Reflections By Jade Uko, Head of Corporate Communications at Energy & Utility Skills Group.
I recently attended a roundtable at King’s College London, held by the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence on the theme of Generation AI: Preventing a New NEET Crisis in the age of AI. The session was chaired by business leaders exploring AI and the future labour market.
As you might expect, much of the conversation was about jobs. Which will change? Which tasks might disappear? What happens to entry-level opportunities? And are we preparing young people for a labour market that could look very different by the time they enter it?
But one thought kept occurring to me. AI may live in the cloud, but it runs on infrastructure. And infrastructure needs people.
One of the most useful ideas from the roundtable was that we shouldn’t think about AI simply in terms of jobs being lost. Jobs are collections of tasks. Some can be automated, others augmented, while many still depend heavily on human judgement, practical ability and experience.
The discussion repeatedly returned to the importance of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, resilience and adaptability, alongside practical workplace experience and mentoring, all of which industry has a crucial part in shaping.
But there is another dimension to this. Every conversation about the growth of AI is also a conversation about physical infrastructure. Data centres need energy. Energy needs generating and moving. Networks need building and maintaining.
None of that happens magically because someone has put the word cloud in front of it.
For years, we’ve talked about the future of work as though becoming more digital inevitably meant becoming less physical. What is less discussed is that the digital economy still needs the physical economy. Our latest set of Workforce Demand estimates which will launch on 4 November 2026, will explore the impact of AI on our industry and explore how technology changes existing occupations as well as where it creates new workforce demand. Digital capability will increasingly need to sit alongside technical competence, practical skills and human judgement.
That goes to the heart of the Skills Strategy at Energy & Utility Skills Group.
We need a workforce that is safe, with competence and accountability at its core; skilled, combining technical expertise with new digital capabilities; sustainable, creating routes for people to enter, retrain and progress; and productive, using technology where it genuinely enables people to work better.
That is why we are establishing a new AI and Technology Group, bringing together workforce, operational, technical and innovation expertise to explore what AI, automation and emerging technologies mean for skills, competence, workforce planning and productivity across energy and utilities. Members can get involved by contacting us at collaborate@euskills.co.uk.
So yes, we should keep asking what AI will mean for jobs. But we should also ask what jobs AI itself will create and depend upon. Because for all the extraordinary things AI can do, there remains an inconveniently analogue truth underneath it. The cloud still needs plugging in.
