Ensuring England’s workforce has the right skills for a rapidly changing economy is key to Labour’s hopes of boosting social mobility and kickstarting economic growth.

So it seems unfortunate that more than a week after Keir Starmer’s drastic reshuffle, ministers are still wrangling about exactly which bits of the skills agenda will now move to Pat McFadden’s beefed up Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Broadly speaking, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is expecting to hang on to responsibility for further education, while McFadden will probably take on apprenticeships and adult skills. Lady Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, will work across both departments.

Labour market experts say there is some logic to the shift: ensuring the right training is available in the right places is one crucial part of tackling the issue of economic inactivity in a rapidly changing employment market, which falls within the DWP’s bailiwick.

But “machinery of government” changes, as official parlance has it, can often bring more disruption than clarity.

Over the past two decades alone, responsibility for skills has bounced around Whitehall, from education into the short-lived Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (2007-2009) then on to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2009-2016), back into education again, and now across to DWP.

Perhaps this nomadic status helps account for successive administrations’ chronic neglect. Government spending on adult education halved between 2011 and 12 and 2019 and 2020. It then recovered somewhat as the worst years of austerity came to an end, but by last year it was still £1bn down in real terms.

Meanwhile, despite endless speeches by politicians of all stripes about how vocational skills should have the same status as university (I have sat through quite a few: it is compulsory to mention Germany), the numbers completing apprenticeships have collapsed.

Official figures show that 178,220 people earned an apprenticeship in England in 2023-24 – down by more than a third on 2017-18, when the Apprenticeship Levy was introduced.

Recently rebranded as the Skills and Growth levy, this is charged at 0.5% of the payroll of larger firms. It was meant to encourage a flowering of workplace training, although employers have long complained that it is too rigid.

Since Labour came to power, Phillipson has made some changes, cutting the minimum duration of an apprenticeship to eight months.

Enrolment in apprenticeships has risen this year, by just over 2% but business groups are still hoping for a more substantial shake-up.

Companies have their own significant part to play, too. It must surely be a piece of the UK’s productivity “puzzle,” that according to the Learning and Work Institute, employers’ annual spending on training for each member of staff has fallen by 28% in real terms since 2005, to £1,530, a level less than half the EU average.

Longtime education expert Sir Philip Augur put it well in a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies podcast about post-16 education.

Welcoming the changes to the apprenticeship levy, Augur said: “Employers have to step up to the plate here. For employers, ‘I can’t get the staff,’ is quite often an excuse for bad management. Now on this occasion, they can’t get the staff because the skills aren’t there. But there needs to be honesty and self-appraisal on the part of employers.”

Augure called for the levy to rise “very slightly”, to free up more resources for expanding apprenticeships.

McFadden is, say his team, keen to ensure that young people get the skills they need to benefit from the jobs scheduled to be created by new government investment in defence and green energy. That will mean working with firms and unions to get the training landscape right.

There is plenty of innovative thinking going on at local level. The West Yorkshire mayor, Tracy Brabin, announced plans last week for what she called “skills-led growth”, in Wakefield, the UK’s largest city without a university.

She hopes to establish a new Wakefield Futures Centre, led by employers, where local people can do courses directly linked to finding work in the fastest-growing sectors in the surrounding economy.

The idea is to make the courses flexible so that adults with caring responsibilities, for example, can take up the offer.

This kind of relatively fluid, employer-connected approach might allow mums to pick up new skills, or older workers to switch sector or dip their toe in the market after a period off sick, for example.

It might also be used to tempt young people to think about a wider set of options: in Manchester, Andy Burnham is pushing to set up an MBacc – an EBacc equivalent, a qualification intended to be an alternative to GCSEs, which is tailored to local jobs.

Jobcentres, which are getting a rejig under Labour to present a more encouraging face, can then signpost to local opportunities such as these.

Getting the skills offer right will have to form one crucial part of any genuine effort to bring down the UK’s unusually high economic inactivity rates, and therefore, ultimately, the welfare bill.

Last year’s crass attempt at cuts failed because Labour could not justify to its own MPs the crude way in which it planned to cut eligibility for the personal independence payment (Pip).

If the government wants to have another go – as McFadden certainly does – then a fresh skills and training offer could be part of the package for the hard-to-reach claimants Labour said it had a “moral case” to help last time – but for whom across-the-board Pip cuts would have done nothing.

It’s not a quick fiscal fix by any means, but get it right and the upside, for individuals, employers and the economy, would be significant and long-lasting. The sooner ministers can clear up who takes on which bits of the task, and crack on with it, the better.

There’s a fierce battle underway in Silicon Valley, and there’s one piece of technology at the center of it all: AI.

When OpenAI released its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, in 2022, it introduced large language models to the broader public and was embraced by business leaders. It also cast a glaring spotlight on its competitors, some of whom raced to release their own AI-powered chatbots.

The growing number of LLMs poses a tricky question for companies determining which model to use.

Sriram Thiagarajan, Ancestry’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of product and technology, told Business Insider that the company is taking a more-the-merrier approach.

“We are agnostic to LLM models,” Thiagarajan said. “We use multiple AI models. Be it Azure, OpenAI, Meta’s Lama, or offerings under Amazon Bedrock.”

For Ancestry, a Utah-based genealogy company that sells DNA test kits, the AI model’s brand is less important than the end result.

“We built an abstraction layer — what we call an AI gateway — on top that helps us leverage whatever models better fit our case,” he said. “We have built our own agentic framework in a way that helps us provide that unique family story and personalized experience for our consumers.”

Ancestry and AI

Thiagarajan said Ancestry had just begun diving into AI and machine learning when he joined the company in 2017.

At that time, Ancestry was trying to find an efficient way to digitize content, which is a massive undertaking for the company. Ancestry collects numerous forms of records, including birth, death, military, land, immigration, census, and newspapers.

“We’ve collected over 65 billion records across 80-plus countries,” Thiagarajan said. “Just to give a scale, that’s about 10,000 terabytes of data on our platform that we use to provide discoveries to our users.”

In the past, processing and identifying troves of records took months.

“About 15 or 20 years ago, when we digitized the 1940 census, it took us about nine months to do it in a manual way at 10 times the cost,” Thiagarajan said.

Then, the company embraced AI.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we apply computer vision AI techniques to automatically digitize content without manual intervention?’ Thiagarajan said. “Fast forward to the 2021 timeframe, we used our own proprietary handwriting recognition computer vision technologies, and we compressed the time to market to under nine days from nine months at a fraction of the cost.”

Still, Sriram said the company relies on humans to fact-check the AI answers “as needed.”

“We’ve built some automated controls and systems that certainly reduce the amount of time we need to spend checking,” he said. “We want to be extra careful in making sure that what we produce using AI is grounded in truth. Grounded in facts.”

These days, Ancestry is going all in on the tech — especially with its employees.

“There are a lot of things we do to drive AI education within the company,” he said. “Be it brown bag lunches, internal forums, or providing an environment where people across departments can experiment.”

Hackathons are also regular events at Ancestry and provide a space for collaboration across teams.

“So encouraging innovation as part of the flow of work, as they call it, as opposed to that residing as a silo,” Thiagarajan said.

He will not be the only Briton fancying his chances on the tables in Las Vegas this December, but Ha Dang prefers games of pure skill rather than blind luck.

The 33-year-old has booked himself a place at the Microsoft Excel world championships by seeing off more than 40 rivals in the inaugural British competition, a feat that has left him “astounded and privileged”.

Dang will head to Sin City to represent Britain against hundreds of others for the title of “world’s best spreadsheeter”, with a $5,000 prize and a personalised championship belt up for grabs.

The stockbroker, who works for a Leeds-based company, won the national title this month despite only learning about competitive Excel tournaments last year.

He said: “Growing up, I have always been into working with spreadsheets but I did not find many peers with whom I could exchange my formulae and Excel tricks.

“It was a delight when I discovered that there is actually a worldwide competition on how to use spreadsheets better and faster, and it is truly amazing to be recognised by that community as a champion of a local chapter.”

Excel tournaments see players complete complex, pre-set equations and puzzles using formulas and shortcuts before their time runs out. It has become a burgeoning form of esport – competitive multiplayer video games – in the past few years.

Jaq Kennedy, the founder of the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) UK, which hosts the British chapter of the world championships, said that Dang was a revelation and hoped that his appearance in Vegas, alongside the reigning world champion Michael Jarman, would help attract more Britons to give it a go.

“Ha beat out the second place in last year’s world championship and another who trains for hours every night, and he only picked up the sport this year,” Kennedy said. “That is an incredible accomplishment and shows what natural talent and drive he has.”

“I think we’ll have even more UK attendees in Vegas this year,” she added. “There are a lot more competitors locally that are hungry for more competition, to learn more Excel, and to make friends in the Excel community.”

Dang, who came to the UK from Vietnam more than a decade ago for university, said that being able to represent the country that took him in was something he felt immense pride in.

“I’m really proud to be able to represent the UK, especially as I got my citizenship just earlier this year,” Dang said. “I cannot stress how grateful I am for the opportunities that this country has given me, it has allowed me to have a steady life, a job and support. I can’t express my gratitude enough and I feel the least that I can do is to represent it well.”

Despite the pressure, Dang said that he isn’t scared, but excited for the new experience and hoped he could “inspire the next generation of Excel users and esports competitors” who may come after him.

“I can’t wait to fly to Vegas and meet everyone, to explore and to just continue to get better,” he said. “Not just better in my professional life but in my personal life as well. This is huge and I can’t tell you how excited I am.”