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The UK government is staking its economic strategy on AI transforming public services, but recent research reveals that digital system delivery has a 9% success rate. This book provides an honest assessment of the current picture and a clear path forward – both things that are sorely needed. The book will be published in late May 2026 and can be pre-ordered now via the link in the description below.
The UK government has placed AI at the centre of its plans to cut costs and improve public services. Ministers have committed to making Britain an AI superpower and identified £45 billion in potential productivity savings from digital transformation. But this new book by one of Britain’s most experienced digital transformation experts argues that without fundamental institutional reform, these ambitions will fail – just as previous government technology strategies have failed to meet the ambitious targets set for them over the past twenty years.
Making AI Work for Britain draws on the government’s own data to expose a pattern that should alarm anyone relying on AI to deliver the prime minister’s agenda. The State of Digital Government Review (January 2025) found that only 9% of the government’s major technology programmes are rated “Green” – that is, on track for successful delivery. Technology programmes are 60% more likely to be rated “Red” than non-technology projects. Half of all digital recruitment campaigns failed to fill the role. Only 8% of public sector AI projects show measurable benefits. And only four government departments out of more than twenty have a digital leader on their executive committee.
Professor Brown argues that these are not technology failures. They are institutional failures – in governance, procurement, skills, and accountability. The same structural barriers that defeated GDS, derailed Universal Credit, and slowed NHS digitization will defeat AI unless they are confronted directly. “More capable AI does not fix less capable institutions,” he writes. “Strategy documents don’t transform countries. Institutions do.”
Most books about AI focus on the technology itself – what it can do, what it might become, what it means for jobs. This book focuses on what determines whether AI actually works in practice. It starts from twenty years of documented evidence about why UK technology strategies fail at implementation, and designs an institutional architecture to break that cycle.
Anyone resident in the UK can pre-order a copy of the book with free postage and packing via the link below:
https://lpp-books.sumupstore.com/product/making-ai-work-for-britain-by-alan-w-brown
Ordering in this way before the end of April will mean that you receive the book ahead of publication. Orders for non-UK addresses will open after the 1st of May.
Alan W. Brown is a professor in digital economy, an experienced business executive and a strategic advisor. He has spent more than thirty years in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom driving large-scale software-driven programmes with commercial high-tech companies, leading R&D teams, building state-of-the-art solutions and improving software product delivery approaches. He has written several books on enterprise software delivery and digital transformation. He is a fellow of the British Computer Society and recently completed his role as a fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI.
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