I believe passionately that we must take action now to ensure that our future programmes provide the people and the expertise to lead the engineering design, management and training of the AI systems of the future – systems that will underpin autonomous transportation, intelligent large-scale infrastructures, and smart personalised healthcare.

Indeed, engineering AI systems is a collaborative process and cannot be achieved solely by academics working on their own. Strong partnership between academia, business and the engineering professional institutes is essential to ensure the design and relevance of these new courses to the existing and emergent industries for which we urgently need to train our graduates.

It is already estimated that the UK needs to produce an extra 20,000 graduate engineers every year in order to sustain the industry^[1], and it is predicted that a further 260,000 skilled people are needed if the UK is to meet its ambitions to invest 2.4% of GDP in R&D by 2027^[2] in making the UK the most innovative country in the world.

As engineers we have a strong obligation to establish the UK as a global leader in the AI systems field and to ensure this exciting opportunity fulfils its promise.

Professor Bashir M. Al-Hashimi, University of Southampton, September 2019