The UK economy can unlock a £35bn productivity windfall, but only if businesses can bridge a widening “readiness gap” between basic and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) use. That’s the core message of Amazon Web Services’s Unlocking the UK’s AI potential report, unveiled this week at its AWS Summit event in London.

The research shows that while 64% of UK organisations have now adopted AI, the majority of users remain stalled at a rudimentary level. According to the report, a transition from basic tasks, such as document summarisation, to integration within core business processes could unlock £35bn in economic growth by 2030, a figure it said is roughly equivalent to the economy of Manchester.

That was the essence of views put across by Alison Kay, vice-president and managing director of AWS UK & Ireland, who addressed an audience of more than 20,000 in London on Wednesday. Kay said that while AI adoption is growing at a rate of one new UK business every 40 seconds, the depth of adoption often stalls at a basic level, with only 21% of organisations saying they feel prepared for advanced AI.

“AI is at a pivotal moment in the UK,” Kay said. “Organisations across the country are seeing tangible results from AI, from productivity gains to faster innovation. While this progress is encouraging to see, there’s still so much more to unlock, especially as we move from basic to advanced AI adoption.”

According to Kay, the AWS research shows that advanced AI users report efficiency gains of 68%, compared to just 40% among basic users: “Most organisations are still in the early stages of adoption, employing productivity, basic automation and experimentation. Our research shows that the UK could unlock £35bn of productivity gains by 2030 if basic adopters moved to advanced AI.”

However, this momentum is threatened by a critical shortage of skills. Nearly half (49%) of UK organisations cited a lack of digital skills as a primary barrier to AI transformation, an increase from 46% last year. The “skills gap” has become so acute that businesses are now reporting an average eight-month wait to fill digital roles, with many prepared to pay a 41% salary premium for AI-literate talent.

Kay pointed to AWS’s commitment to the Skills to Job Tech Alliance, which aims to train 100,000 UK learners by 2030. She said the company has already helped 60,000 students and contributed to a government-backed goal of equipping 10 million workers with AI skills over the next four years.

The summit keynote also featured a technical deep-dive from Francesca Vasquez, AWS vice-president of professional services and agentic AI, who argued that the industry is moving from simple “inline completion” to autonomous “agentic AI”.

Vasquez showcased Kiro, a Claude-powered AI agent-capable IDE designed to automate software engineering. Vasquez said AWS recently rebuilt the inference engine for its Bedrock AI platform using six engineers and AI agents in 76 days, a task it estimated would have required 40 engineers for a full year without agentic assistance.

Vasquez said: “Kiro gives developers structure and complete transparency. When you ask Kiro to build something, it thinks through the problem first. It gives you full user stories with acceptance criteria, technical design documents with architecture diagrams, sequence flows, discrete implementation tests, everything that you would normally spend hours documenting.”

The report also noted that 78% of businesses said they would be more likely to adopt AI if they saw the government lead by example. The report pointed to government research showing full digitisation of public services could realise more than £45bn per year in savings.

The report concludes that while the UK has the ingredients for leadership – including world-class research and a vibrant startup ecosystem – the transition to an AI-first economy requires a move away from “playing it safe”.

This means, it said, closing the digital skills gap by investing in training, public-private partnerships and AI literacy; helping organisations move from adoption to transformation; and scaling AI across public services so government leads by example. 

AWS confirmed it is proceeding with an £8bn investment in UK datacentre infrastructure through 2028. This expansion is estimated to support 14,000 jobs annually and contribute £14bn to the UK’s GDP.

Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning startup, Tools for Humanity, announced last week that a new product called Concert Kit—designed to give verified humans a way to purchase concert tickets—would first roll out on Bruno Mars’ world tour of his latest studio album, The Romantic.

However, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation, the producer for the Romantic Tour, told WIRED in a joint statement on Tuesday that the partnership “does not exist,” and that Tools for Humanity never even approached them about working together.

The confusion stemmed from a Tools for Humanity event April 17 in San Francisco, where chief product officer Tiago Sada said the company would be joining the Romantic Tour to not just provide access to tickets but also “VIP experiences for verified humans.”

The statement was reiterated in a blog post published by the company, which read: “Concert Kit launches today and will roll out during the Bruno Mars World Tour featuring DJ Pee .Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), where verified humans will have exclusive access to VIP suite experiences at select stops.”

A video of the event, and the company’s blog post, have since been edited and reshared by Tools for Humanity. They now say that Concert Kit will roll out on the 2027 European tour for Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.

“To be clear, we were never approached by TFH, nor were we in any discussions regarding a partnership or tour access,” said Bruno Mars’ Management and Live Nation in a joint statement to WIRED. “We first learned that our tour was being used to promote their project after their keynote made those initial claims.” (WIRED had referenced the Bruno Mars partnership in its original story about the event; the story has since been updated to include this new information.)

A spokesperson for Tools for Humanity confirmed to WIRED in a statement Wednesday that the startup “does not have any agreement with Bruno Mars to test or feature Concert Kit, and there is no association or affiliation with the artist or his tour.” Tools for Humanity declined to explain why they announced Mars as a partner for the project in the first place.

Tools for Humanity was cofounded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania, with the aim of using blockchain technology to verify people in online environments where scams are prevalent. In 2023, the company launched a physical, iris-scanning orb that works in conjunction with a mobile app.

While Live Nation and Bruno Mars Management say they “have no opinions for or against their products,” it’s possible that Live Nation is feeling prickly about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup is proposing that Concert Kit will help thwart the bot problem that plagues sites like Ticketmaster—which is owned by Live Nation.

In September, Bloomberg reported that the US Federal Trade Commission was investigating Ticketmaster over whether it had done enough to keep bots off its platform. Anderson .Paak made a cameo at the Tools for Humanity event to vouch for this approach, saying to the crowd, “I fucking hate bots … they make everything really shitty. Especially for the fans.” (Anderson .Paak, for what it’s worth, will soon be touring with Bruno Mars under his moniker DJ Pee .Wee. The plot thickens.)

Tools for Humanity also took a jab at Ticketmaster in its press release for last week’s event, saying that “diehard Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour presale, where Ticketmaster faced 3.5 billion system requests in a single day, locking out millions of fans.”

The partnership with Mars was one of many announced at Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, which aimed to legitimize the startup’s identity-verifying technology by working with major brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign said they’d be expanding their work with Tools for Humanity at the event. In the past, Tools for Humanity has struggled to get governments around the world on board with its technology as a safe, privacy-protecting way to identify real humans.

Cocaine pollution can affect the behavior of fish—altering, for example, the way Atlantic salmon move through their environment, prompting them to swim farther and disperse over a wider area.

So finds a recent study by a research team coordinated by Griffith University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, the Zoological Society of London, and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and published in the journal Current Biology. The findings provide the first evidence that the effects of cocaine contamination on fish behavior occur not only under laboratory conditions, but also in the wild, where animals are exposed to much more complex environmental conditions.

Cocaine and its metabolites have been detected with increasing frequency in rivers and lakes around the world, entering waterways primarily through wastewater treatment systems. Although previous research has shown that cocaine pollution can affect animal behavior, this evidence was limited to laboratory conditions. A 2024 study by the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Brazil showed that even sharks are exposed to cocaine, but little is known about its effects on animals in the wild.

To understand more about it, the authors of the new study surgically implanted small devices that slowly release chemicals into 105 juvenile Atlantic salmon in Lake Vättern in Sweden. They were then divided into 3 groups: a control group, which was not exposed to substances; a group exposed to cocaine; and a group exposed to benzoylecgonine, the main metabolite of cocaine that is commonly detected in wastewater. The researchers also attached small tags to the fish so they could monitor their movements over a two-month period. From subsequent analyses, the team found that, compared with the control group, fish exposed to benzoylecgonine swam up to 1.9 times farther, dispersing at the end of the experiment about 20 miles from the release point.

“The location of the fish determines what they eat, what eats them, and how populations are structured,” said co-author Marcus Michelangeli. “If pollution is altering these patterns, it has the potential to affect ecosystems in ways we are only now beginning to understand.”

In addition to showing how cocaine pollution has changed the way salmon use space in a natural ecosystem, the new study found that the most pronounced effect was observed not so much in the group exposed to cocaine itself, but in that exposed to its metabolite. This result has implications for monitoring, since the metabolites are often more common in waterways and current risk assessments generally focus on the main compound, potentially neglecting important biological effects.

“The idea that cocaine might have effects on fish might seem surprising, but the reality is that wildlife is already exposed to a wide range of human-made drugs on a daily basis,” said Michelangeli. The researchers’ next step will be to be able to determine how widespread these effects are, identify which species are most at risk, and test whether alterations in behavior translate into changes in survival and reproduction.

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Spanish.