score that Oxford Insights provides for each country comprises of 11 input metrics grouped under four high-level topics: governance; infrastructure and data; skills and education; and government public services. On a global level, the top ranking countries (and their scores) were: Singapore (9.186), The likes of India (7.515) and China (7.37) were ranked 17th and 20th respectively.

New research has revealed that the utilities industry, which has struggled to innovate for some time, is now ready to adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring much needed efficiencies to the sector. A recent poll, commissioned by field service management company Oneserve, found that 37 per cent of utilities companies in the UK have plans to integrate AI over the next five years while a quarter (25%) have already integrated the technology into their systems. The UK senior decision makers in the utilities industry cited monetary savings and customer retention as the two main driving factors for AI adoption. The research found that on average utilities companies lose £78,585 each, per year as a result of machine and system downtime. The inability to spot internal technical faults (41%) was given as the main reason for such huge loses followed by using old machinery and legacy systems (27%) and a lack of training which lead to miss-use by staff (20%).