Health Minister Matt Hancock has announced the provision of £140 million to support the development of artificial intelligence services for healthcare. He said the money will be made available over the next three years through the National AI Lab – created last August within NHSX – through competitions run twice a year through the NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative. Announcing the plan in a speech to the Healthtech Alliance, Hancock said the focus will be on "finding and boosting existing technologies with serious scale-up potential", and that the awards will cover all stages of the product cyber, from proof of concept to initial adoption in the NHS. The first call for proposals will focus on screening, diagnosis, clinical decision support and system efficiency. He added that the AI Lab, which provides a forum for academics, specialists and technology companies to harness the technology for healthcare, will also have a skunkworks unit to build and rapidly test prototypes.