What the Welsh Government's AI position means for a local business

Wales published its first national AI strategy, AI Cymru: Shaping a Smarter, Fairer, More Prosperous Wales, on 18 November 2025, and buried inside it is a genuinely useful number for any local business owner still deciding whether AI is worth bothering with: just under half of Welsh businesses (49%) report not currently using AI at all, against 56% across the UK as a whole. Wales is already ahead of the UK average on adoption, not behind it, and the government’s own strategy is built to close what’s left of that gap rather than to create a new obligation nobody asked for.

What the strategy actually says

The strategy is built around four pillars: economic growth, educating Wales, equitable delivery, and excellence and trust in public services. It sits on four stated principles: ethical, empathetic, enterprising, and effective. Most of that reads as the kind of language every government strategy uses. The part worth a business owner’s actual attention is more specific: Welsh Government names levels of expertise, cost, and difficulty identifying a genuine use case as the three things holding businesses back, and commits to scaling up support through Business Wales and the Hartree Centre to address them directly.

Behind the strategy sits actual governance, not just ambition. Welsh Government set up a Strategic AI Advisory Group and a dedicated Office for AI in June 2025, months before the strategy itself was published. The advisory group draws on academic, industry and public-sector expertise and reports directly to ministers; the Office for AI’s stated job is strengthening the government’s own capability and coordinating with councils and other public bodies, rather than sitting apart from them. For a council or public body, that gives AI in Welsh public services a named home inside government for the first time, even if its reach is still being built out.

Business Wales and the Hartree Centre

Both of those support routes already exist and are open to Welsh businesses today. Business Wales offers impartial advice and guidance, including specifically on digital adoption, to any Welsh business that asks. The Hartree Centre, working through a hub based at Cardiff University, supports small and medium businesses with AI and data analytics help in the Cardiff Capital Region specifically. Neither requires waiting for a new scheme to launch. The strategy’s own language is that this support “needs to be scaled up in Wales”, which reads more like an acknowledgement that awareness is still low than a promise that something new is coming.

The Welsh language commitment

The strategy also makes a specific, and genuinely distinctive, commitment on the Welsh language: AI tools should work properly in Welsh, not as an afterthought, and Welsh-language datasets should be made available to AI developers globally so systems trained mostly on English perform properly in Welsh too. That has practical weight for any organisation serving Welsh speakers. A council publishing bilingual content, or an advice service answering queries in Welsh, is being told directly by its own government that the tools it adopts are expected to hold up in both languages, not just English with a Welsh option bolted on.

What it means for councils and public bodies

For councils and public bodies specifically, the strategy points toward guidance on deploying AI efficiently across services, alongside an explicit expectation of human oversight and public trust running through any automation. That’s worth reading as an early signal rather than a current requirement. A community or town council that starts thinking now about how it would explain its own AI use, if asked, is simply ahead of where most of its peers currently are.

What it means for a private business

For a private business, the practical reading is simpler. The government’s own data is blunt about it: adoption is patchy, the barriers are ordinary ones (cost, know-how, not knowing where to start), and Wales is doing marginally better than the UK average despite that. Impartial support already exists through Business Wales. None of this requires becoming an “AI business”. It just means the honest starting point, checking what support is already on offer before assuming AI adoption means hiring a consultant or building something from scratch, is a smaller step than the strategy’s own ambitious language might suggest.

The bottom line

Strategy documents like this rarely change what a business does the next morning. What this one does is confirm, with the government’s own numbers, that just under half of Welsh businesses still haven’t started at all, that the reasons why are ordinary rather than complicated, and that the support to close the gap already exists. That’s a useful thing to know before deciding whether AI adoption is worth the bother. It also means a business that hasn’t started is neither unusual nor badly behind, which makes now a reasonable point to begin rather than a moment already missed.

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Sources

• AI Cymru: Shaping a Smarter, Fairer, More Prosperous Wales (GOV.WALES, published 18 November 2025). Fetched directly for the strategy’s four pillars, four principles, the 49%/56% business-adoption figures, the three named adoption barriers, the Business Wales/Hartree Centre commitment, and the Welsh-language AI/dataset commitment.
• Written Statement: Strategic Artificial Intelligence Advisory Group and Welsh Government Office for AI (GOV.WALES, 28 June 2025). Fetched directly for the establishment date, purpose and remit of the Advisory Group and the Office for AI.
• Artificial intelligence (AI): overview (GOV.WALES). Fetched directly to cross-check the four stated principles and confirm publication/update dates.