UK Parliament Probes AI at Work as Global Adoption Hits 17.8%
UK Parliament is probing AI’s impact on the workplace as global AI adoption reaches 17.8%. Here’s what the evidence shows and what it means for British workers
The House of Commons Business and Trade Select Committee launched a formal inquiry into artificial intelligence and the workplace on 26 May 2026, calling for evidence from businesses, workers, trade unions, and researchers. The inquiry arrives as global data shows AI adoption in professional settings accelerating fast — with both the productivity gains and the disruption to existing jobs becoming harder to ignore.
What Parliament Wants to Know
The Business and Trade Select Committee is one of Westminster’s most active scrutiny bodies, and its decision to examine AI at work reflects how central the issue has become to political debate in the UK. The inquiry’s terms of reference cover three broad areas: how AI is changing the nature of work, how the benefits and risks are distributed across different groups of workers, and what legislative or regulatory responses the government should consider.
The Committee has called for written evidence submissions from businesses deploying AI, workers affected by AI-driven changes, trade unions, academics researching the labour market impacts, and technology companies developing AI tools. Oral evidence sessions are expected to begin in September 2026, with a final report and recommendations due before the end of the year.
The inquiry is not the first parliamentary engagement with AI and work — the Lords Communications and Digital Committee published a report on AI in creative industries in early 2026 — but it is the most comprehensive Commons examination of the issue to date. Its recommendations are likely to inform government thinking on the National Policy Framework for AI published earlier in the year.
The Data: 17.8% Global AI Adoption
The inquiry comes against a backdrop of rapidly accelerating AI adoption in professional settings. Data from a survey of 45,000 workers across 28 countries, published in May 2026, found that 17.8% of respondents now use AI tools regularly in their work — up from 9.3% in a comparable survey conducted in 2024. The growth represents a near-doubling of adoption in roughly 18 months.
The UK sits slightly above the global average, with 19.2% of UK workers reporting regular AI use. Adoption is highest in financial services, legal and professional services, software development, and marketing, where knowledge-intensive tasks are most easily augmented by current AI capabilities. Adoption is lowest in construction, hospitality, and social care, where physical presence and human judgement remain dominant.
The disparity in adoption rates across sectors has significant policy implications. Workers in high-adoption sectors are experiencing rapid productivity changes and, in some cases, job role restructuring. Workers in low-adoption sectors worry about when disruption will reach them. Parliament’s inquiry aims to understand how these dynamics interact with job security, wage levels, and skills requirements.
GitHub’s Evidence: AI Drives 78% More Code
One of the most concrete data sets on AI’s impact on work comes from GitHub, which publishes quarterly data on developer activity across its platform. GitHub’s May 2026 report found a 78% increase in git push activity — the act of submitting completed code to a shared repository — compared to the same period in 2025.
GitHub attributed the majority of this increase to Copilot, its AI coding assistant, and to other AI tools that developers use alongside it. The implication is that AI is enabling developers to write, test, and submit code significantly faster than a year ago. That is a substantial productivity increase in a sector that employs hundreds of thousands of people in the UK.
The data is not unambiguously positive. A 78% increase in code output does not necessarily require 78% more developers. Some analysts argue it will lead to sustained headcount pressure in software teams over the next three to five years, as teams can accomplish more with fewer people. Others counter that rising productivity typically creates new categories of work rather than simply eliminating existing jobs.
Trade Union Concerns
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) submitted evidence to the inquiry emphasising the risk that productivity gains from AI will accrue disproportionately to employers rather than workers. The TUC’s analysis, based on case studies across retail, financial services, and professional services, found that while AI-assisted roles often require higher skills and more complex work, pay increases for those roles have not kept pace with the productivity gains being realised.
The TUC has called for mandatory consultation rights when employers introduce AI tools that affect working conditions, job roles, or performance monitoring. It has also called for a prohibition on AI-driven performance management without human oversight — a response to growing use of AI systems that automatically track and score employee output in logistics, call centres, and retail environments.
The CBI has taken a different position, arguing that over-regulation of workplace AI would harm UK competitiveness at a critical moment. The CBI supports voluntary codes of practice and industry-led guidance rather than legislation, pointing out that the pace of AI development makes prescriptive rules quickly outdated.
UK AI Safety Institute: Beyond Safety
The UK AI Safety Institute, established in 2023 and now operating as part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, has expanded its scope in 2026. Originally focused on evaluating the safety properties of frontier AI models, it has increasingly engaged with questions of societal impact — including labour market effects.
In April 2026, the Institute published a technical paper examining how the capabilities of current AI systems map onto occupational tasks in the UK labour force. The paper found that approximately 36% of tasks performed by workers in high-skill professional roles are susceptible to AI augmentation in the near term, and that around 8% of tasks are susceptible to outright displacement.
The 8% displacement figure is more modest than some earlier projections — Oxford’s 2013 paper had suggested 47% of US jobs were at risk — but it still represents millions of individual tasks that will be done by AI rather than humans over the next decade. The Institute was careful to note that task displacement does not directly equate to job loss, as workers typically perform many tasks and AI displacement of one may allow more time for others.
The National Policy Framework for AI
The Business and Trade inquiry will feed into the government’s National Policy Framework for AI, published in early 2026. The framework sets out principles for how AI should be developed and deployed in the UK economy, with sections covering public sector adoption, private sector responsibilities, and workforce impacts.
The workforce section of the framework is notably thinner than its technology and governance sections, reflecting the fact that this is an area where policy thinking is still developing. The Select Committee’s inquiry is explicitly intended to fill that gap with evidence-based recommendations.
Key questions the inquiry will address include: whether the UK needs a dedicated AI and employment strategy; whether existing employment law is adequate for AI-managed workplaces; how skills and training systems need to change; and whether there should be specific rights for workers affected by AI-driven redundancies.
What This Means for UK Workers
For individuals navigating an AI-augmented workplace, the Select Committee inquiry is both a formal acknowledgement that the transition is happening and a signal that government engagement is deepening. That matters, because it increases the likelihood that policy changes — whether around consultation rights, retraining support, or employment law — will follow.
The evidence from multiple sectors points in the same direction: workers who learn to use AI tools effectively are becoming more productive, and productivity is ultimately what drives wages and job security. The 19.2% of UK workers already using AI regularly are building skills that will become more valuable as adoption widens.
Sectors currently insulated from AI disruption — construction, care, hospitality — are likely to face different dynamics as robotics and physical AI systems develop over the next decade. The current focus on knowledge-work disruption should not create a false sense of security in those sectors.
The TUC’s call for consultation rights when AI tools are introduced is a reasonable ask that aligns with existing good employment practice. Workers who understand how AI tools will affect their roles, and who are involved in decisions about implementation, adapt more successfully than those who have AI imposed on them without explanation.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only.
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