Beyond the startup, by Nick Freer

With so many podcasts around these days, is there room for another one featuring a dyed in the wool PR guy banging on about startups from Scotland? 

It’s a fair question, and one I’ve been asking myself on repeat as we prepare to launch Beyond the Startup, a new podcast series alongside former Skyscanner growth executive Lisa Venter.

Supported by Scotland’s largest AI consultancy, Create Future, and next generation enterprise CMS platform Forrit, we’re setting out to explore a subject that hopefully deserves a bit more attention: how Scotland builds more globally successful technology companies.

Not simply more startups, important though they are, but businesses capable of scaling internationally, creating substantial employment and generating lasting economic value.

Our first guest is Richard Lennox, an experienced scaleup operator, author of the recent Framing Scotland’s Entrepreneurial Economy report, and regular guest writer for this column.

Richard has spent much of his career helping ambitious technology businesses grow at pace, and his argument is compelling. Namely, that Scotland is pretty good at supporting companies through their earliest stages, but less so when helping them to scale. 

We rightly celebrate new businesses, university spinouts and entrepreneurial success stories, but the bigger economic prize lies in helping more of these companies go global.

Today, consider Wordsmith, Simple Online Healthcare, or Chemify. Different sectors, different business models, all demonstrating the potential for Scottish companies to compete well beyond our borders.

Imagine the impact if Scotland could produce significantly more businesses of this calibre. More high-value jobs, greater exports, stronger supply chains, and experienced entrepreneurs reinvesting their knowledge and capital into the next generation.

That’s the conversation Lisa and I want to encourage.  We bring different perspectives. Lisa has experienced the realities of scaling a global technology business, while I’ve spent much of my career advising and writing about Scotland’s entrepreneurial community including some of our most celebrated tech companies.

We’re interested in the personalities, decisions, challenges and, where possible, the uncomfortable truths behind building successful businesses. Not simply another round of congratulatory exchanges about how wonderful our entrepreneurial ecosystem is.

There’s also something appropriate about launching a podcast focused on scaling companies when the podcast itself resembles a startup.  Our first iteration will undoubtedly be a little raw around the edges. We’ll learn what works, discover what doesn’t, and hopefully improve with every episode.

Like any early-stage venture, we have an idea, some ambition, supportive partners, but absolutely no guarantee of success.  I guess the challenge is turning that initial enthusiasm into something sustainable and genuinely valuable to the audience.

Perhaps that’s a useful reminder of what entrepreneurship involves. Starting something can be relatively straightforward. Building something that lasts is way harder.

Scotland has become good at celebrating the beginning of that journey. With Beyond the Startup, we hope to spend more time discussing what happens next.

Because the real prize for Scotland isn’t simply creating more startups. It’s building more companies that change the world, and our economy along with it.

AI security is now a boardroom emergency, guest blog by Peter Proud, CEO and Founder of Forrit

Artificial intelligence has changed the economics of cybercrime. An attacker no longer needs a large team, specialist knowledge, or months of preparation. AI tools can scan thousands of websites, identify weaknesses, write malicious code and launch attacks faster than any person could. Work that was once difficult, costly, and slow can now be automated.

 This is already happening. During an internal evaluation in Australia, an OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to non-public files on a government Medicare statistics portal. No patient records were reportedly accessed, but the episode showed what an autonomous system can do: probe infrastructure, learn from failure and simply keep trying.

 Denmark provides a different warning. Attackers reportedly misused a company’s legitimate access to the national CPR register. Names, addresses, and personal identification numbers linked to about 8.8 million people were exposed. This was not reported as an AI attack, but it shows how trusted access and an overlooked weakness can expose data on a huge scale. AI makes such openings easier to find and faster to exploit.

 IT systems are vulnerable because they often rely on a jumble of open-source software, plugins, third-party services, old code, and forgotten connections. One unpatched component, exposed interface or dormant account may be enough. AI can search for these gaps around the clock. It can also create convincing phishing emails, copy trusted brands, rewrite malware, and help inexperienced criminals target vulnerable systems.

 There is a precedent for the response now required. In 2002, Microsoft acknowledged that software built for standalone PC’s and offline servers, were not secure enough for an internet-connected world. Through its Trustworthy Computing initiative, teams paused development, reviewed existing products, retrained engineers, and put security at the centre of the development process. This was more than a round of patches. Microsoft changed the way it built software.

 AI calls for a similar reset across business and government. Every organisation should review every existing system against AI-enabled threats. Websites, software, data, suppliers, and access rights must all be reconsidered against threats that learn and adapt in real time. A system designed before autonomous AI should not be assumed safe.

 This belongs in the boardroom. It cannot be handed to the IT department and forgotten. Directors decide how much risk to accept, where to invest and how resilient the organisation should be. They should know which systems are critical, who can access them, when they were last tested, how quickly a breach could be contained and which executive is accountable. If the answers are vague, the organisation is not ready.

 A yearly compliance exercise is no longer enough. Boards need continuous oversight, rapid fixes, and tighter control over critical systems. At Forrit, our philosophy is that security, governance, resilience, and auditability must be designed into the platform, not added later. That means limiting plugin sprawl, controlling integrations, and removing unnecessary routes into a system. Simpler technology is often safer, but boards must still demand proof that the safeguards work.

 AI will help defenders spot unusual behaviour and respond more quickly. Attackers, however, have access to much of the same technology and every incentive to exploit delay. Trust takes years to earn and minutes to lose. The question is not whether AI-enabled attackers will test an organisation’s systems. They will. The real question is whether its board acted early enough. After a breach, saying “we left it to IT” will satisfy neither customers nor regulators.

Businesses are learning to think long term again, by Zudu CEO Paul Duffy

For the best part of a decade, long-term planning in Scottish business has felt like a luxury. Brexit, a pandemic, an energy crisis, inflation and interest rates taught us a similar lesson, essentially not to look too far ahead because events will overtake you.

Five-year plans became three-year plans, then annual budgets and, for many businesses, a rolling quarter of simply getting through it.  But something is changing.  Over the past year, I've spent a lot of time talking to business owners across Scotland, including interviewing founders and leaders with both my Zudu and Entrepreneurial Scotland hats on.

The conversation has shifted. People are mapping out five-year plans again. Proper plans involving new markets, hires, products, acquisitions and succession. Leaders increasingly seem to believe the ground beneath them is firm enough to build on.

That's not because the world has suddenly become more predictable. Quite the opposite. The pace of change is accelerating. What's different is how businesses are responding to it.  Rather than waiting for things to settle before committing, more leaders are accepting that things probably won't settle.

My own industry has operated like this for years. Software teams live with constant change. New tools, frameworks and approaches arrive continually and have to be tested against real problems before earning their place.

You quickly learn that you can't postpone your plans until the landscape stops moving. You choose a direction, review regularly and become comfortable changing the route without losing sight of the destination.

Increasingly, I'm hearing the same thinking outside of technology circles.  So, a family manufacturer considering how to grow without losing what makes it distinctive, a hospitality group planning expansion while rethinking staffing, a professional services firm preparing for the next generation of leadership.

These are growth, people and legacy stories before they are technology stories. Technology inevitably features, and increasingly so does AI. But that conversation has matured too.  Two years ago, boards were asking: "What should we be doing with AI?" Today, I'm more likely to hear: "How can this help us get where we want to be in five years?"  That's a much healthier question. It puts the business first and the technology second.

Companies are becoming less interested in chasing every new announcement and more interested in where technology earns its keep - relieving pressure on teams, improving customer service and providing better information for decisions.

Why does this matter? Because long-term planning is an expression of confidence, and confidence drives investment, recruitment and growth.

Scotland has never lacked talent or ideas. What has sometimes been missing is the appetite to commit to a longer-term vision when the immediate future feels so uncertain.

There are caveats. A five-year plan assuming the next five years will resemble the last won't survive contact with reality. Successful plans will anticipate change, incorporate flexibility and invest in people as much as systems.

But the direction is encouraging.  After years of firefighting, Scottish business owners are lifting their heads and looking towards the horizon again.

The pace of change hasn't slowed. They've simply decided to stop waiting for it.

How AI can free up financial advisers to actually advise, guest blog by Legado CEO and founder Josif Grace

One of the more interesting numbers in the FCA’s latest survey of financial advisers is not that the UK has around 31,000 advisers, it’s that the number has barely moved while authorised advice firms have fallen by 15 per cent since 2021.

Advisers aren’t disappearing, instead firms are consolidating around them, and the market is changing faster than the headcount suggests.

Regulated advice still reaches a relatively small slice of consumers. The FCA is opening up models such as targeted support, while firms face growing pressure to serve more people efficiently without compromising customer experience or regulatory standards.

That is where the AI debate gets interesting. It is tempting to assume greater automation ultimately means fewer people. I don’t think that’s what’s happening, at least not yet.

Our partner FNZ recently published research covering 500 financial institutions across 16 markets, with nearly three-quarters expecting AI to produce a step-change in human productivity. Where firms are already using it, applications are mostly mundane: meeting summaries, updating records and planning.

Too much of an adviser’s week still has little to do with giving advice. Moving information between systems, chasing signatures, uploading documents and producing evidence is necessary, but it isn’t why clients choose an adviser.

Strip that out and you’re not removing the adviser. You’re giving them more time to do their job.

You can see that thinking across the market. Aviva has brought its Bed and Pension journey entirely onto its platform, removing external transfers and rekeying. Quilter has moved more servicing and applications into straight-through digital processes, in some cases cutting five days or more from the journey.

It is notable that Aviva and Quilter were comfortably the two most recommended adviser platforms by value last year, according to Defaqto. Both continue investing in making everyday adviser journeys easier.

The bigger question is how these improvements fit together. A new piece of technology can solve one problem brilliantly while creating another hand-off elsewhere.

The firms getting this right will think about the whole journey - what sits on the platform, what connects into it and whether each addition genuinely removes work rather than simply moving it around.

We have learned that through our relationship with FNZ. Legado is integrated into its wider ecosystem and works across several clients, allowing us to build on experience rather than treat every deployment as an isolated technology project. Our partnership with Amiqus follows similar logic - identity and AML, communications and e-signing are individually useful, but considerably more valuable when part of the same journey.

Perhaps the clearest sign of change is who’s in the room - we’re increasingly talking directly to CEOs and leadership teams, not just IT or operations.

Once the conversation encompasses adviser capacity, cost-to-serve, customer experience and regulatory risk, technology becomes a business decision. The firms that come out ahead will be those where the technology is largely invisible, removing friction and giving advisers more time with clients.

The future of financial advice will undoubtedly be more digital. If we get it right, it should also be more human.

Don't waste a good old reorganisation, by ePass CEO and co-founder James Buchan

“Don’t waste a good old reorganisation”.  I'm not sure that's a saying yet. Given what was announced at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh last week, and in Whitehall last month, it deserves to be.

The Programme for Government commits to rewiring the Scottish state: fourteen health boards becoming two, more than 130 public bodies facing rationalisation, a dialogue on local governance. In Whitehall, Rewiring the State is moving power and funding to strategic authorities.

Two governments, different starting points, very similar activity.

Here is the bit I keep coming back to. Many public bodies are about to choose digital infrastructure they may still use in a decade. We are rightly clear that local control matters. But somewhere along the way we began treating local control and locally owned infrastructure as the same thing. They aren't.

Merge two organisations and plenty changes. But the work underneath is stubbornly similar. The underlying capabilities can be reused.

Across government the same handful of capabilities get solved again and again. Proving who someone is. Taking a payment. Recording a decision so it stands up to scrutiny. Every organisation builds its own version, at its own cost, to its own standard, and none of it is where local difference lives. Build these once, then let services focus on what genuinely needs to differ.

This isn't an efficiency argument. It is about what fragmentation displaces. Every hour retyping details into a second system, every case that stalls because two organisations cannot see each other's records, every person proving who they are for the fourth time in a month. That is paid in the currency public services have least of. Staff time.

The public feels it too. Nobody experiences an organisation chart. They experience the people and services. The form that already knows who they are. The application that doesn't demand the same evidence twice. The decision that arrives in days, not weeks. Share the plumbing and a carer explains their circumstances once, not again to a council, a health board and a charity.

That is what prevention requires. This Programme for Government is built on reaching families before crisis and care at home rather than hospital, both of which depend on seeing the same person across boundaries. Prevention is also the first thing squeezed when staff are buried in admin. Budgets are not getting looser. We can make room for work that changes lives by not spending effort on rebuilding the same plumbing in dozens of different places.

None of this argues for one national platform telling public bodies how to work. Shared infrastructure works only when the shared layer stays thin, open and configurable. Savings without a new monolith.

The disruption is coming regardless. So there are two choices. Migrate today's fragmentation into a new shape. Or, while the bonnet is open, look at what goes back in.

If you have to pull the plumbing apart anyway, it is a strange time to put it back exactly as you found it.

Scottish tech’s passport to international success, guest blog by Anais Guillemaud, Head of International at CodeBase

Commentators regularly concur that Scotland has ambitious technology startups and the talent to build globally competitive businesses. One challenge is ensuring our brightest tech companies think internationally early enough, and have the networks and support to turn that ambition into reality.

For many Scottish founders, the biggest opportunities lie in the vast US market to the fast-growing economies of Asia. Reaching those markets requires more than a good product. It requires connections, confidence and an understanding of how to navigate unfamiliar ecosystems.

I have seen this first-hand through Techscaler, which CodeBase runs on behalf of the Scottish Government. Since the first international delegation to San Francisco and Silicon Valley in 2024, we have helped Scottish founders take their businesses into markets including the US, Singapore, Japan and the UAE.

The numbers are encouraging. Our international programmes have generated almost 3,000 connections, more than 400 commercial leads and around 60 contracts. But perhaps what matters most is what sits behind those metrics.

Successful international expansion relies on understanding a market, building trust, testing your proposition and learning how buyers in another country think. Often, that can only happen when you are there, face-to-face.

One Scottish deeptech company, weeteq, used a Techscaler mission to Japan to revive commercial discussions that had stalled remotely, securing a pilot with a leading semiconductor company. In New York, LiberEat turned years of groundwork into a meeting with a major US supermarket chain, triggering a formal contract and integration process. Tethered arrived in the city with one meeting in the diary and left having held 19, opening conversations with seven major hotel groups.

Wellness startup danceSing landed in the US with no clients, but now has contracts signed and a clear strategy for how to scale in the world’s largest lifestyle market. LifeLens VR used the market validation and commercial strategy developed in Singapore to help secure an external investment round.  Stemming from our UAE programme, Simple Online Healthcare progressed supply chain and manufacturer agreements. 

Sometimes the most valuable outcome is discovering that a market is not right for you, allowing scarce time and capital to be deployed elsewhere. Either way, internationalisation needs to become part of a company’s DNA.

Scotland is a small nation with a relatively small domestic market. But that need not be a disadvantage if our companies are encouraged to build with a global mindset from day one.

We have the talent, ideas and technology. Now we need to give our best startups the connections and confidence to take on the biggest markets on the planet.

The next generation of Scottish technology success stories will not be defined by how well they conquer Scotland, but by how successfully they compete globally.

And this is only the beginning. Next month, our fifth Techscaler cohort heads to Silicon Valley, followed by a third Singapore programme in October, while our first Hong Kong programme is already open for applications. If Scotland’s tech startups are going to compete globally, we need to keep opening doors.

From report to reality: Scotland's female founder movement is gaining momentum, by Nick Freer

There is a graveyard somewhere in Scotland filled with well-intentioned business reports. They arrive with fanfare, make important recommendations, generate a few headlines, then spend the rest of their lives gathering dust.

The Pathways report by Ana Stewart was always supposed to be different. I know that having had a ringside seat as a close adviser to Ana since the early stages of the work that became the Scottish Government-commissioned review into women in entrepreneurship.

I have seen first-hand the energy and persistence that has gone into turning its recommendations into something more useful than just another report.

The publication of the Stewart Report in 2023 was an important moment. But the real achievement has been what has stemmed from it.

Pathways Forward was created to maintain momentum and, crucially, turn diagnosis into action. Its most powerful innovation may be the simplest: the Pathways Pledge.

Rather than asking organisations to nod sympathetically at the gender imbalance in entrepreneurship before returning to business as usual, the Pledge asks them to do something about it.

Specific actions. Measurable commitments. A 12-month period in which progress can be tracked and, importantly, shared.

Scotland has never been short of initiatives designed to support entrepreneurs. What we have sometimes lacked is the collective discipline to ask whether the system itself is working. The Pathways Pledge is beginning to address that.

More than 40 organisations are now part of the growing Pathways community, representing more than 100 actions designed to increase diversity, opportunity and female participation across Scotland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

And this isn’t simply about fairness, it’s also about economics. If women are under-represented among entrepreneurs, investors and company leaders, Scotland is effectively operating with one hand tied behind its back. We are leaving talent, ideas, companies and ultimately economic growth on the table.

That is why the Pathways-run Female Founders Growth Summit at the beginning of October is not one to be missed. Starting a company is hard, scaling one is a different challenge altogether.

It requires capital, customers, talent, international networks and the confidence, from founders and investors alike, to believe that a Scottish company can become a global one.

This is where Ana’s work has evolved beyond a campaign about women in business. It is becoming part of the wider conversation about Scotland’s economic future.

Ana has taken an issue that could easily have been parked in the “diversity” box and made the much bigger case: that if Scotland wants more successful companies, more innovation and more economic growth, it needs to get better at finding, backing and scaling entrepreneurial talent wherever it exists.

Three years on from its publication, the Stewart Report has become a movement. That movement created commitments, and those commitments are beginning to change behaviour.

The summit provides another opportunity to push that process forward. Because ultimately, the measure of Pathways will not be how many reports it produces, pledges it signs or conferences it hosts. It will be the number of women who build companies that scale.

And perhaps one day we will no longer require a special initiative to make that happen.

Scotland’s greatest competitive advantage is not what you think, guest blog by TecTonic director Nick Murray

After more than a decade working across startups, creative industries, international programmes, and now impact ventures, I've realised that most of my jobs have had the same underlying purpose: creating situations where good things can happen between good people.

That sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult to design.

The best ideas rarely come from a perfectly mapped-out process. More often, they come from a conversation that wasn't planned, or a question asked by someone outside the echo chamber.

That, to me, is one of Scotland's greatest strengths. We are small enough that almost everyone is closer than they appear. Need to speak to someone who has raised venture capital? Built a games studio? Produced a theatre show? Designed satellites? Run a distillery? Chances are you're just one degree of separation apart. In a larger country, those worlds might never meet. Here, they could overlap with ease.

The challenge is that modern life is increasingly designed around familiarity. The platforms originally built for community and discovery now encourage siloed thinking and tribalism.

The most valuable conversations are often the ones that weren't planned. That is why curiosity matters and innovation blossoms from these positive collisions.

Not the version of curiosity that appears on LinkedIn from personal development slop or a manufactured epiphany used to sell a value proposition. True curiosity is walking into a room where you don't know anyone, asking a question without worrying whether it sounds obvious, and being interested in someone else's world without calculating how it benefits your own.

I saw this clearly while travelling through ecosystems abroad. What stood out wasn't the investment or the scale, but the generosity. Conversations started with "How can I help?" rather than "What's in it for me?" That mindset compounds, and it's something Scotland already has in abundance. We just need more opportunities for it to happen.

That's one of the reasons Glasgow Tech Week’s format really matters. For a week every year, the city becomes a playground where different communities naturally overlap, and those accidental conversations are usually where the magic happens.

It's the belief behind everything we've tried to build through TecTonic Night Summit. Not another talking shop where people sit and nod politely, and draft an AI-generated LinkedIn wrap-up post on the way home, but a space that reflects the reality of innovation here: messy, vibrant, and full of people tackling problems from completely different perspectives. You can't manufacture those moments, but you can create the conditions for them to happen.

It's easy to focus on what we lack. We should also recognise what we already have: a country of five million people with an unusually powerful ability to connect ideas, industries and individuals.

Perhaps the question isn't only what we build, fund or scale, but how we choose to show up for one another. Because curiosity is more than a personality trait. It might just be one of our greatest competitive advantages.

Build companies not ecosystems, by Richard Lennox, CodeBase COO and author of 'Framing Scotland's Entrepreneurial Economy' report

In my last column here I suggested Scotland's entrepreneurial economy should be judged by the companies it builds, not the programmes it funds. That statement read very differently depending on whether one's income depends on the companies or on the support programmes around them. Feedback clearly reflected that.

Over the last couple of weeks CodeBase has published my own detailed answer on how we can ensure the publicly funded support we offer businesses will actually deliver. The report, "Framing Scotland's Entrepreneurial Economy", sets out a simple framework whose central claim is simple: align the support we have to founders’ needs, not new programmes.

A thriving startup ecosystem is what you get when business succeeds and companies scale. Those companies hire, pay tax, and recycle talent, capital & ambition into those that follow. Skyscanner did exactly that, seeding founders, operators and investors. Build the companies and ultimately the ecosystem follows. Forget them and the money pays for scaffolding instead of the building. 

Scotland is in danger of the former. We have invested heavily, and it has worked in part: more businesses are forming than ever. Our scaleups however are only 0.52 per cent of Scottish SMEs and improving that could be worth 138,000 jobs and £22 billion a year. Additional funding and more programmes will not fix that. A shared model that makes every pound committed directly traceable to serving a founder's need will have more impact.

The proposed framework has two parts. First, honesty about destination: a thriving small business, a growth-stage employer and a globally significant scaleup are all legitimate. The support these businesses need different layers of support and a system that doesn’t recognise this keeps misallocating resources. 

Second, a simple matrix: the three things founders actually need - capital, customers, and operators who have made the journey before - relevant to one of four stages of business growth.

Held against that grid, the whole portfolio of support activity becomes visible and a real assessment can be made as to the value of each intervention. As we do that, it will become clear that the stage that matters most, the valley of death where viable  companies stall and wither, stays critically underserved. We must stop mistaking activity for outcomes and redirect to where scale up failure is highest and the prize largest.

For founders and operators, this changes everything. Today they face a fragmented, opaque maze of more than 100 organisations, each with its own self-justifying logic. The framework replaces that with clarity and real choice over the support available, where they need it. 

This framework belongs to no single provider, CodeBase included. Codebase may deliver Techscaler but it lacks the contractual agency to sufficiently adapt it to meet the needs of Scotland’s startups and scaleups. This is why we are advocating for change. The Scottish Government must commission and evaluate entrepreneurial support against a framework that does that.

Scotland’s scaleups will be real measure of nation’s tech success, by Nick Freer

I sometimes think of tech startups as shiny new things that hold promise for future success and investor returns.  And, as an agency, we’ve spent over a decade working with some of the shiniest and best.  Two Big Ears would be a good example - founded in Edinburgh by two University of Edinburgh PhDs, the immersive audio startup was acquired by Facebook in 2016.

It’s exciting to advise these fledgling technology companies, helmed by young founders with tons of ambition and big dreams. However, when startups become scaleups, arguably things get more interesting as scaleup companies can transform economies.

They create highly skilled jobs, attract international investment, produce and retain talent, and generate tax revenues that fund public services. One Skyscanner has produced scores of founders building their own startups. One FanDuel has produced a generation of engineering talent.  Then just last month, one Wordsmith funding round reminded the world that Scotland can produce globally competitive tech businesses.

An imminent report on scaleups by a former Skyscanner and Current Health executive Richard Lennox will shine more light on the importance of scaleups and provide a blueprint on how we can produce more of them.  It follows previous reports on the subject by fellow Skyscanner royalty in the form of Mark Logan and Shane Corstorphine.

Last November, entrepreneur and investor Ana Stewart, who is also Scotland’s second chief entrepreneurial adviser to the Scottish Government (Mark Logan was the first), outlined her priorities to increase the number of scaleup companies based here - including closer engagement with the startup community, more tailored support for startups, and more consistent reporting to track progress and provide a more transparent picture of Scotland’s entrepreneurial health.

As Sir Tom Hunter commented at the time: “Scotland needs a laser focus on building scaling businesses. Why? If we double the number of scale-ups from the estimated 675 today, we’d create around 75,000 new high value jobs; that drives economic growth.”

Different authorities and reports chart varied projected numbers in terms of jobs and revenue creation, but by whatever yardstick you use, we’re certainly talking about tens of thousands of high value jobs and into double digit billions in terms of annual revenue.

The transition from startup to scaleup is a significant and challenging one.  Building a prototype as an early stage venture is one challenge. Building a business with hundreds of employees, international customers and recurring revenues is another entirely.  This is where leadership, access to capital, international networks and experienced operators become every bit as important as innovation itself.

There are other small nations and regions punching above their weight, so we need to keep examining, reflecting, and iterating how we plot a course for scaleup success.

Scotland has never lacked entrepreneurial ambition or world-class ideas. The real opportunity now is to build more companies capable of commercialising those ideas and intellectual property on a global scale.  Because while startups capture the imagination, scaleups shape entire economies.

Scotland's rural economy won't grow unless its leaders do, guest blog by Elevator CEO Rachel Ross

When people talk about economic growth in rural Scotland, the conversation traditionally centres on planning policy, infrastructure or skills shortages. The rise in green energy opportunities has filtered closer to the top of the agenda. Those things matter. But after twenty years of working with rural businesses across Scotland, I've become convinced that the biggest constraint on rural growth isn't a lack of opportunity. It's that too few of us step outside the way we've always thought.

That isn't a criticism. It's human nature and it’s lack of access to networks or just being part of the bigger conversation. 

If you've spent decades building a successful farming business, managing an estate, running a hotel or leading a rural enterprise, why would you suddenly question the business model that has brought you this far? There’s comfort in familiarity; achieving a sustainable business that balances the books is often more than an achievement in its self, without pushing boundaries. 

But for Scotland we need our rural business owners and leaders to collectively be challenging themselves and pushing themselves out of this comfort zone. The world around us is changing faster than at any point in our lifetime and the rural opportunities in Scotland are at a peak like never before. Artificial intelligence, satellite technology, natural capital markets, renewable energy, digital communications, robotics, biotechnology and new models of tourism are transforming what is possible for rural Scotland. Creating a thriving Scottish economy over the next twenty years is not necessarily about being the biggest or even the best resourced local businesses.  It will come from a Scotland which creates leaders that are curious enough to ask different questions.

One of the biggest lessons I have seen running the Scottish Rural Leadership Programme is that entrepreneurial leadership isn't about teaching someone how to run a better farm or estate. It's about helping people see possibilities they couldn't see before. Sometimes that comes from visiting a totally business. Sometimes it comes from sitting beside someone from a completely different industry: A crofter from the Western Isles learning alongside a satellite engineer from Shetland. A family estate owner working with a digital entrepreneur. A renewable energy specialist challenging a tourism business. A conservation leader learning from a technology company.

When those conversations happen, something remarkable begins to emerge. People stop thinking about "their business" and begin thinking about "their region". Innovation stops being something that happens in cities and starts becoming something that happens in communities.

Diversification stops meaning converting outbuildings into self-catering units and starts asking much bigger questions. How could this land support new businesses? How do we create value from natural capital rather than simply manage it? How do we build supply chains around offshore wind, forestry, biodiversity, space or data and who can work with to do this?

How do we create careers that encourage young people to stay in rural Scotland rather than leave it? These are leadership questions, not technical ones.

That is why I'm delighted Elevator has been reappointed to deliver the Scottish Rural Leadership Programme and to run Scotland's Rural Leaders Alumni Network, of almost 1,000 rural leaders from every corner of the country. 

The next chapter of the programme will deliberately push people further. Working alongside partners including the Glasgow School of Art's Rural Lab and SAC Consulting, we'll challenge participants to think more creatively, collaborate more widely and see innovation not as something separate from rural Scotland, but as central to its future. We'll mix people who might never otherwise meet.

Scotland doesn't need every rural business to become a technology company. But it does need every rural leader to become more entrepreneurial and to understand the tool box that unlocks opportunities for them and their business. 

Scotland has crossed the AI tipping point, now comes the hard part, guest blog by Zudu CEO Paul Duffy

A few years ago, every business conversation about AI started with the same question.  Should we be using it? That question is over. According to research we carried out this year, 94 per cent of Scottish businesses are now using AI and 80 per cent use it every day.

We surveyed more than 50 companies during Q2 2026, ranging from small and medium-sized enterprises to larger corporates across a broad range of sectors. AI has moved from experiment to everyday. The gap between those using it well and those still finding their feet is widening faster than most people realise.

Surprisingly, the survey revealed that the IT or technology team is not the primary driver of AI adoption. Leadership and individual employees drove it in roughly equal measure.

Marketing and content led the charge, with 77 per cent of businesses applying AI in these areas first. That makes sense, it’s the most visible entry point and delivers results you can see quickly. 

But the figure I find more significant is 62 per cent using AI for data and reporting. When AI starts shaping how decisions get made, not just what gets published, its impact on a business becomes structural.

Almost 70 per cent of Scottish businesses are spending less than £500 a month on AI. A fifth are spending nothing at all, relying on free tools to get by. Only 13 per cent are investing at a serious scale. For now, that’s not necessarily a problem, but it will be. The businesses that run AI as a low-cost experiment and those that treat it as a core capability will look very different in two years’ time. The window to close that gap is narrowing.

What’s holding people back? Not money, at least, not primarily. Sixty-nine per cent cited lack of expertise as their main barrier. That’s more than double those who cited cost. And 93 per cent said their top concern is accuracy. Put those two figures together, and you get a pretty clear picture - Scottish businesses are using AI, but many don’t yet fully trust it, and they don’t have the internal knowledge to close that confidence gap.

That raises a question that should concern anyone thinking about Scotland’s economic future. If AI is now embedded in daily business operations, and it is, but 14 per cent of organisations have no clear owner for it, and most haven’t yet built custom solutions, governance frameworks, or proper measurement of outcomes, then we are running a significant amount of our economy on something we haven’t properly executed. 

The good news is that value is showing. Two-thirds of organisations are seeing clear return on investment (ROI) or early positive signs from their AI investment. But a quarter aren’t measuring ROI at all. You cannot improve what you don’t track, and you cannot justify further investment without evidence.

Adoption without strategy is a treadmill. Scotland’s businesses have proved they can pick up a new technology and run with it. The next test is whether they can build something durable with it.

What 15 years in Scotland's tech scene taught me, guest blog by former journalist and scaleup operator Lisa Venter

I arrived in Scotland in 2011. Exactly the wrong time for journalism and exactly the right time for digital.

I’d trained as a journalist in South Africa during the recession, as newspapers continued moving online. Twitter was so new that I was teaching university students how to use it responsibly because lecturers didn't “get it”. My degree was rooted in newspapers and storytelling. “Digital” was blogging and basic websites awkwardly bolted onto the side.

Working across agencies, propertytech, fintech, traveltech and ecommerce in Scotland taught me a series of lessons through 15 years of technological change that has only made sense in hindsight. First, attention online could be engineered. Second, even beloved products lose to changing customer behaviour. Third, companies can be right too early, building behaviours and infrastructure that don't yet exist. And finally, the businesses that grow fastest are those that learn fastest.

I saw that most clearly at Skyscanner, where a Scottish company became global because it understood something simple: intent matters. If someone searched "Scotland World Cup Boston", they were already telling you exactly what they wanted.

Later, at Snappy Shopper, I watched Covid accelerate digital adoption overnight and then partially reverse as customers returned to stores. The lesson wasn't that online would replace offline. It was that customer behaviour rarely moves in a straight line.

So now… AI.

Some of the AI conversation feels familiar because I've lived through several waves of technological change already. Technology changes. The challenge of helping people adapt rarely does.

What gives me confidence isn’t the technology. It’s the people adapting around it. Take Ross McNairn, a fellow graduate of the “Skyscanner mafia”. Like many of us who learned to scale companies there, he is now leading Wordsmith AI and applying those lessons to the next technological shift.

Over the last fifteen years, Scotland has developed a generation increasingly comfortable operating through technological change. Not because they can predict what comes next, but because they have learned how to test, adapt and keep moving when customer behaviour, business models and assumptions begin to shift.

Capability matters now. AI will change products, roles and operating models, but the companies that benefit most won’t necessarily be those that adopt the most tools. They’ll be the ones that help people understand what’s changing, experiment and translate new technology into better decisions and ways of working.

That doesn’t mean Scotland has solved the startup equation. There’s still scepticism around funding, opportunity and whether enough companies can successfully scale.

But fifteen years ago people were still trying to prove that Scotland could build globally relevant technology companies at all. That argument feels mostly settled now.

I’ve lived through the decline of print, the birth of search, the rise of social platforms, the acceleration of Covid commerce and now the emergence of AI.

Every time, somebody declared everything was about to change.

Usually they were right.

What they got wrong was thinking the technology was the difficult bit.

The difficult bit has always been helping people change with it.

Enough about programmes, lets build companies, guest blog by CodeBase COO Richard Lennox

I recently attended the Dublin Tech Summit, chairing a panel on a question that has occupied my thinking and driven my most recent actions: whether the ecosystem we have built around founders is serving them, or serving itself. Founders and operators across Europe are asking the same question, yet are the customers of that same ecosystem?

Scottish Enterprise's 2025-26 Ecosystem Guide lists over 100 organisations providing entrepreneurial support across the country. The guide opens, with complete sincerity, by declaring that Scotland is "the best place in the world to start and scale your business." We all have a right to ask: when will that support produce outcomes?

Having met Irish founders, VCs and ecosystem operators in Dublin, I saw that Ireland's answer is delivered in producing durable and sustainable companies. Ireland has built a culture that backs ambition loudly and early, treats a founder's failure as evidence of serious intent rather than personal embarrassment, and measures its success by the number of globally significant businesses it produces rather than the volume of interventions it funds. The contrast with Scotland is not subtle.

I took on my current role at CodeBase, including leading Techscaler’s delivery, specifically to attempt to address this. Every founder, regardless of what stage they are at, ultimately needs three things: access to customers, access to capital, and support from people who have actually built and scaled businesses before. 

What they do not need are generic playbooks nor advice from those who have never built anything. The hard question for every programme operating in Scotland, including Techscaler, is whether it is organised around meeting those needs or something else entirely.

Scotland has too many rooms where founders are talked at by people whose careers and reputation depend on the existence of the room, and too few where operators who have actually scaled a business sit with founders to work through their problems. Techscaler needs to be the latter, and that's what you should expect going forward. 

It must serve the needs of the businesses it supports first, before serving any broader narrative about Scottish entrepreneurship. A programme that cannot demonstrate it has helped move a company forward is not worth funding.

We have invested seriously in our entrepreneurial economy, an investment that will likely take a decade or more to fully realise the value it creates. The long-term measure is how many companies Scotland built that are still growing in ten years. 

Scotland now has a clearer sense of what public support actually means. It needs the policy environment to match. One that gives real agency to the operators best able to deliver the promise; that funds business outcomes not programmes, and backs the businesses that emerge with the same confidence Ireland brings. 

That is how the ecosystem reaches the tipping point of self-sustainability. The companies we build become the capital, the customers, and the operators for the companies that follow, and the system pays for itself.

Nigeria's future is being built today, guest blog by Forrit CEO and founder Peter Proud

I arrived in Lagos with a mixture of curiosity and expectation, but nothing quite prepares you for the scale and energy of Nigeria until you experience it first-hand. From the plane, Lagos stretches endlessly, a vast expanding landscape that mirrors a country growing rapidly in both population and economic ambition.

That ambition is immediately visible. Nigeria remains rich in natural resources, with oil and gas dominating revenues and exports, yet there is a clear shift underway. Increasingly, the conversation is moving towards minerals, agriculture, and most notably, technology as the drivers of future growth.

This shift was on full display at the Bluechip Data & AI Summit 2026. The event opened with the national anthem, sung by thousands of attendees with a genuine sense of pride and a collective statement of the belief in the country’s future.

Inside the conference, the atmosphere was striking. Entrepreneurs, developers, policymakers and business leaders with a shared conviction that technology can enable Nigeria to leapfrog traditional constraints.

AI and data are not abstract ideas here; they are tools already being applied to real challenges, from financial inclusion, healthcare access, to agricultural productivity and government transparency.

One of the most encouraging aspects of the summit was the focus on women in leadership. The all-female panel on diversity and opportunity stood out for the quality of discussion and the influence of those involved. Across the event, women were not only present, but leaders shaping policy, building businesses and driving change across all sectors.

The conference also addressed the realities facing Nigeria. Security concerns are still an issue and infrastructure, particularly power, internet connections and transport, can be inconsistent. During my stay, power interruptions were a regular occurrence, highlighting the problems that businesses must navigate daily.

Yet what stood out most was not the presence of these challenges, but the response to them. The resilience and optimism in Nigeria felt distinctive. The country’s young population is energetic, digitally connected and increasingly well educated.

That conviction was evident throughout the week. Founders spoke confidently about competing in global markets. Engineers discussed scaling infrastructure solutions, and entrepreneurs described ambitions to build businesses capable of lasting impact. There is a strong desire to succeed and create enduring value.

This spirit was epitomised by Bluechip Technologies founders Kazeem Tewogbade and Olumide Soyombo. They represent a new generation of Nigerian leadership, globally minded, ambitious and grounded in local realities. Their focus extends beyond personal success, to building ecosystems, backing talent and demonstrating that world-class companies can be created in Nigeria and scaled across Africa.

As my visit came to an end, what stayed with me was the intensity of belief and the momentum driven by the people. Across the city, I met individuals actively building Nigeria’s future.

From afar, it is easy to focus on Nigeria’s challenges. After spending time in Lagos, I left with a different perspective. The story of Nigeria today is not simply one of potential. It is a story of transformation already in motion.

Technology should sit at the heart of Scotland's growth strategy, by Nick Freer

At the Scotland 2050 conference in Edinburgh this week, politicians and business leaders gathered to discuss the country's long-term future. Energy, housing, healthcare and economic growth all featured prominently. Yet one topic appeared notably underrepresented: technology.

That omission matters when you consider that today, 12 of the world’s 14 trillion-dollar companies are technology or technology infrastructure businesses. Whether artificial intelligence, cloud computing, semiconductors or digital platforms, technology has become one of the primary drivers of economic growth.

For a country seeking to improve productivity, attract investment and create high-value jobs, the question is no longer whether technology should be part of the economic conversation. It is whether it sits at its centre.

The next frontier is likely to be quantum computing. While still in its early stages, the technology promises to tackle problems beyond the reach of even today's most powerful supercomputers, with applications ranging from drug discovery and energy systems to advanced manufacturing and logistics.

Alongside artificial intelligence, quantum computing is set to become the defining technology of the coming decades. Jensen Huang, chief executive of NVIDIA, has suggested that "very useful" quantum computing may emerge within the next twenty years. If so, the economic opportunities created will be seismic.

Scotland has growing credentials in quantum. Last year saw the launch of the Quantum Networks Hub, led by Heriot-Watt University and supported by £42 million of UK research funding. Its objective is to develop the technologies, protocols and standards underpinning secure and scalable quantum communications networks.

However, the longer-term ambition is not simply academic excellence. It is to translate research into commercial success: new companies, new industries and new sources of economic growth.

That distinction is important. Research and development generate knowledge. Prosperity comes when that knowledge is commercialised, scaled and anchored locally. Scotland’s world-class universities have delivered breakthrough innovations for generations. The greater challenge has often been converting them into globally significant companies.

While it is important to look ahead to a future quantum era, there remains a more immediate challenge. Scottish technology companies need access to the computing infrastructure in order to innovate today.

Writing for this column recently, CoreWeave's vice-president of strategy, Ben Richardson, argued that delays in providing sufficient cloud computing capacity risk slowing innovation and pushing investment elsewhere. In the age of AI, access to compute is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for economic competitiveness.

No one can confidently predict what Scotland, or the wider world, will look like in 2050. But one conclusion already seems clear: the countries that prosper will not simply be those that anticipate technological change. They will be those that help create it.

Scotland's potential is already visible. This week, Edinburgh-based legal tech startup Wordsmith AI secured a $70 million Series B funding round, prompting inevitable comparisons with Skyscanner, still for many the benchmark for Scottish technology success.

But if Scotland wants to help shape the world come 2050, technology can never be a footnote.

The biggest market Scotland keeps overlooking is its own government, guest blog by James Buchan, CEO and co-founder of ePass

A new Scottish Parliament has been elected. A new Cabinet is settling in. Scotland has strategies for digital public services and for AI. The question is whether sovereign public sector spend gets serious attention, or ends up as a footnote.

Scotland does not lack ideas. We have the universities, the technical talent, the innovation programmes and the founders to build serious companies. The harder question is whether we are creating the conditions for those companies to scale in areas where Scotland can genuinely lead.

Shane Corstorphine put it plainly in his recent contribution to Scotland's scale-up debate: procurement represents a substantial gap - and closing it is arguably one of the quickest, cheapest and most impactful things the next Scottish Government could do.

As a Scottish GovTech founder who came through the CivTech accelerator, I agree. But if we are serious about that ambition, we need to look beyond the usual suspects.

Public sector spend should be one of Scotland's defining scale-up opportunities.

That may sound less exciting than AI, fintech or clean energy. But government is one of the largest, most complex markets in the world. Every country is wrestling with rising demand, stretched teams, fragmented systems and higher citizen expectations. The companies that learn to solve those problems, and solve them well, can take that capability anywhere.

We live in a fair, open, globalised market, and that should remain. The opportunity here is not protectionism. It is making deliberate choices that serve Scotland's economic interests as well as its public services.

The CalMac ferry order going to a Polish shipbuilder while Ferguson Shipyard sat idle is not an isolated incident, it is a symptom of procurement that does not weigh economic impact enough alongside price. Scotland can do better. From our own experience, thoughtful public sector spend can carry a company from startup to scale-up, generating tax revenue, skilled jobs and exportable IP in the process.

There is also a sovereignty argument the incoming government should take seriously. 

Governments across the world are waking up to the fact that who builds and owns your public digital systems is a strategic question, not a procurement one. Scotland should be no different.

As AI becomes more embedded in public services, the data beneath it, how it is governed, where it lives, who controls it, will matter enormously. That is not a technical detail. It is a question of national capability. And it is one Scotland is better placed to answer if the companies building that AI factory are rooted here.

We can build reusable public sector technology in Scotland, around real operational needs, and then take that capability into other markets. That is exactly the scale-up story Scotland says it wants: companies rooted here, solving hard problems, creating skilled jobs.

That requires more than strategies and ambition. It needs procurement that rewards innovation, capital that understands public sector markets, and a government that sees Scottish founders as strategic partners, not just suppliers.

The strategies are written. The ambition is stated. Now Scotland has to back the companies that can help deliver it.

How Scotland can turn AI ambition into lasting economic value, guest blog by Version 1 CEO Roop Singh

With the Scottish Government launching its new AI strategy for the next five years and launching AI Scotland to help businesses adopt the technology, the direction of travel is clear.  But Scotland could still be at risk of missing the AI boom.

There is no shortage of talent, the challenge is what happens next, because too many good companies reach the point where they need to scale - and suddenly Scotland becomes the place they used to be based.

You can see the pattern.  Founders from Scottish universities build an early team in Edinburgh or Glasgow supported by local investors.  Then the big decisions drift as cloud and computing is bought elsewhere, senior posts are created in London or in the US, and clients are increasingly served from outside Scotland.

When that happens, the region loses more than jobs, it loses tax receipts, supplier spend, experience, and the next wave of spinouts.  AI can only be transformational when it’s turned into working services.  That needs problems worth solving, enough computing power and people who can build, integrate and run systems safely.

Scotland is strong on research, and more investment in compute is arriving.  The weaker link has been delivery, or put simply, the engineering and operational muscle that gets AI out of a demo and into a call centre, a hospital ward or a council office.  The question for Scotland is not whether it can invent, it is whether it can repeatedly deliver.

Version 1 recently announced the acquisition of CreateFuture, a Scottish business built around the hard work of making technology stick, turning AI ideas into systems that operate inside real organisations.

Keeping more of that capability based here is very different from watching it be absorbed and directed from somewhere else.  When delivery happens locally, so do the rewards, because investment follows the expertise, and clients reinvest where the teams sit.

Version 1 has already been delivering in this way for the Scottish Government’s Agriculture and Rural Economy (ARE) Directorate, helping to maintain and modernise the digital services that farmers and crofters rely on, enhancing the very fabric of Scottish society and a key part of its economic engine.

That is the wider point - when Scotland builds deep, long-term capability, it keeps more of the true value, the experience, the senior jobs, the supplier spend, and the tax money, instead of watching it leak away as firms scale.

Scotland can be a place where AI businesses stay, scale, and lead.  We have seen how clustering works, but to have the same pull in AI big decisions need to be made. Public procurement should reward delivery capability, not just glossy pitches.  Employers need routes that grow engineers into leaders here.  And we need the practical infrastructure of compute, data access, and secure environments that enable teams to ship real systems, not prototypes.

CreateFuture joining Version 1 is one step towards a stronger Scottish base for AI delivery.  But Scotland should be aiming higher than individual deals.  The prize will be when the next Scottish AI success story scales up in Scotland, not away from it.

Building Scotland’s future through AI infrastructure, guest blog by CoreWeave VP of Strategy, Ben Richardson

Scotland has a long history of shaping the modern world through invention, from Alexander Graham Bell to John Logie Baird and Alexander Fleming. The opportunity with AI is no different. But breakthroughs face a bottleneck: can Scottish innovators access the computing capacity they need?

Generally, pushing the boundaries of AI is not about owning the infrastructure, but tapping into high-performance compute through the cloud. The speed and ease of that access determines what can be built, and where.

Scotland has developed real momentum in AI.  The Scottish Government recently published its AI Strategy. It recognises the importance of research, talent and collaboration in shaping a competitive AI ecosystem, and sets out an ambition for Scotland to play a leading role in AI infrastructure.

Speed is of the essence, and while the 2027 objectives in the strategy are the right ones, these need to be met on time, or sooner.  AI progress is measured in months, not years. Delays in enabling access to the compute required will slow innovation, and risk it moving to other economies. Ensuring that Scotland’s strengths translate into real economic advantage will require coordinated action across government, industry and academia.

Scottish universities remain at the forefront of research, and programmes like Techscaler are helping convert research into credible commercial ventures.  Since 2022, companies within this network have raised more than £250 million, reflecting a growing pipeline of founders building AI-driven businesses.

But we need to use this momentum to address a new challenge.  Demand for AI compute is no longer limited to large technology firms. It is being driven by startups, scale-ups and organisations across both the private and public sector. This demand will benefit Scotland,particularly from a public sector productivity perspective. AI is expected to free up 62.1 million staff hours per year in Scotland’s public sector alone by 2030, releasing officials from routine tasks.

As we move from AI experimentation to real-world deployment, demand will grow exponentially. Already, demand is outpacing access, which underlines the critical need to deploy cloud computing at scale. The value of this infrastructure will lie in how quickly it can be provisioned, how reliably it performs and how easily it scales.

Building on these foundations, Scotland is well positioned to deliver on the opportunity. As a result,CoreWeave is committing to invest £1.5 billion to deploy a new AI cloud location at the Data Vita site in Lanarkshire and has recently announced a partnership with tech ecosystem builder CodeBase, helping Scotland realise its AI potential.

Scotland combines structural advantages that are increasingly important in the AI economy: a renowned research base, a growing pipeline of innovation, and access to abundant renewable energy to support the scaling of advanced computing.  Taken together, these are not isolated strengths. They form the basis of a system capable of competing with other emerging AI economies.

Should Scotland get this right, and maintain or even quicken current momentum, it can play a wider role as a platform for building AI that serves both domestic and European demand.

The framework for development is clear. It is now incumbent on the Scottish Government to turn this hard-earned momentum into a lasting advantage.

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.