TechRound’s Gina Marrs put that question to Calum and 16 other tech company leaders.
Here are Calum's comments:
“Starmer’s likely successor, Andy Burnham, is far better at vibe politics, though the bar is low. But it remains to be seen whether his policies can fix Britain’s serious problems.
Burnham is something of a weather vane, pegged as both Blairite and soft left. He is said to have little interest in artificial intelligence, and if true, that is a serious shortcoming. The US economy is now a one-way bet that AI will transform every organisation, and the UK and Europe ignore this at their peril. The UK should aim at AI Sovereignty, but can only achieve that in collaboration with the rest of Europe.
Competing with Big AI on frontier models is implausible, but Europe and the UK should at least undertake enormous infrastructure investments, especially in data centres. With ASML in chips and Mistral in open-source LLMs, generating tokens at scale would give the continent a seat at the global AI table.”
The other 16 respondents are listed below and you can read what they all said here.
- Liam Houghton: Founder and CEO of Popsa
- Graeme Donnelly: CEO and founder of 1st Formations
- Juliana Germinio: Founder and Creative Director of Yellow Zest
- Todd Davison: MD of Purbeck Personal Guarantee Insurance
- Sabby Gill: CEO of Dext
- Dimple Patel: CEO of NatureMetrics
- Simon George: Co-Founder of Business Buzz
- Carolyn Dawson: CEO, Founders Forum Group and Tech Nation
- Jose Lopez: Head of AI at bunny.net
- Paul Jenkinson: CEO and Co-Founder of Whitespace
- Eduard Panteleev: Co-Founder and Co-CEO, ANNA Money
- Jenson Brook: Founder of Britain’s Got Startups
- Rory Blundell: CEO at Gravitee
- Paul Beare: Founder and MD of Paul Beare Limited
- Mark Sait: CEO and Co-Founder of SaveMoneyCutCarbon
- James Bannon: Co-Founder and Operations Manager at BM Technologies