Few technologies in the history of mankind have the disruptive potential of artificial intelligence. The technology’s emergence has been likened to the industrial revolution, a phenomenon which introduced immense productivity gains and swept away entire categories of labour in the process.

In some ways, the comparison understates the scale of the impact, which could be orders of magnitude bigger. AI doesn’t just mechanise existing jobs in favour of human-controlled machines, it involves the introduction of machines with infinitely greater knowledge than humans, which require vanishingly small levels of human input, if any.

On the flip side, there is a lot of hype, confusion and snake oil. Thousands of self-proclaimed “AI” companies have been founded in the UK alone over the past two years. Many of these use AI tools licensed from larger, genuinely innovative AI businesses, customising them for specific use cases, while others don’t really use AI at all. The upshot is that when the hype subsides, only a fraction of these firms are likely to subsist….