54% of UK Firms Use AI But Only 12% Earn More: Closing the Productivity-Profit Gap
54% of UK firms now use AI. Only 12% have anything to show for it on the bottom line The British Chambers of Commerce, working with Atos and the University of Essex, published a number in March that we think every small business owner in the country should sit with for a moment: 54% of […]
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Deepfake Scams Are Now a Top Fraud Threat: How to Protect Your Trades Business
A supplier calls your office phone. It sounds exactly like the person you’ve dealt with for three years, right down to the slight cough halfway through the sentence. They say the bank details have changed and could the next invoice go to the new account. You say yes, because why wouldn’t you. The voice on […]
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46% of UK Construction Pros Now Use AI: Inside the £23,000 Productivity Gap
Nearly half of construction and design professionals in the UK are now using AI in their business, according to the first Houzz UK State of AI in Construction and Design Report, published this month. The 46% who have adopted it are saving an average of more than three hours a week each, which works out […]
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Missed Calls Cost UK Trades £24,000 a Year: How AI Phone Agents Fix It
Every trade business owner knows the feeling: you are up a ladder, under a sink, or mid-job with dust on your hands, and the phone rings. You cannot answer it. Most of the time that is fine. Increasingly, it is not. New UK research puts a hard number on what that costs. A 2026 industry […]
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Checkatrade’s Free TradeMore App: Free AI Job Management for Every UK Tradesperson
Checkatrade has just launched TradeMore, a free AI powered job management app open to every UK tradesperson, not just those already signed up to Checkatrade. It lands at a genuinely uncomfortable moment for the trade: research behind the UK Admin Drain Report 2026 found the average small business owner in trades loses eight hours a […]
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Proof for $2,000. An 80-Year Problem, Solved. Same Lab Was Wrong Before.
An 80-year-old problem, and a bill smaller than a laptop On 1 August 2026, OpenAI announced that Astra, an unreleased research model, had produced fully verified solutions to ten open mathematical problems, each unsolved for a decade or more. The company published a 249-page manuscript alongside machine-checkable Lean 4 proof certificates on GitHub, and the […]
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Cooper Is Live, and the Renewal Price Just Went Up 25%
Cooper is live, and the renewal price just went up 25% On 13 May 2026, Simpro Group switched on Lightning, an AI-native operating platform rolled out simultaneously across its three field service brands: Simpro, AroFlo and, in the UK and Europe, BigChange. Simpro Group calls it the largest single product release in the company’s history. […]
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There’s Still No UK AI Act: Here’s the Regulation That Actually Applies to Your Business
Every few months another headline asks where Britain’s AI Act has got to. The honest answer is that it isn’t coming, not in the shape people expect. There is no single AI statute before Parliament and no date to circle for one. Ministers have said repeatedly they don’t want to legislate AI as a technology […]
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New UK Rules on AI Decisions Are Live: The Data (Use and Access) Act Explained for SMEs
What actually changed on 5 February 2026 Section 80 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 came into force on 5 February 2026, replacing Article 22 of the UK GDPR. For nearly a decade, the old rule gave people a fairly blunt right: a decision made “solely” by a machine, with no human involved, […]
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The Amazon v Perplexity Ruling: What the First Agentic Shopping Case Means for You
A courtroom just answered a question every online retailer will face On 4 August 2026, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that when someone sends an AI shopping agent onto Amazon to browse, compare and buy on their behalf, it is the shopper who is legally “accessing” Amazon’s site, not the […]
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