Imogen Stead is the Senior Policy Analyst for Emerging Technologies at Forefront Advisers, which provides intelligence-led political insight to public affairs and investment teams. You can find out more about Forefront Advisers and its services here.
By its own admission, techUK’s half-day conference on Monday 22 April “raised more questions than it answered”. In a rich and varied programme, participants heard from each of the four members of the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) – Ofcom, ICO, CMA and FCA – about the benefits of regulator-led collaboration for driving forward the UK Government’s sector-led approach to AI governance.
The topics of discussion ranged from the high-level challenges facing digital regulators as they address the rapid development of new technologies to a detailed assessment of the UK’s AI regulation landscape, before zooming back out for a whistle-stop tour of the DRCF’s horizon scanning workstream.
It soon became clear from informal conversations with fellow participants on the sidelines of the event – whether from industry, regulators, or the machinery of government – that drawing out just one overarching theme from such a wide-ranging debate would be an impossible task.
Here are my own three key takeaways, which together demonstrate not just how far the UK’s digital regulation landscape has already come, but more importantly how much further we still have to go.
1. The DRCF is measuring itself in “dog years”
Despite only being established four years ago, the DRCF is already the centrepiece of the UK’s digital regulation landscape and a figurehead for regulatory cooperation internationally. With the launch of the AI and Digital Hub pilot – announced at the conference – and a full workplan for the year ahead, the DRCF’s role as the “connective tissue” between regulators, industry and government is only set to increase.
Nevertheless, there was broad recognition across the panels that the DRCF will need to evolve further to better support UK innovation. Although the AI and Digital Hub is undoubtedly a positive step forwards, it is only the beginning of the journey.
The regulators themselves were keen to stress that the Hub will function as a two-way street, likely to become as much a listening device for regulators to better understand industry worries as it is a centralised regulatory advice platform for businesses.
Equally, the jury is still out on how far the Hub will be able to break down the communication barriers between regulators and innovative SMEs, who often hit a brick wall when trying to navigate the UK’s regulatory landscape. Finally, the architecture of the DRCF itself is still in flux, with no definitive answer yet to the question of how other regulators outside the “big four” can be systematically included in its work.
2. The UK AI regulation debate is still in its infancy
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the February AI White Paper response was the final word on the direction of travel for the UK’s AI regime, just as it is easy to view the EU’s AI Act as a done deal.
In reality, both jurisdictions are at the beginning of the regulatory process. Black-and-white narratives that pit the UK and EU approaches in opposition to each other will not stand the test of time – nor will they help businesses to navigate the two frameworks. Given AI’s global reach, finding the areas of harmonisation between jurisdictions will instead be more important for encouraging cross-border innovation.
The UK approach, which has garnered broad support from industry, civil society and regulators, is designed to be iterative. Since the priority is to create a regulatory environment that works for UK businesses and the tech sector in the long term, we should expect the process of developing a coherent AI regulatory regime to take 5-10 years rather than 5-10 months. That said, the panels were themselves a demonstration of how long and winding this road will be.
The AI debate continues to operate at the level of theory rather than practice: we heard plenty of big-picture narratives about the importance of collaboration and balancing innovation with consumer protection, but much less about the operational details and the inevitable trade-offs that will need to be navigated. To take two examples, questions over the stability of regulator funding (such as the future of the regulator pioneers fund) and how to balance intellectual property rights with generative AI innovation remained largely unanswered.
3. Horizon-scanning is an important piece in the puzzle
The DRCF’s mission to be a flexible, forward-thinking collaboration mechanism and not a super-regulator is nowhere more evident than in its horizon-scanning function. The team’s work so far has taken in quantum technologies and immersive tech, with a paper on digital IDs due to be published this summer and a new workstream on deepfakes and synthetic media soon to begin.
The importance of this work cannot be underestimated, as a means of both improving regulator preparedness ahead of rapid technological or commercial developments and feeding a wide range of expert views into Whitehall policy conversations.
However, humility is equally important when trying to predict the future. Horizon-scanning for horizon-scanning’s sake is not effective – that is, it should not stop at simply identifying the opportunities and risks of new technologies. Instead, the DRCF’s end goal is to reach a strategic understanding of what need each new technology addresses and how best to support the sector to reach that outcome.
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