Goldman Sachs Urges UK Small Businesses to Scale Up AI Adoption

Three hundred small-business leaders converged on a Birmingham library last week, unfazed by hourly train cancellations across England's second city, to hear Goldman Sachs bankers deliver a pointed message: adopt AI now or watch larger competitors absorb your market.

The bank's 10,000 Small Businesses UK summit, run in partnership with the University of Oxford's Said Business School, brought firm leaders from across England together to debate how artificial intelligence can function as a growth lever rather than a boardroom abstraction. Among the speakers was Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister who was appointed as a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs in July and holds additional advisory roles at Anthropic and Microsoft Corp.

"We have a situation where global behemoths are swallowing up small businesses or pushing them out," Sunak told attendees. "When it comes to AI, adoption is everything."

The warning carried weight from someone with hands-on experience at both ends of the policy spectrum. As prime minister, Sunak pledged more than £100 million to help regulators and universities tackle challenges around AI and hosted the first global summit on AI safety. In Birmingham, he directed that same conviction toward entrepreneurs rather than policymakers, and put the stakes in concrete terms. "My work with the two technology companies has left me even more convinced, not just about how much AI is going to change, but how quickly it's going to change things too," he said. He illustrated the point with an example from his North Yorkshire constituency: a dairy farmer using AI alongside wearables to detect signs of mastitis in cattle before the condition affected milk production.

The Birmingham event sits within a program that has supported approximately 2,500 entrepreneurs since its launch. Organizers describe it as building community as much as technical capability; many participants, often working in isolation, use the summits to share experiences and solutions with peers. Goldman's choice of Birmingham is deliberate: the bank has stated plans to grow its local workforce as part of an expansion beyond London, and the concentration of SME activity in England's second-biggest city makes it a natural proving ground for AI adoption strategies.

One session at the conference asked participants directly whether AI is "friend or foe." Fortune's executive editorial director for Europe, Kamal Ahmed, argued the framing itself is a distraction. The real priority, he wrote, is whether business leaders can identify where AI drives revenue while preserving the human judgment that differentiates their firms from one another. "If everyone uses the same AI tools in the same way, then everyone risks offering the same AI-led solutions," Ahmed noted, warning against a race toward generic, indistinguishable output.

Since leaving government, Sunak has confounded predictions that he would leave the UK for Silicon Valley. A Stanford MBA graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst himself, he remains an MP for a rural North Yorkshire constituency while advising Goldman, Anthropic, and Microsoft simultaneously. He has declared £1.1 million in Goldman Sachs earnings, all donated to charity. For the bank's small-business clients, he has become its most visible argument that AI is not a competitive threat to manage but a capability to build before the window closes.