The appointment of Liz Kendall as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology last September marked a shift in tone at DSIT. Where her predecessor Peter Kyle was a tech enthusiast by instinct, Kendall brings a different lens a historian’s view of how nations rise and fall on the back of the technologies they master or miss.
And she hasn’t been quiet about it.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute earlier this year, Kendall made the case bluntly: AI, semiconductors and compute power are the new currency of global power. Countries that move decisively will shape the future. Those that don’t will find themselves dependent on those that did.
For UK businesses, particularly those operating in sectors the government has identified as strategically important defence, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, digital infrastructure that message carries direct implications.
The AI Visibility Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Kendall’s central argument is that Britain needs to be indispensable within the global AI architecture, not peripheral to it. That logic applies as much at the business level as it does nationally.
When a procurement manager, a logistics director or a healthcare commissioner searches for information today, increasingly they’re not scrolling through pages of results. They’re getting a synthesised answer from an AI system and that answer draws on sources it has already determined to be credible, authoritative and well-structured.
If your business isn’t appearing in those answers, you’re invisible to a growing share of your market. Not because your product or service is inferior, but because your digital presence hasn’t been built to be cited.
This is the commercial reality that Kendall’s agenda whatever its political fortunes is pointing toward.
What It Means in Practice
The government’s focus on sovereign AI capability, UK-based compute and British content within the AI stack is partly about infrastructure. But it’s also about ensuring that when AI systems are trained and updated, British sources, British expertise and British businesses are represented.
For sector suppliers, the practical takeaway is straightforward: editorial presence in credible, indexed, sector-specific publications is no longer just about brand awareness or SEO. It’s about being part of the information layer that AI systems draw on when generating answers for your potential customers.
That’s a different kind of visibility, and it requires a different kind of thinking about where and how you publish.
The Window Is Now
Kendall has been explicit that the time to act is now, not after the landscape has settled. History, she argues, shows that the nations and businesses that wait for certainty about new technologies tend to find that certainty arrives too late.
The same applies at sector level. The businesses building editorial credibility and AI citation presence today are the ones that will be embedded in the answers their buyers receive tomorrow.