On Monday 13th January, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer set out the government’s plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) across the UK’s public and private sectors. It aims to improve efficiencies in public services and accelerate economic growth.

The UK is already the third largest AI market in the world, but as the technologies behind AI have advanced rapidly in the last two years – at a pace that has surprised almost everyone – the new government has decided to fully support it before it falls behind other nations.

In its AI Opportunities Action Plan, published this month, the government states that AI could be its “single biggest lever to deliver its five missions, especially the goal of kickstarting broad-based economic growth”. The paper acknowledges that the UK has a healthy start-up and scale-up sector, strong research in multiple universities, and plenty of talented graduates with AI related degrees. And the AI Safety Institute, the world’s first state-backed organisation of its kind, manages AI safety, measures its impacts on people and society, and helps shape government policies.

The government says it’s determined to capitalise on the nation’s leading role in AI and make the UK an AI superpower. In his speech, Sir Keir Starmer said that AI “will drive incredible change” and that his government is “going to make AI work for everyone in our country”. The Labour government claims that leading tech firms have already committed £14 billion towards various AI projects, creating over 13,000 jobs.

Ahead of the AI game

At Quorum Cyber, we’ve understood the enormous power and potential of AI for years. We see it as a force multiplier for defenders and we’ve chosen to run towards it to take advantage of the benefits as early as possible in order to protect our customers from cybercrime.

AI enables our large team of Security Operations Centre (SOC) analysts, who work in the UK, the US, and Canada, to investigate potential cyber incidents deeper than before and conduct linked investigations (across data, network, and identity signals) to provide organisations with holistic incident reports detailing root causes and affected areas across the entire digital estate. And we’ve embedded AI into our managed security services, Clarity Defend, Clarity Extend, and Clarity Protect.

“I think that what you can do with AI from a security standpoint is more powerful than what the threat actors can do with it,” says Quorum Cyber CEO Federico Charosky. “If we really do unlock that power, we might have the upper hand for the first time in a long time.”

He elaborated: “The nature of the way we protect against threats becomes far more powerful with the help of AI. Our ability to collect, analyse, interpret, and respond to data is going to be unlike anything we have ever seen. Attackers are going to have to become much more sophisticated to pierce through these defences. Real-time estate monitoring is already being embedded into product ecosystems, like Microsoft’s, by default.”

Follow the AI conversation with Quorum Cyber

If you’d like to understand more about Quorum Cyber’s viewpoints on AI and how we’re using it to protect over 200 organisations around the globe, you might want to read the highlights from AI in Cyber Security: Navigating the Future, our first AI event focused on Copilot for Security. Our panel of experts covered the many benefits of AI tools, privacy versus security, the economics of cybercrime, and how cybercriminals are likely planning for AI-powered cyber-attacks.

You might also be interested in Principal Incident Response Consultant Mark Cunningham-Dickie’s insights on why it’s vital to learn from the past when it comes to implementing AI.