Scotland must plot route up AI mountain, by Nick Freer

In late March at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at Quartermile, the Scottish Government launched Scotland’s Artificial Strategy 2026-2031, setting up the AI Scotland body and detailing areas where action should be taken to ensure an effective response to AI as an emerging technology. 

The Futures Institute itself, an entrepreneurial campus developed with funding from the UK and Scottish Governments, has quickly become a jewel in Quartermile’s crown, a section of the city that has been a fulcrum of Scotland’s emerging tech scene over the last decade or so, and being home to the country’s first two tech unicorns, Skyscanner and FanDuel. 

The AI strategy outlined on the day covered AI users, adoption and skills, companies and products, innovation and R&D, data centres and infrastructure, semiconductors, data, and regulation. 

Already in Scotland, we can see our AI scene move from a fledging phase to something more mature, although experts concur that we are still near the bottom of the AI mountain as AI superpower nations and other European countries closer to home make much bigger strides.   

On the upside, in June last year the University of Edinburgh was announced as the home of the UK’s next national supercomputer, to the tune of £750 million. Then in September, US cloud computing giant CoreWeave led a £1.5 billion infrastructure investment into Scotland - marking the first major investment of its kind here, alongside DataVita, Scotland’s largest data centre.

Also last year, one of the world’s most storied AI venture capital firms, Index Ventures, led a $25 million investment into Edinburgh-headquartered Wordsmith AI, an AI platform that helps in-house legal teams review contracts, draft documents, and run fast AI-powered legal research.

And only last week, the Financial Conduct Authority said the results of its small language model for financial services with Malted AI, another Edinburgh-based AI startup, had delivered “extremely encouraging” results. 

While Edinburgh and Scotland have considerable pedigree on the academic and R&D side of AI, we must produce even more world-beating AI companies like Wordsmith to be considered a bona fide AI nation. 

In April 2025, a deeptech AI initiative was launched to bridge innovation between university postgraduate talent and NHS Scotland.  ‘AI Discovery’, delivered by CodeBase via its Techscaler programme in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, and NHS Scotland, now helps postgraduates harness the latest AI technologies and build AI-enabled startups that can address some of the greatest challenges faced by the NHS.  

And CodeBase was behind the wheel again earlier this year, debuting digital skills provider CodeClan’s applied agentic AI programme, a UK first, in partnership with University of Edinburgh Business School and Qwasar Silicon Valley, equipping senior engineers to build, deploy and optimise enterprise-scale agentic AI systems. 

So, the early signs are encouraging that while Scotland may still be near the bottom of the AI mountain, the route upward is becoming clearer.  The challenge now is execution, and whether Scotland can turn intellectual excellence into lasting economic impact.