AI, automation and digital transformation, reported from the UK. Every Foundry4 article, newest first.https://foundry4.com/en-gbhttps://foundry4.com/beyond-the-smart-city-how-can-londons-data-help-citizens/https://foundry4.com/beyond-the-smart-city-how-can-londons-data-help-citizens/TfL spends roughly £1m a year publishing open data and the assessed return is £90m to £130m a year. The city portal itself tells a much less flattering story.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/big-data-will-fuel-the-ev-revolution/https://foundry4.com/big-data-will-fuel-the-ev-revolution/British law requires every public charge point to broadcast whether it is working, within 30 seconds. Almost nobody reads what that obligation produced.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/cloud-repatriation-economics/https://foundry4.com/cloud-repatriation-economics/Dropbox filed its infrastructure numbers with the SEC and 37signals published its invoices. Almost every other repatriation figure in circulation is an assumption.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/data-infrastructure-for-ai/https://foundry4.com/data-infrastructure-for-ai/The UK government's AI playbook sets out ten principles for civil servants. Not one of them is about whether the records being fed to the model are usable.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/data-quality-is-the-bottleneck/https://foundry4.com/data-quality-is-the-bottleneck/Companies House removed false or misleading information affecting 100,400 companies in a single year. That register is what British firms check clients against.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/how-to-handle-the-technically-complex-and-get-it-right-the-first-time/https://foundry4.com/how-to-handle-the-technically-complex-and-get-it-right-the-first-time/The 2019 census rehearsal found blocks of flats with no flat numbers in the address frame. TSB ran a performance test in one data centre, and the FCA priced that.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/hybrid-cloud-is-the-default/https://foundry4.com/hybrid-cloud-is-the-default/Every customer that told the CMA it would not move its public cloud workloads elsewhere was already running a hybrid estate. That is a destination, not a waypoint.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/open-data-in-2026/https://foundry4.com/open-data-in-2026/We queried data.gov.uk, sampled 6,000 of its datasets and then tested 400 of its download links. A fifth of them came back unusable and one in eight never connected.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/the-beginnings-of-open-data/https://foundry4.com/the-beginnings-of-open-data/The British open data programme was a delivery schedule with months attached, not a vision. Its central artefact has not been updated since March 2015.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/uk-data-centre-power-constraints/https://foundry4.com/uk-data-centre-power-constraints/There is more data centre capacity queuing for a grid connection in Great Britain than the whole country draws at peak. Ofgem does not believe most of it is real.Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/18-disruptive-technology-trends-for-2018/https://foundry4.com/18-disruptive-technology-trends-for-2018/A list of eighteen predictions is a hedge. Eight years on, the ones that arrived on time all had a statutory deadline attached, and the rest are still unmarkable.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/3-minutes-on-product-management/https://foundry4.com/3-minutes-on-product-management/The civil service publishes what a product manager decides, at what grade, and which four numbers the service must report. Hardly any company does either.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/5-industry-applications-of-rpa/https://foundry4.com/5-industry-applications-of-rpa/A decade of robotic process automation left five recognisable shapes of work still running in British organisations. Here is what they are, and what killed the rest.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/5-business-uses-of-virtual-reality/https://foundry4.com/5-business-uses-of-virtual-reality/Meta lost $19.2bn on Reality Labs in 2025 while five unglamorous industrial and clinical uses of virtual reality quietly went into routine production.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/6-key-digital-transformation-recommendations-for-a-modern-government/https://foundry4.com/6-key-digital-transformation-recommendations-for-a-modern-government/Six recommendations for digital government, each drawn from a published audit finding rather than a principle, and each testable against a document you can read.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/6-tech-companies-making-waves-in-ocean-technology/https://foundry4.com/6-tech-companies-making-waves-in-ocean-technology/Six firms building subsea instruments and uncrewed vessels, ranked by what their filings actually disclose. Defence is now the buyer that moves the numbers.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/9-disruptive-technology-trends-for-2019/https://foundry4.com/9-disruptive-technology-trends-for-2019/Nine of the predictions the technology industry made for 2019, marked against the public record in 2026. Four were simply wrong and only one was a clean call.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/addressing-the-challenge-of-online-harms/https://foundry4.com/addressing-the-challenge-of-online-harms/Ofcom fined a suicide forum £950,000, then reported that it had exhausted every legal route to collect it. Three years of Online Safety Act enforcement.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/ai-agents-in-the-enterprise/https://foundry4.com/ai-agents-in-the-enterprise/Strip out the announcements and the pilots, and the enterprise agent estate is small, narrow and closely supervised. The public records show exactly how narrow.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/ai-generated-phishing-defence/https://foundry4.com/ai-generated-phishing-defence/Training taught staff to spot bad grammar. That tell was an artefact of the attacker's budget and it has gone. What still works is procedural, not perceptual.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/are-you-really-agile-yet/https://foundry4.com/are-you-really-agile-yet/The manifesto names no ceremony at all. It asks for late requirement changes and a business person available daily, which is where transformations quietly stop.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/blockchain-5-ways-cybercriminals-can-hack-the-unhackable/https://foundry4.com/blockchain-5-ways-cybercriminals-can-hack-the-unhackable/A dormant wallet moved 8.2 bitcoin and the Met made an arrest. The chain worked perfectly. Five categories of failure that sit around it, and what each one costs.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/combining-digital-and-technology-at-the-dfe-why-now/https://foundry4.com/combining-digital-and-technology-at-the-dfe-why-now/The Department for Education put digital and IT under one leader in 2020. The reorganisation keeps recurring across Whitehall, and legacy funding explains why.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/digital-leadership-after-the-cto/https://foundry4.com/digital-leadership-after-the-cto/Regulators and a governance code have started naming who is answerable for technology. In finance it has a code number. In listed firms it lands in 2026.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/digitising-vs-digitalising-your-business-whats-the-difference/https://foundry4.com/digitising-vs-digitalising-your-business-whats-the-difference/HMRC decided not to sequence the two, because sequencing would have missed a published date. The bill for treating them as one programme ran to £1.3 billion.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/does-digital-hold-the-public-sector-back/https://foundry4.com/does-digital-hold-the-public-sector-back/Eleven government digital strategies since 1996 and few transformations at scale. The binding constraints turn out to be budget rules, pay bands and contracts.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/enterprise-ai-governance-uk/https://foundry4.com/enterprise-ai-governance-uk/Britain still has no AI statute, so a UK firm's obligations are the sum of existing regulators plus a European law that reaches across the Channel anyway.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/enterprise-software-procurement-uk/https://foundry4.com/enterprise-software-procurement-uk/A licence metric agreed in 2004 exposed Diageo to a £54.5m claim in the High Court, and an accounting decision from 2021 now shapes who signs the next one.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/focus-on-users-to-find-the-right-solution/https://foundry4.com/focus-on-users-to-find-the-right-solution/The largest forecast economic benefit in a £9.3bn programme was five minutes per officer per shift, written in 2015, never revised, and not yet accepted by police.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/government-technology-procurement-reform/https://foundry4.com/government-technology-procurement-reform/New notices, published KPIs and annual performance assessments arrived in February 2025. The team buying technology for Whitehall still numbers fifteen people.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/greater-expectations-meeting-digital-needs-post-covid-19/https://foundry4.com/greater-expectations-meeting-digital-needs-post-covid-19/HMRC built the furlough claims service in four weeks. Six years on, most of British government still cannot move at that speed, and the record shows why.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/how-do-you-get-people-to-embrace-digital-change/https://foundry4.com/how-do-you-get-people-to-embrace-digital-change/Two of the three terms staff negotiate over are already written in statute, with clocks attached. Most transformation plans schedule engagement after the deadline.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/is-social-value-fit-for-purpose-in-the-public-sector/https://foundry4.com/is-social-value-fit-for-purpose-in-the-public-sector/Social value weighting rises to 20% on large contracts from January 2027. The law already requires performance to be published, and almost nobody reads it.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/is-the-public-sector-doing-enough-with-its-data/https://foundry4.com/is-the-public-sector-doing-enough-with-its-data/British government holds the records it needs to cut fraud and error. What it lacks is a workable way to share them, and the audit trail proves it.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/is-your-technology-partner-a-speed-boat-or-an-oil-tanker/https://foundry4.com/is-your-technology-partner-a-speed-boat-or-an-oil-tanker/Airwave costs the Home Office about £1.7m a day while its replacement is built. That daily rate, not supplier size, is what a partner choice actually buys.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/local-government-legacy-systems/https://foundry4.com/local-government-legacy-systems/Seven of 61 funded local government digital projects ever spread beyond the council that built them. The evaluation says why, and the money explains the rest.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/nis2-and-uk-cyber-rules/https://foundry4.com/nis2-and-uk-cyber-rules/NIS2 is not UK law and never will be. Three separate routes still pull British organisations into it, and only one of them involves a regulator writing to you.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/nhs-digital-productivity/https://foundry4.com/nhs-digital-productivity/Up to £10bn is going into NHS technology by 2028-29 and productivity is rising. Nothing published lets you connect the two, and NHS England says as much.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/platform-engineering-team-shape/https://foundry4.com/platform-engineering-team-shape/GOV.UK PaaS ran 172 services at 99.95% uptime with one major incident in seven years, and was shut down anyway. Adoption decided it, not engineering quality.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/quantum-computing-uk-position/https://foundry4.com/quantum-computing-uk-position/Three overlapping quantum funding announcements, seven testbeds, and three national missions due in 2030. What has actually been bought, and what has not.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/rpa-to-agentic-automation/https://foundry4.com/rpa-to-agentic-automation/The category leader now calls itself an agentic automation firm as its growth slows. Read the filings and the lessons that transfer are operational, not technical.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/saas-pricing-moves-to-consumption/https://foundry4.com/saas-pricing-moves-to-consumption/Snowflake's contracted backlog is growing faster than the revenue it consumes. Consumption pricing did not abolish the commitment, it moved who carries the forecast.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/safety-tech-in-the-uk-a-platform-for-success/https://foundry4.com/safety-tech-in-the-uk-a-platform-for-success/UK safety tech revenue reached £704m in 2024 while headcount stalled and investment fell 43%. A sector growing on regulation rather than on capital.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/supply-chain-ransomware-uk-public-sector/https://foundry4.com/supply-chain-ransomware-uk-public-sector/One council's cyber lead put it exactly: every time we have been compromised it was through a third party. The regulator's fine list now reads like a supplier list.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/tackling-misinformation-around-covid-19-with-technology/https://foundry4.com/tackling-misinformation-around-covid-19-with-technology/Britain tried four things against pandemic misinformation. One survived into statute, and it is not the takedown power everybody spent three years arguing over.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/the-5-biggest-bike-share-businesses-disrupting-mobility/https://foundry4.com/the-5-biggest-bike-share-businesses-disrupting-mobility/Ranking bike share operators by what they disclose rather than what they claim. The biggest fleets publish least, and a city budget office had to estimate the rest.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/the-dos-and-donts-of-delivery-management/https://foundry4.com/the-dos-and-donts-of-delivery-management/Government expects a delivery manager to handle commercial and financial management. Two skills no agile certification teaches, and the week turns on both.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/the-growing-influence-of-subscription-business-models/https://foundry4.com/the-growing-influence-of-subscription-business-models/Sage renews at 101% by value and government has legislated the renewal into an event with a notice attached. The model now turns on retention, not conversion.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/transformation-programmes-that-stall/https://foundry4.com/transformation-programmes-that-stall/An assurance review called GOV.UK Verify an innovative technical success that was not producing its promised benefits. Both halves of that were accurate.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/vet-ai-a-pioneering-platform-for-pets/https://foundry4.com/vet-ai-a-pioneering-platform-for-pets/The constraint on remote veterinary care in Britain is not the video call. It is a carve-out in the prescribing rules, and a competition package landing this year.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/wealth-management-company-automates-payments/https://foundry4.com/wealth-management-company-automates-payments/In a firm holding client money, the payment run is not a payments problem. It is a controls problem, and the FCA has written down most of the answer already.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/what-ai-automation-costs-to-run/https://foundry4.com/what-ai-automation-costs-to-run/Enterprise AI has moved from per-seat licences to per-action metering. That changes who controls your bill, and the vendor can redefine the unit you budgeted in.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/why-norway-leads-the-charge-on-electric-vehicles/https://foundry4.com/why-norway-leads-the-charge-on-electric-vehicles/Norway reached a 95.9% electric share of new car sales through tax design, not technology. Only 32.1% of its car fleet is electric, and the incentives are ending.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/workflow-automation-build-or-buy/https://foundry4.com/workflow-automation-build-or-buy/The clearest build-or-buy test in Britain is published free by the Government Digital Service and is mandatory for public spend. Most private buyers never read it.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://foundry4.com/zero-trust-after-the-hype/https://foundry4.com/zero-trust-after-the-hype/The national technical authority now publishes a page whose job is telling you what zero trust is not. That is what the end of a hype cycle looks like in writing.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT