Counted in courses, promised in people
This page holds the checkable core of the research: what was promised, what has been counted, and who did the counting. My own experience of the training platform is on the about page, and nothing below rests on it.
In June 2025 the government announced a training partnership with eleven technology companies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and IBM among them, and a promise to train 7.5 million workers in AI by 2030. By January 2026 the promise had grown to 10 million, and the partners had reported just over a million course completions. The two figures are shown apart, because nothing published connects them.
The promise has outlasted the Prime Minister who made it: announced in June 2025, and still standing after a change of Prime Minister a year later.
There is a second set of numbers. BridgeAI is the government's own £100 million AI programme: launched in 2023 and run by Innovate UK, it funds AI projects and business support for firms as well as training. From its launch to the end of 2025 it recorded 1,700 course completions and 126 accreditations, with £74.6 million of its budget allocated. The industry partnership reported a million completions in its first seven months.
Both sets of numbers are published by the government. Neither appears next to the other.
What the figures leave out matters as much as what they show. Nothing published says how many individual people were trained, what counts as a completed course, or which company delivered what. The question here is deliberately narrow: can anyone outside government check these claims? Whether the ambition is right is a separate argument, and it is not the one I am making.
Who builds it, and who supplies the evidence
The government commissioned PwC to design, build and run the AI Skills Hub, the platform the training sits on. The White Paper making the case for that work drew its skills-gap evidence mainly from PwC's own surveys. PwC is named as a delivery partner too. All three roles appear in the same government publication.
Government documents put AI's potential at an additional £400 billion for the UK economy by 2030. The Action Plan's footnote for that figure cites research by the consultancy Public First, commissioned by Google. The same consultancy produced a £550 billion figure in a report commissioned by Microsoft. Google and Microsoft are both among the eleven companies delivering the training.
None of this means the figures are wrong. It means the case for the programme, the platform it runs on, and the training itself were supplied by companies with a commercial interest in the answer.
See every source, and whose interest it serves, in the research log