The UK's AI strategy isn't built for small businesses
Here's what I found when I went looking for the SME strategy
In January 2026, the UK government announced an expansion of its flagship AI training programme, the AI Skills Boost. The target is 10 million workers upskilled by 2030. “At least 2 million” of them will be SME employees.
The government claims that AI Skills Boost is “for everyone everywhere”. It’s a “free training offer” that teaches “practical skills you can use straight away”. The current focus is on “key skills for those in small and medium-sized enterprises, where AI adoption lags behind larger organisations.”
Almost four months in, I do not believe that the strategy is working for small businesses. Here are four reasons why.
1. None of the chosen training providers is a small business
The 14 foundation courses on the AI Skills Boost programme are delivered by eight enterprise (mostly tech) companies: Accenture, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Sage, Amazon, Salesforce and SAS. No small businesses have been included in the list of training providers.
This is both a representation issue and an economic one.
The contracts to deliver national AI training, and the visibility that comes with being a government-endorsed provider, are going exclusively to enterprises. Small training providers (like the AI Edit’s CPD-certified AI Fluency for Leaders course as just one example) have not had the opportunity to participate. The economic upside of being part of a publicly funded programme of this scale is being captured entirely by large vendors.
In addition, there is the issue that training designed by enterprises often has an enterprise perspective. I have taken a number of these type of training courses* in the last few years, and often found them not aligned with my needs as a small business owner. Ethics is a good example - where the focus is often on the ethics of building AI, rather than the ethics of deploying it. Most small businesses are not building AI, but they need to understand the ethical implications of deploying it.
Enterprise AI training, however well delivered, is often built for the world its designers know. That world is not the world in which most small businesses operate. The result is training that technically satisfies the benchmark and practically misses the audience.
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2. Courses delivered by vendors create two specific problems
The first is data. Twelve of the 14 foundation courses on the AI Skills Boost programme require the learner to log into a separate vendor platform after registering on the AI Skills Hub. To complete the foundation programme, a small business owner or employee must hand over data and learning behaviour to several of: FutureLearn, Google Skills, IBM SkillsBuild, Founderz, AWS Skillsbuilder, Salesforce Trailhead, Accenture’s Skills to Succeed Academy, and Learn SAS. The Hub itself is mostly a directory. The courses don’t live there.
The second is commercial interest. The course on generative AI from Google includes prompting in Vertex AI. The Microsoft course teaches SharePoint and Microsoft Copilot. These are foundational courses in name. By letting the vendors run them, they risk becoming introductions to the products the vendor also sells. The small business owner who completes them comes out with brand-specific knowledge, when the real goal should be transferable AI literacy - including an objective look at the pros and cons of the AI products on the market.
3. Engagement appears to be low and content is out of date
The AI Skills Boost programme launched on 28 January 2026. Since then (more than three months into the programme aiming to educate 10 million people), the 14 foundation courses have generated only 95 reviews in total by my count. The most-engaged courses, Accenture’s Mastering Prompting with 22 reviews and Microsoft’s Get Started with Agents with 20, both have an average rating of 2.5 stars. One Amazon course has zero reviews. The five-star ratings on the platform come from samples of one, two, or four reviews.
Some of the foundation courses had not been updated for nine months by the date of the public launch. Microsoft’s Get Started with Agents and Google’s Introduction to Generative AI were both last updated in March 2025. Amazon’s two foundation courses were last updated in April 2025. In a field where Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have all released major model upgrades in the intervening period, much of the content small business owners are being directed to was already aging at the moment they were invited to take it.
4. The training allocation is disproportionate to the SME workforce share
Small businesses (those with fewer than 250 employees) employ around 60% of the UK private sector workforce, according to the Department for Business and Trade’s Business Population Estimates. When the public sector is included, SMEs employ around 48% of UK workers.
The AI Skills Boost programme commits to upskilling “at least 2 million SME employees” out of its 10 million target. That is 20% of the training allocation for 50% of the workforce. A proportional share would be closer to five million.
The methodology behind the 2 million figure has not been published. The phrase appears once, in the government’s January 2026 press release. There is no published consultation document, no working dashboard, and no Skills England paper that shows how the figure was reached.
What this adds up to
These four things, together, are the AI strategy small businesses are being offered. Training delivered by the enterprises that sell AI to those small businesses. Vendor lock-in dressed as a foundation programme. Engagement levels that suggest the audience is not engaging. And an allocation that gives 20% of the training capacity to ~50% of the workforce.
I wrote an open letter to Anthropic last month about how the same gap shows up at vendor level. The pattern is the same. Small businesses are downstream of programmes designed for organisations that look nothing like them.
The strategy that was meant to be the cavalry was not built around small businesses. The cavalry is not coming.
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*Full disclosure - I have not taken the 14 foundational courses on AI Skills Boost.