Ali Shaw, director at Livingston James<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\nPwC’s survey of 4,454 CEOs in 95 countries at the end of last year, meanwhile, showed that despite widespread experimentation, only 12% of bosses said AI has delivered both cost and revenue benefits. Overall, a third reported gains in either cost or revenue, while 56% saw no significant financial benefit to date.<\/p>\n
The survey pointed to a growing divide between companies piloting AI and those deploying it at scale. Those reporting both cost and revenue gains are two to three times more likely to say they have embedded AI extensively across products and services, demand generation and strategic decision-making. Those that have embedded responsible AI frameworks and technology environments that enable enterprise-wide integration were also found to be three times more likely to report meaningful financial returns.<\/p>\n
Scottish PwC director Neil Muir said that AI takes the time out of tasks, not the people out of jobs. Internally, over the last three years, the firm has gone from one AI tool to several, with some moving beyond the experimentation phase. “Those moving fastest understand pain points in workflow, they have enough usable data, and a reason to trust and govern the outputs.”<\/p>\n
The issue of governance is crucial in the highly-regulated sectors which should be best suited to AI implementation, like professional and financial services.<\/p>\n
“The near term pattern is AI taking on contained pieces of work, with guardrails in place to make sure an agent only executes within boundaries – so that’s access, control and accountability – what data can it reach, what actions can it take and how do you monitor that,” Muir explained. “Claude, Copilot, Chat GPT, they all have versions of agentic tools, and while agents talking to agents won’t happen immediately because of these risks, it’s coming a lot faster than a lot of people realise; certainly faster than the proper governance and risk awareness is.”<\/p>\n
A recent Bank of Scotland Business Barometer<\/em> showed that Scottish businesses integrating AI into their operations are reporting ‘significant financial benefits’, with 96% seeing increased productivity – the highest proportion of any UK nation or region – and 32% reporting higher profits over the past 12 months. Of those which reported a profit boost from using AI, 60% recorded an uplift of 11% or more, with a further 34% stating profits increased by 6% to 10%.<\/p>\nThe findings come as investment in AI accelerates, with nearly half (46%) of Scottish businesses confirming they have invested in AI. The research found that most firms spent less than \u00a325,000 (23%) to enhance their AI capabilities, followed by 9% of firms who spent between \u00a325,000 to \u00a3100,000, 5% spending between \u00a3100,000 to \u00a3250,000 and 9% spending \u00a3250,000 or more.<\/p>\n
Alongside these gains, Scottish businesses are investing in the skills needed to make AI adoption effective. The survey showed that just over a fifth of businesses have up-skilled their customer service teams (23%), while the same proportion have up-skilled their sales teams (23%).<\/p>\n
Martyn Kendrick, Scotland director at Bank of Scotland Commercial Banking, said: “Firms across the country recognise the strategic advantage that this technology can deliver, but as they make further investments in it, and expand its use, they will need clear oversight and robust processes so that it is used responsibly and transparently.”<\/p>\n
![\"Gordon](\"https:\/\/www.thebusinessdesk.com\/_files\/images\/apr_26\/Screenshot-2026-04-17-145908-e1776434405461-300x200.png\")
Gordon Davey, cloud technology and professional services leader at KPMG<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\nA similar study from\u00a0KPMG revealed\u00a0that 24% of private firms in Scotland see AI as a key area for investment, with 38% prioritising investment in the necessary workforce and skills development.<\/p>\n
Gordon Davey, cloud technology director at KPMG UK, commented: “Businesses should be preparing now for the safe and practical adoption of AI across their organisations – that means putting clear policies and standards in place so people can use AI tools confidently and securely.<\/p>\n
“We\u2019re already seeing many employees adopt AI with good intentions, but often on a ‘proceed until apprehended’ basis, without fully understanding the risks around data privacy or intellectual property.”<\/p>\n
Sector specifics<\/h3>\n
Research from the accountancy sector found that 72% of professionals fear that generative AI could produce errors or reach incorrect decisions, while 52% raised concerns about client data privacy and confidentiality.<\/p>\n
A year-long study commissioned by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS), drawing on firm-wide surveys of more than 200 accounting professionals and 50 in-depth interviews, revealed that 74% reckon the technology speeds up the tasks they perform – with many highlighting quicker data extraction, document analysis and information cross-referencing – yet only 22% said this has translated into a substantial increase in their overall work rate.<\/p>\n
More than half of respondents (53%) turn to AI to write emails and edit text, while 46% use it to summarise meetings or documents and 33% rely on it to support spreadsheet or other software-based tasks.<\/p>\n
ICAS research lead Ewan McCall commented: “The message from our research is clear: people, not machines, must remain firmly in the driving seat of professional decision-making.<\/p>\n
“While Gen AI can help accountants work faster and handle many routine tasks more efficiently, the technology is only as effective as the information, supervision, and oversight behind it – weak inputs lead to weak outputs, which over time erode the trust that underpins accounting work and wider society.”<\/p>\n
![\"Murray](\"https:\/\/www.thebusinessdesk.com\/_files\/images\/apr_26\/Murray-McCall-scaled-e1776434477441-300x215.jpg\")
Murray McCall, managing partner at Anderson Strathern<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\nAs for the law, there was also widespread agreement that legal firms need to get AI adoption right first time to maintain trust in the sector.<\/p>\n
Murray McCall, managing partner of Scottish law firm Anderson Strathern, said: “We must recognise ourselves as integral to shaping AI adoption and speaking up about problems that are arising from this technology – namely how unregulated it currently is and the capacity to produce absurd responses.<\/p>\n
“Navigating the pace of change in technology is also a significant challenge, and it’s vital to strike a careful balance between maintaining a level of control to ensure proper integration, adopting robust policies and providing appropriate training so that client confidentiality is never jeopardised.”<\/p>\n
He explained that Anderson Strathern is evaluating processes and ensuring staff understand its guidance on using AI. The main focus is on building it into management systems and processes, while exploring options for making best use of institutional knowledge to create more efficiencies.<\/p>\n
Large parts of the legal sector are already heavily automated, including volume debt recovery, some aspects of residential conveyancing and personal injury claims. The market clearly sees it as being rife for disruption, as evidenced by Edinburgh-based lawtech firm Wordsmith AI hitting a $100m valuation just 18 months after launch; believed to be the fastest ever for a Scottish start-up.<\/p>\n
“Looking ahead, I’d say it’s less a question of ‘what areas are likely to be automated’ and more a question of ‘to what degree will areas be impacted’ – AI is rapidly altering what clients expect and what lawyers do,” said McCall. “For a knowledge-led profession, that means rethinking where our value lies and, as it stands, we see real value in expertise.”<\/p>\n
WordSmith AI chief executive Ross McNairn told TheBusinessDesk that his company’s revenue grew by more than 10 times in 2025, with more than half of that new business coming through word of mouth referrals.<\/p>\n
“When a general counsel at one company sees results and tells their counterpart at another, that’s the strongest validation we can get – enterprise teams like Financial Times and BT are on the platform with their lawyers using it daily – with some in-house teams reporting as much of an 80% cost reduction in external counsel spend,” he said. “Baillie Gifford are another great example – not exactly a firm that takes risks lightly, so that says a lot about where confidence in this technology has got to.”<\/p>\n
![\"Wordsmith](\"https:\/\/www.thebusinessdesk.com\/_files\/images\/apr_26\/IMG_6163-e1775555076401-300x201.png\")
Wordsmith AI chief executive Ross McNairn<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\nWhen asked about risks and reticence in the market, McNairn said he tries to always put customer education and engagement first.<\/p>\n
“My co-founder and I are both lawyers, so we have been on both sides of the table, and we now have a team of over 20 former lawyers whose entire job is to work alongside our customers, teaching them how to get the most out of the platform; not just onboarding them and walking away.<\/p>\n
“We call this role the legal engineer, and honestly I think it’s the hottest job that’s going to exist for in-house legal professionals over the next decade – lawyers who know how to implement Al in a way that drives real efficiency for the business are going to be extraordinarily valuable,” he continued, adding: “If you can get something turned around in an hour instead of a week, that value compounds every single time it happens; across every team, every deal, every request that comes through the door.”<\/p>\n
Within highly-regulated sectors such as law, accountancy and financial services, the risk of falling behind competitors has to be balanced with the risk of falling foul of the rules.<\/p>\n
Edinburgh-based consultancy Optima Partners recently pivoted towards AI and now advises clients within these sectors to help join up disparate data across things like marketing, HR and finance to improve internal and external communications.<\/p>\n
Chief executive Chris Foley reckons the tech has been largely embraced, but with the need for proper guardrails to guarantee outcomes deterministically. “The danger is creating ‘data space junk’ by not realising who the beneficiaries are, storing more and more unnecessary information,” he explained.<\/p>\n
“Within life and pensions for instance, the number of times that customers would interact has been quite sparse, so the amount of data captured compared to retail banks is more shallow – but that’s changing as things move towards investment-based pensions,” Foley went on. “There’s certainly a challenge from fintech disruptors, which are unencumbered by legacy systems, but it’s all about improving ways of working – we saw this in the pandemic with the acceleration of vaccine production, AI can help improve efficiency by creating a universal semantic layer to connect data assets between different functions.”<\/p>\n
![\"Chris](\"https:\/\/www.thebusinessdesk.com\/_files\/images\/apr_26\/Chris-Foley-CEO-at-Optima-Partners-1-1-scaled-e1776435669595-300x200.jpg\")
Chris Foley, chief executive at Optima Partners<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\nDr Alexandra Birch-Mayne is chair of multilingual natural language processing at the University of Edinburgh, as well as a co-founder and chief scientist at fintech firm Aveni, which last year secured \u00a311m in a Series A funding round.<\/p>\n
Having built up a customer base for its Aveni Protect quality assurance automation product, mainly among the wealth management sector, as LLMs improved in recent years, the start-up developed Aveni Assist to help financial firms automate things like updating client relationship systems and draft marketing emails. It now has more than 100 customers across the two products and is working on an AI agent which checks on the safety and efficacy of other agents being used by financial firms.<\/p>\n
“In our latest funding round Lloyds and Nationwide invested in a project to build an LLM for finance – FinLLM – which is going from web crawling to distilling high performance models,” Birch-Mayne explained. “We’re now focusing on what the commercial case is and thinking about deploying through a modular, scalable agentic platform.<\/p>\n
“Agent Assure is essentially an agent which checks other agents, and we’re working with Lloyds to develop the first minimum viable project, which should complete by the end of May, following a development phase in the FCA’s AI sandbox earlier this year.”<\/p>\n
She commented that the UK’s financial regulators have been trying to support the development of safe AI, but that nobody has a complete playbook of how to do this.<\/p>\n
“There are a lot of different aspects of security which have to be taken into account – our current focus is checking whether the models say things that are compliant – but there’s also protection against things like prompt injection, making sure tools don’t get switched for less safe ones, and then making sure these bots work for vulnerable demographics that must be protected,” Birch-Mayne continued, adding: “As we try to map existing processes onto combinations of agents and humans, ultimately some person still needs to take responsibility for safety; there needs to be some form of accountability.”<\/p>\n
Emerging risks and opportunities<\/h3>\n
The AI landscape is shifting so rapidly that many of these assertions may be rendered redundant in the coming weeks or months, but as of the middle of April 2026, funding rounds and valuations of the big model and chip makers are ballooning at an alarming rate, causing many economic commentators to urge caution.<\/p>\n
Paul Diggle, chief economist at Aberdeen Group, recently set out several scenarios in its second quarter global economic outlook. One of these – albeit given only a 15% probability – is that AI-related spending collapses, tech stocks fall sharply and private credit defaults surge, triggering a US recession similar to the dotcom bust. Another of the firm’s scenarios is that rapid advances in AI mean it substitutes for a wide variety of service-sector work, raising unemployment, while central banks are slow to react, perhaps because of a misdiagnosis that rising unemployment reflects a higher natural rate.<\/p>\n
“Eventually, policy rates fall to the effective lower bound, but the economy is already in a liquidity trap,” wrote Diggle. “Fiscal positions deteriorate, as income tax takes decline, low marginal propensities to consume mean the higher incomes enjoyed by capital owners are not spent on new wants and needs that would create new employment.”<\/p>\n
![\"Shannon](\"https:\/\/www.thebusinessdesk.com\/_files\/images\/apr_26\/Screenshot-2026-04-17-150426-e1776434733228-300x200.png\")
Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford chair in the ethics of data and AI at the University of Edinburgh<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\nAway from job concerns, there is also the issue of security risks from uncontrolled use of agentic AI platforms like Openclaw and people using AI to ‘vibe code’ without knowing how to check the quality or safety of that new code before implementing it in critical business environments, according to professor Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford chair in the ethics of data and artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh.<\/p>\n
“Trust in the potential benefits of AI use, especially by SMEs which want to expand their capabilities with it, can be quickly undermined by people\u2019s lack of knowledge of how to use it responsibly,” she stated, pointing out that failing to partner effectively with staff on AI implementation is one reason why so many businesses are still seeing limited productivity gains.<\/p>\n
Vallor recently launched an online, open access course designed to help business leaders assess AI, which she believes still isn’t the right option for all companies.<\/p>\n
“There are definitely some small businesses that are not going to see much value from it, or where the risks outweigh the potential gains – but your employees or clients might be using it anyway, in ways that could cause your business huge problems down the road if you\u2019re not aware, or your competitors may be using it, in ways that will really change your industry, for better or for worse,” she said.<\/p>\n
On 15 April, UK technology secretary Liz Kendall wrote an open letter to businesses about AI cyber threats, in particular warning about Anthropic’s new Mythos model. Launched on 7 April, its ability to find and exploit software vulnerabilities meant that before general release, it is being security tested with 50 multi-national firms so they can assess their defences. OpenAI is also scaling up its Trusted Access for Cyber programme to allay similar concerns with its next model.<\/p>\n
Testing by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, alongside the AI Security Institute (AISI), found Mythos to be “substantially more capable at cyber offence” than any model previously assessed. The AISI assessed that frontier capabilities are doubling every four months, compared to every eight months previously.<\/p>\n
![\"Liz](\"https:\/\/www.thebusinessdesk.com\/_files\/images\/apr_26\/Liz_Kendall_Official_Cabinet_Portrait_July_2024_cropped_2-e1776937480506-300x200.jpg\")
Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology – credit: Lauren Hurley<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n“The trajectory is clear and therefore it is vital that we are prepared for frontier AI model capabilities to rapidly increase over the next year, and plan accordingly for that outcome,” read the letter, adding that government action alone will not be enough. “Every business in the UK has a part of play, criminals will not just target government systems and critical infrastructure, they will target ordinary companies, of every size, in every sector.”<\/p>\n
Kendall concluded: “We are entering a period in which the pace of technological change may test every institution in the country, the businesses that act now – that treat cyber security as an essential part of running a modern company, not an optional extra – will be the ones best placed to thrive through it and seize its advantages.”<\/p>\n
As Anthropic prepares to release Mythos across UK financial institutions, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Treasury and the National Cyber Security Centre have all held discussions with the industry regarding the potential risks to critical infrastructure. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank is preparing to meet with eurozone banks to assess the risks posed by the preview model.<\/p>\n
Just this week, the FCA announced that Scottish Widows, Barclays, Experian and UBS have been chosen to live test AI applications to “support safe and responsible deployment”. The regulator said its initiative should help explore key questions around risk management and live monitoring.<\/p>\n
“Applications reflect the fast-evolving nature of the technology, with a diverse range of AI models underpinning use cases \u2013 from agentic AI and small language models to emerging solutions such as neurosymbolic AI,” read a statement, with testing including both customer-facing and business\u2011to\u2011business use cases like AI-enabled targeted support for investments, credit score insights for consumers, agentic payments and anti-money laundering detection.<\/p>\n
The FCA will also publish a Good and Poor Practice report for AI in financial services later this year to support firms in the safe adoption of the developing technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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