Geography of AI Technologies in the UK, 2012-2019

We provide measures of artificial intelligence technologies for the UK at the Travel-to-Work Area (TTWA) level. The data is derived from Lightcast Technologies (formerly known as Burning Glass) vacancy. A keyword-based algorithm is applied to the text of the vacancy data to characterise vacancies as being related to either cloud computing or machine leaning technologies (collectively grouped as AI).

We map and track the state of technological change in the UK, understand its drivers, impacts and help to improve the UK's productivity record via our collaboration and engagement with industry and policymakers. We focus on the role of frontier or 'future' technologies, such as AI, robotics, clean tech, blockchain and quantum. The contribution of these technologies to UK productivity will depend on the twin channels of their production and use (diffusion), the determinants of which we will seek to model theoretically and empirically. We will build up quantitative evidence on economic activity in the UK's 'future-technology-producing' and 'future-technology-using' sectors. First, through description - which will include both sectoral and geographical elements; and second through building evidence on the extent to which financial or skills frictions constrain investment. We are therefore addressing two of the challenges set out by the PIN workshop: understanding and improving innovation diffusion; and understanding and improving regional and local productivities. An innovation in our approach is that we will use a range of emerging databases on technology-oriented firms linked to text-based information on their activities to build a comprehensive empirical picture of the future technology sectors.