Businesses have welcomed the government’s decision to expand AI adoption support across high-growth sectors as announced in the Autumn Budget. The expansion of the BridgeAI programme marks a positive step towards helping firms deploy AI to strengthen productivity and growth, an outcome the CBI and its members have long called for.
While this announcement is a strong step in the right direction, it remains limited in scope: support is currently focused on AI and the 8 Industrial Strategy growth sectors. Many firms across the wider economy still lack access to digital and non-digital technology adoption support. SMEs in particular continue to face persistent barriers; skills shortages, infrastructure gaps, and financial constraints that prevent them from adopting the technology and automation that drive competitiveness and growth.
The Made Smarter programme has demonstrated that combining expert advice with financial support is an effective model for helping firms adopt technologies that enable them to scale. Many sectors and regions remain outside the reach of similar support, meaning the UK is not fully seizing the productivity gains available through technology adoption. Research by Amazon shows that digital adoption could add £520 billion to the economy by 2030, with automation alone able to deliver a 1.4% uplift in productivity. And if just a quarter more small businesses adopted readily available technologies, the UK could unlock an additional £45bn in GVA by 2030.
To seize this opportunity, government should now build on the momentum of the Autumn Budget. The CBI is calling for a National Technology Adoption Plan, with clear ownership in DSIT, setting out ambitions, implementation plans, and mechanisms for review. This should be backed by expanding sector-specific support programmes, modelled on the success of Made Smarter and delivered through regional AI Adoption Hubs so that every sector and region of the economy can benefit from technology-driven growth. The evidence is clear: when government provides leadership and targeted support, businesses respond, productivity rises, and growth accelerates. Now is the moment to scale what works and ensure no sector is left behind.
The case studies below highlight the vital role of technology adoption, beyond AI, in driving efficiency, strengthening competitiveness, and unlocking growth across sectors:
Case studies
HMG Paints - digital transformation
HMG Paints is a medium-sized independent paint manufacturer in the North West. As a fourth-generation, family-owned business founded in 1930 and based on the same Manchester site for nearly a century, HMG has historically expanded cautiously, remaining firmly UK-focused and committed to quality. HMG Paints signed up for expert advice from the Made Smarter programme in 2019, with several ideas to digitize various aspects of their internal processes. With the support of the independent advisors, they determined to digitise the paper-based system in the dispatch centre with the goal of enhancing efficiency, product quality, and working conditions for their staff.
The dispatch centre was an area of the business where a paper-heavy workflow created delays, bottlenecks and regular error, from lost paperwork to grabbing the wrong color paint. On top of the high risk of mistake, paper trails meant limited visibility so issues were difficult to trace or resolve. The company particularly valued Made Smarter's unbias support in determining whether to buy an off the shelf solution or build one themselves. In the end, supported by technical advice from Made Smarter considering their specific needs, HMG elected to build a bespoke digital dispatch system internally.
The IT team worked closely with operational staff in the dispatch centre to design and deliver a new warehouse management platform over six months, with the system rolled out on tablets across the shop floor. Staff across the warehouse embraced the new system and worked through early refinements, enabling rapid, though not immediate, improvements.
The positive impacts have been noticeble: error rates fell sharply, from 50–60 per month to just 2–3 under the new digital system, while dispatch capacity doubled. The team began breaking daily dispatch records without additional strain, and employees were consistently able to finish shifts on time. The new system also introduced meaningful data visibility for the first time, enabling root-cause analysis, proactive problem-solving, and continual refinement of workflows. Incremental enhancements such as barcode scanning and automated validation added further assurance and efficiency, benefitting both customers and staff.
In the context of broader commercial pressures on mid-sized manufacturers, HMG Paints sought an approach that balanced the benefits of external guidance with the resilience and agility of internal development. Made Smarter played a key advisory role at the front end of the transformation, offering technical expertise without a sales agenda, access to independent specialist advisors, and support in identifying the highest-value areas for intervention. While HMG Paints self-funded the warehouse project and did not require grant support, the structured advice and early-stage planning proved central to its success.
The digital transformation strengthened staff capabilities and job satisfaction, without requiring redundancies, with roles instead reshaped to align with the new processes.
The HMG project illustrates how a medium-sized manufacturer can pair long-standing traditions with modern technology to deliver operational excellence. By pooling external strategic insight with internal development capacity, HMG Paints' digitisation of its dispatch processes supported their goal of improved productivity, enhanced product quality, and improved working environment, while maintaining the independence and agility that define the business. The experience highlights how technology adoption drives increases in productivity and efficiency, while opening the door to further adoption.
Centre for Processing Innovation - using technology to improve processes
The pharmaceutical sector faces mounting pressures to deliver increasingly personalized medicines more efficiently. In order to meet these pressures amid rising medical costs, companies have turned to technology to improve their batch production process. Traditional batch production methods are resource-intensive, inflexible, and impractical in a market seeking increasingly complex medications. To address this, the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) collaborated with industry leaders and academics to develop a more efficient and sustainable Continuous Direct Compression (CDC) technology. Recognising the inefficiencies and inflexibility of batch processes, the CPI identified CDC as a ‘ready now’ technology with the potential to revolutionise the manufacturing of oral solid dosage medicines. CDC technology integrates raw material blending, granulation, and tablet compression into a single, continuous process, supported by digital twin technology to optimise production and tailor medicines to patient needs.
Market demonstrations showed that CDC technology can dramatically reduce manufacturing times, streamline production, and minimise waste, all while maintaining the highest quality standards. The environmental benefits are equally significant, with reduced energy consumption and a lower carbon footprint.
While CDC technology has successfully been adopted in the production of some medicines, including HIV and breast cancer treatments, adoption in the UK lags due to high upfront investment in equipment, workforce upskilling, and facility upgrades, coupled with complex regulatory pathways and industry risk aversion. CPI has identified that uptake could be increased by facilitating collaborative pilot projects and clear regulatory frameworks. CPI has been working closely with regulators to develop clearer regulatory frameworks, and actively promoting CDC technology's benefits across the sector.
The development and rollout of CDC technology demonstrates how technology improves efficiency, quality, and sustainability in complex manufacturing. By bridging the gap between innovation and implementation, CDC is not only enhancing productivity and sustainability in medicines manufacturing, but also opening the door to further innovation across the industry. With the right focus to address the barriers to its uptake, the benefits of CDC could expand more widely throughout the pharmaceutical industry, improve efficiency in an expensive industry, and position the UK as a global leader in medicines manufacturing.