According to the Financial Times, the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, or i.AI, spent £5 million of its £12 million allocation in the financial year ending 31 March 2025, with £3.7 million going on staff salaries. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology admitted the shortfall was “primarily driven by delays in recruitment” after a freedom of information request.
The incubator had only 46 employees at the beginning of June, well short of the 70 promised in February 2024 by then deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden. Recently advertised posts apparently attracted nearly 250 applications, according to someone familiar with the matter.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves insists AI and automation will be at the centre of a “major overhaul in productivity and efficiency” across Whitehall. Unfortunately, the House of Commons public accounts committee warned in March that the public sector was not remotely ready for such an AI shake-up, thanks in no small part to the inability to recruit and retain staff.
The average salary at i.AI was £67,300 in 2024–25, almost double the civil service median of £35,680. That might sound generous for bureaucrats, but in the private sector it barely registers. OpenAI’s software engineers start on about $238,000 and can pull in up to $1.34 million, while Meta doles out between $212,000 and $3.7 million, according to salary-tracking site Levels. The best AI engineers now command packages worth more than $10 million.
The incubator was set up by the previous Conservative government in November 2023 to flog AI tools that would supposedly make the civil service more efficient.
At the launch, Dowden said: “This is about trying to get a hit squad, a sort of crack squad, that is going to go out there and bring a high level of expertise to try and identify innovative solutions to projects.”
Labour has since inflated the scheme, boasting i.AI could eventually “target” up to £45 billion in annual savings.
During the past year, more than 3,100 civil servants had access to a tool called Red Box, which digests official sources such as Hansard. By April, only about 2,000 of them were still using it monthly. Another tool, Consult, triages and summarises government consultation responses. A pilot showed its work was untouched in 60 per cent of cases, which is damning with faint praise.
The department pushed back on reports of recruitment chaos, saying: “We don’t recognise these claims about hiring issues. The incubator for AI has been ahead of leading AI labs in using new technology to make public services more efficient.”
It added that its tools were speeding up government consultations, cutting admin and transforming planning. “We want the very best talent and that means recruitment can take time,” DSIT said.
