The government has launched the first procurement competitions for its £100 million sovereign AI R&D procurement scheme, aiming to support British AI companies to “start here, scale here and win globally”.
According to the government, the scheme is designed to act as a venture capital fund, focusing on demonstrator-stage solutions ready to be tested in real-world environments. Applications will be assessed by the sovereign AI team, participating government departments, and technical experts, with the first competitions designed to test the delivery model for future phases.
One of four competitions launched in the first phase is the NHS productivity challenge, with firms set to work with the DHSC to develop AI systems capable of automating workflows, coordinating care, and supporting decision-making. Other competitions focus on driving compute efficiency, integrating AI in defence, and agent security and resilience testing.
“Too often, smaller companies with great ideas are locked out of public contracts with national and local government because they lack the turnover, cash reserves or track record of larger firms,” the government states. “This scheme removes those barriers, with upfront payments available where appropriate, giving more British founders the early-stage funding they need to be able to build and prove their technology.”
Solutions will remain the intellectual property of the organisations that created them, the government continues, allowing them to be expanded beyond pilot stage into commercial products for both UK and international customers.
Kanishka Narayan, AI Minister, said: “When we said that sovereign AI would put the heft of a nation behind Britain’s AI founders, we meant it. Every year the British state spends billions procuring products and solutions tackling some of the most important challenges facing society – from health, to our national defence. This first-of-its-kind scheme will open up these opportunities to the British AI innovators whose ideas could make the biggest difference, backing their businesses to grow here, and go on to win globally.”
A video posted to the Sovereign AI LinkedIn page offers further insight on the launch.
Further challenges are reportedly to be expected as the programme expands.
Wider trend: Health AI
An AI spin-out from the University of Birmingham has launched, with an aim to speed up the process of extracting data from EHRs to support medical researchers and reduce the time for drug safety and effectiveness studies. Dexter AI is based on a software developed by a team from the Birmingham Department of Applied Health Sciences, Professor Krishnarajah Nirantharakumar, Dr Krishna Gokhale, and Professor Joht Singh Chandan. Its website outlines the potential for use in the design of epidemiological studies, cohort identification, emulating clinical trials with real world data, automating clinical audits, and enabling population health management.
An award of up to $35 million from the US Department for Health and Human Services’ rare disease AI/ML for precision integrated diagnostics programme is set to support UNC Health to build a data resource for rare disease AI. According to UNC Health, the new data resource will support clinicians and researchers identify patterns and develop research further into rare disease diagnosis and care. New and existing tools will help enable analysis of this large-scale clinical and biological data, with the ambition of promoting earlier diagnosis and treatment discovery.
OpenAI has introduced EHR and public data integration into ChatGPT for Healthcare, said to enable AI-assisted workflows and provide clinical teams with a variety of patient information, context, and insights from public health sources. The EHR integration is capable of bringing authorised patient information from Epic into ChatGPT for Healthcare, OpenAI states, whilst the Healthcare Public Data plugin grants direct access to official healthcare datasets such as PubMed and DailyMed.
