UK's £400B AI Windfall Traced Back to a Report Google Paid For

AI minister Kanishka Narayan admitted in a parliamentary answer last week that the £400 billion figure was not the government's own math. It was lifted from a publicly available 2023 report commissioned by Google and written by the consultancy Public First, now known as PF Global. The government's actual projection: AI adoption and data investment could add between £55 billion and £140 billion to the UK economy by 2030, with a central estimate of £120 billion. Narayan called even that number a hugely uncertain estimate.

The timeline is the sore spot. Ministers have had the lower estimate sitting in front of them since at least November 2025, almost a year before Narayan's disclosure — yet Skills England, the agency handling apprenticeships, was still publishing the old £400 billion number four months later. Narayan's answer never withdrew the bigger figure or labeled it wrong. According to WIRED, it marks the first recorded evidence of the government placing the two numbers side by side or acknowledging Google commissioned the report.

PF Global pushed back on the gap. Its head of economics, Jonathan Dupont, told WIRED that AI moves fast and models need updating as assumptions shift, and that the government's numbers assume a much slower adoption rate than the 2023 model anticipated. He said the firm's central estimate for what's achievable by 2030 now lands much closer to the government's figure, with growth climbing faster in the years after.

Dame Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP chairing the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, told WIRED that hype is one of the central barriers to delivering digital transformation in public services. Overstating what AI can do, she said, risks undermining the whole case for change. Conservative peer Lord Holmes of Richmond, who asked ministers about the claim's origins in January 2025 and got nothing back, said the figure should have been clarified much sooner and more directly — and that robust data matters when billions of pounds ride on it.

The dispute sits inside a bigger fight over where government support ends and boosterism begins. Former technology minister Peter Kyle also leaned on the £400 billion figure while promoting AI's benefits. Sumedha Deshmukh of the Ada Lovelace Institute told WIRED the revised estimates are welcome but the timing is concerning, warning that AI figures which look precise often carry baked-in assumptions and incentives — and that government should test numbers before building policy on them. The Cabinet Office and Google were approached for comment; PF Global said its work for Google continues but that all research, judgments and assumptions are its own.