AI Economy Helps Lift UK Growth to a Two-Year High

AI-linked businesses helped boost UK economic growth to its fastest quarterly pace since early 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Its data, released on Thursday 12 November, shows GDP growing 0.7% between July and September, with computer programming, consultancy and related activities up 4.4%.

ONS chief economist Grant Fitzner said growth was “almost entirely due to strong and widespread growth in the services sector”, where computer programming and consultancy has been the biggest contributor to three-month growth for seven months running, according to the ONS bulletin.

For businesses outside those industries, or only starting out with AI, Ben Thompson, co-founder and CEO of Employment Hero, has a suggestion. Speaking on the company’s Inside the Workroom podcast (Episode 8, hosted by Kevin Fitzgerald, UK Managing Director of Employment Hero), he said:

“I would encourage people to stop and think for a minute, how would I run this business if I could spin up 10,000 agents that are individually brilliant?”

But how are businesses using AI?

Listen to Episode 8 of Inside the Workroom below:

How Workers Feel About AI at Work

Employment Hero’s AI Paradox report, a survey across Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, found nearly three in four employees say AI has boosted their productivity. In the UK, 41% of workers feel guilt using AI to produce work, rising to 51% of Gen Z. Across all four markets, 42% of employees who use AI say it feels like cheating.

Ben says AI should be seen differently: “I’m sure when they invented electricity, people didn’t feel like they were cheating, switching on a light instead of lighting a candle.”  

The bigger shift, he argues, comes from “building the company around agents first”, not from handing staff AI tools for the jobs they already do.

How AI Adoption Differs From Handing Out Tools

It’s a lesson Employment Hero learned first-hand, Ben says: “We made the mistake of thinking that AI adoption was giving people AI tools to do the jobs they’re already doing better or faster.” Tools can bring incremental improvement, he says, but the companies adopting AI best are “building the company around agents first”, and an existing business would need to “completely redesign how the business works”.

Russell Dias, Employment Hero’s Product Manager for AI, advises giving staff “sensible budgets to play around, to experiment with”, because “individual confidence is really important”.

What the Future of Work Looks Like for Smaller Employers

AI-linked businesses also stand out on hiring. Employment Hero’s AI Paradox report found that across Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK, 42% of companies grew entry-level headcount over the past two years, rising to 62% among businesses with AI at their core, more than double the 30% of non-adopters.

Asked on the podcast why that might be, Ben pointed to capacity. AI, he said, is letting Employment Hero build things “that we had the aspirations to build, but never the capacity” for. “For those things, you need humans involved,” he said. “We have more reason to hire more people because we’re just doing so much more.”

Listen to episodes here. New episodes will continue to appear in the Newsroom as they’re released.