Indian diaspora leaders in London discuss UK AI opportunity and growth capital gap

This week, an Indiaspora dinner chaired by Tony Matharu, founder and Chairman of Integrity International Group and Central London Alliance CIC, took place at The Skyline London in Tower Suites. The event brought together forty of the most accomplished business leaders, entrepreneurs, and policymakers of Indian origin working across Britain today.

With the Indian diaspora generating a global annual turnover of $730 billion and the top 100 members of the diaspora holding wealth in excess of $700 billion, the wealth creation of Indian origin must be recognised and valued.

The guest list told its own story: chief executives, investors, a government minister, and the Indian High Commissioner — all in one room, wrestling with the same question. How does Britain make the most of the AI moment, and how does the UK-India relationship help it get there?

The Keynote: Three Pillars of AI Opportunity

Kanishka Narayan MP, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for AI and Online Safety, delivered the keynote. He set out a case that Britain’s opportunity in artificial intelligence rests on three things:

• Infrastructure to build it — His point was blunt: a country that wants to be at the centre of the AI economy must build the computing capacity to match its ambition.
• Alliances to scale it — He argued there is no partnership more valuable to Britain in this field than the one with India.
• Public trust to sustain it — Durable public confidence in AI must be earned, not assumed, built on shared values rather than imposed from above.

India’s AI Ambition

Periasamy Kumaran, the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, put real numbers behind that ambition. India’s AI Mission is scaling fast, with a national push to deploy some 100,000 public GPUs, blending public investment with private capital and renewable-powered campuses. He was equally clear that India’s approach to AI governance favours principle-based regulation over heavy licensing — flexible enough to let innovation move, careful enough to keep safety at the centre.

Britain’s Position in the Race

Britain’s own position in this race is easy to underrate. The country has become, in effect, the place where the world’s AI is tested first. Britain has consistently been offered early access to the most advanced systems before they reach other markets — a reflection of the depth of AI talent already here. That is not a permanent advantage, but presently it is a genuine one, and it is the reason global AI labs and governments alike have come to the UK before they go elsewhere. However, the UK cannot afford to be complacent, and the right environment for investment and innovation must exist.

The Capital Challenge

What struck attendees most, though, was how the conversation kept returning to capital — or the lack of the right kind of it. Britain has been relatively good at seed-stage investment. Where it consistently loses ground, and loses talent, is at the growth stage, when ambitious companies need serious money to scale rather than survive.

The minister’s answer was to point to pension reform: unlocking the liquidity sitting in local government pension funds so more of it can be deployed into growth capital, rather than parked in low-yield safety. Wales was cited as an early proof point, where merging local pension funds has already started to shift what’s investable.

The deeper challenge, as more than one guest put it, is cultural as much as regulatory — Britain still prizes steady yield over long-term appreciation. Turning that around, from 24-hour visa decisions for skilled workers to faster capital deployment, is as much a mindset shift as a policy one.

AI, Jobs, and the Skills Pipeline

There is a useful precedent for the anxiety now surrounding AI and jobs, and it is one Britain has lived through before. At the turn of the millennium, there was no shortage of nerves about where computing would leave the workforce. Two decades on, technology had created far more roles than ever anticipated.

The UK’s dedicated AI sector alone now employs around 86,000 people, up a third in a single year. The government’s own projections see AI-related roles growing from roughly 158,000 today to close to 4 million by 2035 — around 12 per cent of the entire UK workforce.

The catch is that Britain is not yet training enough people to fill that pipeline: nearly half of AI roles are forecast to go unfilled by 2028 on current trends. These are decreasing incentives to employ young people and train them, as reflected in the growing number of NEETs (nearly one in five young people neither in work nor in education). Employers must be incentivised, not punished.

The lesson from the last twenty years is not that the disruption isn’t real — it is that the response has to be new skills, not old fears. And that starts with how seriously Britain takes technology teaching in schools and NEET numbers as a priority.