Britain is well-placed to be at the forefront of AI breakthrough but for one thing: its deep-seated culture of risk aversion. To foster a more entrepreneurial culture, there are three things the UK should do, says Lewis Z Liu

The UK has a unique set of advantages to lead the AI revolution. It boasts world-class intellectual depth, an international outlook and a preeminent global city in London. However, it will fail to capture any of the rewards of this revolution if it does not address its deep-seated cultural malaise of risk avoidance.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this more clearly than my early experience with Eigen Technologies, the AI company I founded in London and recently sold. When Eigen won its first client, Goldman Sachs, in 2017, we were just 18 people. I worked nonstop during my honeymoon to win the deal, finally succeeding in beating out Big Tech and well-funded Silicon Valley start-ups. But instead of celebrating those last remaining days with my new wife, I faced a mutiny: 16 of my 18 employees signed a joint email imploring me not to take the deal, calling it “too risky”. Keep in mind, we didn’t have any clients at the time. As such, I called each employee individually to convince them to move forward. To this day I still owe my wife a honeymoon! Ultimately, we delivered the first banking AI deployment of its kind — a watershed moment in AI adoption.

I tell this story to highlight both the best and worst of UK tech entrepreneurship. Like DeepSeek, a small elite group turned AI on its head where Big Tech and Silicon Valley couldn’t. But unlike DeepSeek, our team was deeply international, in the full spirit of London, bringing together the best minds from around the world.

Today, the UK is an AI intellectual powerhouse. The DeepMind team built their groundbreaking work in the UK and continue to do so as part of Google. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Prize-winning physicist and widely regarded “Godfather of AI” is British. Two of the three 2024 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners, recognised for their AI-driven breakthroughs in protein folding, did their........

© City A.M.