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Small Businesses: Artificial Intelligence

Asked by Victoria CollinsLiberal DemocratDepartment for Business and TradeTabled Answered 10 December 2025UIN 97577

The question

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what steps his Department is taking to develop standards to help with procurement and encourage AI adoption amongst SMEs.

Answered by Blair McDougall

In July, the SME Digital Adoption Taskforce published ten recommendations to help the UK’s SMEs become the most digitally capable and AI confident in the G7 by 2035. We are now working to deliver these recommendations.

We have already partnered with Google on a series of events to help SME leaders around the UK explore how AI can help them.

DSIT has published AI Management Essentials to help SMEs implement responsible AI governance practices.

Also, we are prioritising SMEs in our new system to give them a fair chance at public contracts, with departmental targets and a new SME Procurement Education programme.

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