When accountants at mid-tier firm Moore Kingston Smith started using AI to speed up their work, their profit margins jumped. Another team that checks for corporate fraud used AI to produce a client report in just two hours — a task that used to take two weeks.
All this is feeding hopes that AI might finally help the UK escape the productivity slump it’s been stuck in for nearly 20 years. With the economy growing slowly and the finance minister Rachel Reeves expected to raise taxes in Wednesday’s budget, any boost is welcome.
Because services make up such a big chunk of Britain’s private sector, economists think the UK could benefit more than other countries as AI rolls into fields like accounting and finance. Moody’s even said the UK stands to gain more than most from the tech.
Becky Shields, who leads digital transformation at MKS, says AI is taking tedious, repetitive work off employees’ plates and giving them more time for clients. Their platform — built on Google’s Gemini 2.5 — is already being used across more projects. Teams using AI heavily saw their profit margins jump by 8 percentage points.
Instead of requesting piles of documents from clients, the AI-enabled team just has them upload full datasets and lets the system do the analysis automatically. There was some extra work up front, but it’s now paying off — and clients appreciate the reduced paperwork.
For the broader UK economy, improving productivity is crucial. Weak productivity has dragged down pay growth since the financial crisis, and the government is trying to fix that by speeding up planning, upgrading infrastructure, improving skills, and using AI in public services. But it won’t solve everything at once.
AI could help, but some sectors may benefit more than others. Services — where the UK is strong globally — look promising. Manufacturing, on the other hand, is dealing with high costs and other challenges. Amtico, a flooring maker in the Midlands, uses AI to plan production but says robotics may matter more for cutting costs.
And despite the optimism, uncertainty remains. Experts say AI’s long-term economic impact is still hard to predict. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey even compared it to electricity, which took decades before showing up in productivity data. Growth might pick up in the 2030s, but that won’t spare the government from hard budget decisions now.
There are risks too: big firms may benefit the most, regulation may fall behind, and some jobs could disappear. A recent survey found 17% of private-sector employers expect to cut staff over the next year due to AI. MKS has already hired fewer graduates, though Shields says that’s temporary and meant to help staff adjust faster.
In the long run, MKS expects hiring to bounce back — AI may change the work, but the “human touch” still matters. As Shields put it, clients trust them to do more with their business, not less.