UK CTOs can unlock a £5 Billion AI opportunity (www.techradar.com)

A TechRadar Pro piece from GitLab’s CTO quantifies AI’s impact on UK software teams: AI can save an average of £11,008.57 per developer per year, and when applied across the UK’s ~465,000 developers that implies a roughly £5.12 billion annual opportunity. Executives are already prioritizing software innovation (89%), and 78% say they’ll commit large parts of IT budgets to it — yet AI currently handles only about 25% of development work versus an aspirational 50% human-AI split. Ninety percent of UK executives also flag a pressing need for AI training. The article lays out practical levers CTOs should use to capture this value: adopt platform thinking (centralized platform teams and AI-powered “subsystems” to prevent silos and scale reuse), align leadership style to company stage (Builder for early innovation, Strategist for platformization and partnerships, Guardian for governance and stability), and invest heavily in upskilling — especially prompt engineering, data management, and skills that preserve human strengths (defining the “why,” strategic thinking, creativity). Technical implications include reorganizing teams around shared AI services, embedding governance/security for large-scale AI usage, and shifting developer roles toward higher-value design and oversight to realize the estimated productivity gains.