Speech: Nurturing Welsh Talent in an Age of AI

Master, Wardens, Liverymen and Guests.

It is a real pleasure, and a real honour, to be with you this evening.

I should perhaps begin with a confession. When Jane invited me to speak, she did not exactly under-sell the occasion. This was not so much a tentative invitation as a warm Welsh summons, delivered with characteristic generosity and, I suspect, a carefully calibrated promise of hospitality. And, of course, it was impossible to refuse — though sadly, with the Newport 10K awaiting me the following morning, I had to approach at least some elements of the evening with more restraint than the occasion properly deserved.

It is a privilege to speak at a moment of transition for this Company, and a particularly fitting one. Because Jane’s theme for her year, honouring tradition and embracing innovation, is not simply a good strapline. It captures, rather precisely, one of the central questions of our time.

How do we keep what matters, while changing what must?

How do we ensure that heritage is not simply preserved, admired, and occasionally dusted, but carried forward, renewed, and made useful for the future?

That is a question for governments, for universities, for businesses, for public institutions, and for civic organisations such as this one.

And in that respect, the Worshipful Livery Company of Wales is in a strong position indeed. Founded in 1993 as the Welsh Livery Guild, and granted a Royal Charter in 2013, it occupies a distinctive place in Welsh civic life: not tied to a single trade or profession, but committed across the arts, science, technology, education, and wider human endeavour.

Because this Company has always understood something important: tradition is not nostalgia. At its best, tradition is a way of transmitting values, standards, obligations, and opportunities from one generation to the next. It is a means of continuity, but also of renewal.

And that is exactly what this Company has done, and continues to do, through its commitment to nurturing Welsh talent. Not simply by celebrating achievement once it is already obvious, but by identifying promise early, backing it seriously, and doing so in the service of public benefit.

I know that personally.

I have a long and grateful connection to this Company. I was honoured to receive its Gold Award in 2013, and to become a Liveryman the following year, and I remain very conscious of what that recognition meant. Not simply the practical support, though that matters. Not simply the ceremony, though that matters too. But the signal it sends.

We see you.
We believe in you.
We are prepared to invest in what you might yet become.

For a young person, or indeed for anyone still finding their path, that can matter enormously.

And that is why I think Jane’s theme is so timely. Because in 2026, honouring tradition and embracing innovation is not simply a matter of balance. It is a matter of judgement.

We are living through a period of rapid technological change, especially around AI and digital systems. But the key question is not whether technology changes society. It always does. The real question is what kind of society we want those technologies to help produce.

That is not a technical question alone. It is a civic, cultural, educational, and moral one.

Too often, debates about AI are framed in crude binaries: optimism or pessimism, opportunity or threat. But the more serious challenge is institutional. Which forms of judgement, expertise, discretion, and accountability remain properly human? Which tasks can be augmented by AI? Which should not be delegated? And how do we redesign our institutions, our professions, and our public life around those distinctions?

That is where the real work is.

Because the future is not a contest between people and machines. It is a question of how human capabilities, social institutions, and technological systems are configured together.

And that means Wales should not think about AI simply as a matter of adoption, productivity, or efficiency, important though those are. We should also be clear about the cost of not engaging. If Wales does not shape these transitions confidently and on our own terms, the risk is not simply that we miss out on economic opportunity. It is that decisions about language, culture, work, and public life are shaped elsewhere, and for us. That is why this is not a question of whether to engage with technological change, but how to do so with confidence, judgement, and purpose.

In that sense, AI is no longer a distant or speculative topic. It is already part of the live policy and institutional landscape across the UK, not as science fiction, but as a practical question of adoption, capability, and public benefit.

In other words: not just what the technology can do, but what kind of country we want to become with it.

That takes me to education.

I have spent much of my career working at the intersection of education, technology, and public policy, including leading major curriculum reform in Wales. And one of the reasons that work mattered so much to me is that it was never simply about modernising content. It was about asking a deeper question: what should young people need to thrive in a world defined by uncertainty, complexity, rapid change, and profound technological disruption?

Curriculum reform in Wales was, at its best, an attempt to answer it seriously: not by reducing education to the accumulation of facts, nor by treating young people as future units of labour market supply, but by recognising that they will need knowledge, of course, but also ethical judgement, critical thinking, creativity, adaptability, and the capacity to act as informed citizens.

That matters even more in the age of AI. Because if knowledge becomes more searchable, more generatable, and more ambient, then the value of education lies increasingly not only in what students know, but in what they can do with what they know.

Can they reason?
Can they question?
Can they interpret?
Can they create?
Can they distinguish confidence from competence, correlation from causation, fluency from understanding?
Can they exercise judgement?

That, to me, feels like one of the defining educational questions of our time.

So when we talk about skills, I think we need to be careful. Wales should absolutely invest in digital skills, technical capability, computational thinking, and the wider pipeline into science, engineering, creative industries, and innovation. But we should not fall into the trap of imagining that this is only a narrow pipeline issue.

The deeper challenge is broader. We need a population, and not just a small elite, that can combine technical fluency with critical literacy, creativity with confidence, and digital capability with civic judgement.

The future will not belong simply to those who can code.
It will belong to those who can discern.

Those who can use powerful tools without surrendering to them.
Those who can think and work across disciplines, across sectors, and across communities.
Those who can participate in a digital society without becoming passive within it.

That is a very different ambition from simply producing more users of technology. It is about cultivating capable citizens in a technologically mediated world.

And that brings me to culture, place, and language.

One of the more persistent myths of digital modernity is that technology is culturally neutral. It is not. Technologies are shaped by markets, incentives, languages, training data, institutional choices, and power. Left to themselves, digital systems often reward scale, dominant languages, standardised content, and the logic of what is easiest to reproduce.

For a nation like Wales, that matters.

Because the future of the Welsh language is not only a question of classrooms, communities, and culture, important though all of those are. It is increasingly also a question of platforms, tools, data, interfaces, and whether Welsh fully belongs in the digital and AI systems through which modern life is now organised.

So when we speak about language in Wales today, we are not speaking only about preservation. We are speaking about presence, participation, and power in the systems that will shape everyday life.

That is true of the Welsh language.
It is true of local culture.
It is true of creative economies.
And it is true of the civic life of communities across Wales.

In that sense, culture is not peripheral to the future economy. It is part of its foundation.

Place matters.
Belonging matters.
Language matters.
Shared institutions matter.

A country that neglects those things may still grow, in some narrow statistical sense, but it risks becoming thinner, less confident, and less cohesive in the process.

By contrast, a country that invests in its social and cultural infrastructure invests in the conditions that allow innovation, trust, creativity, and civic participation to flourish.

That phrase, social and cultural infrastructure, matters to me. We often speak quite comfortably about physical infrastructure and economic infrastructure. But from my experience across public policy, including work connected to questions of national infrastructure in Wales, I think the institutions, networks, cultural assets, and civic relationships that help people participate in society also deserve to be seen as infrastructure: not decorative, not optional, but foundational.

In Wales, we have also given ourselves a distinctive civic language for thinking about this through the Well-being of Future Generations Act: a commitment not simply to immediate outcomes, but to the long term, to integration, to collaboration, to involvement, and to prevention. That feels highly resonant with the mission of this Company, and with Jane’s ambition to invest in young people, capability, and the future shape of Welsh civic life.

And that is one reason why organisations like this one matter.

The Worshipful Livery Company of Wales is not simply a charitable body, and not simply a ceremonial one. It is a form of civic infrastructure. It identifies talent, confers legitimacy, links generations, sustains networks, and translates values into opportunity.

Its public aims are strikingly modern in their own way:

promoting education, arts, science and technology;
promoting vocational skills;
offering awards and scholarships;
developing the talents of young people throughout Wales;
and investing in the future of the Company through its Award Winners Community.

That is not simply fellowship, valuable though that is. It is an active investment in the capabilities on which Wales’ future depends.

And that matters all the more because this is not a historic mission recalled only on ceremonial occasions; it is living work, expressed through the Company’s current awards, scholarships, and support for young people across Wales in academic, vocational, creative, and public-service pathways.

And at a time when so many institutions are under strain, that role becomes more important, not less.

Because another defining issue of our time is trust.

We live in an age of extraordinary connectivity and extraordinary informational abundance. But abundance does not guarantee understanding. And visibility does not guarantee trustworthiness.

Indeed, one of the great challenges of the online world is not simply that falsehood circulates. It is that the wider conditions for shared knowledge become weaker. People become less sure which institutions deserve authority, which claims deserve confidence, and which sources are acting in good faith.

That is not only a misinformation problem. It is a problem of epistemic security.

By that I mean the health of the shared institutions, norms, and practices through which a society comes to know things together:

how we produce,
test,
share,
and trust knowledge
in public life.

Schools matter here.
Universities matter.
Public service broadcasters matter.
Libraries, museums, archives, and other trusted civic institutions matter too.

Because trust is not built by assertion. It is built by trustworthiness: by competence, by integrity, by transparency, by accountability, and by sustained public service over time.

In a noisy and often cynical information environment, those things become strategic assets.

And I think this is especially important for Wales.

In just a few weeks, Wales will again go to the polls, and this time in a changed democratic landscape: with a larger Senedd, new constituencies, and a new voting system. Whatever one’s politics, that is a reminder that the future of a nation is not simply inherited. It is argued over, decided, renewed, and shaped through institutions and choices.

So this is a moment to ask what sort of Wales we want to build.

My own view is that Wales should be ambitious, certainly, but also pragmatic, purposeful, and focused on delivering for its citizens.

And it should do so in a way that takes seriously not only the needs of the present, but the obligations we owe to future generations: to leave behind a Wales that is more capable, more confident, more creative, and more just than the one we inherited.

Ambitious about AI, but not naive about it.
Ambitious about education, but clear that education is about agency, citizenship, and judgement as well as employability.
Ambitious about culture and language, not as matters of sentiment alone, but as living assets in a modern nation.
Ambitious about trust, because a society that cannot sustain trusted institutions will struggle to sustain democratic confidence.
And ambitious, above all, about young people.

Because the test of any generation is not whether it enjoyed change, or merely survived it, but whether it prepared the next generation to lead wisely within it.

And that, I think, is where Jane’s year comes into focus.

Because the priorities that I understand will shape her year — growing membership, strengthening fundraising, increasing the visibility of the awards, mentoring, and investing in young people and skills — are not separate administrative tasks. They are part of a larger civic mission.

They are about widening the circle of opportunity.
They are about renewing the Company’s relevance.
They are about ensuring that a strong tradition continues to do living work in the present.

So let me end with a challenge, respectfully offered.

The Worshipful Livery Company of Wales should continue to do what it already does so well. But it should also be bolder.

Be bolder in reaching young people earlier.
Be bolder in connecting technical, vocational, creative, and civic forms of excellence.
Be bolder in mentoring not only achievement, but judgement and leadership.
Be bolder in supporting the institutions and networks that help Wales remain confident, bilingual, creative, and outward-looking.
Be bolder in making the case that arts, science, and technology do not compete with one another, but together help build a good society.
And be bolder in saying that nurturing Welsh talent means more than recognising success. It means building the conditions in which more people can flourish.

Because the future of Wales will not be secured by technology alone.

It will be secured by people.
By institutions.
By education.
By culture.
By language.
By trust.
And by the willingness to invest, early and patiently, in talent that has not yet fully revealed what it can become.

That, to me, is what this Company represents at its best.

Not simply continuity, but stewardship.
Not simply ceremony, but civic purpose.
Not simply honouring the past, but helping to co-create the future.

Master, Jane, your year begins at a moment when that mission could hardly be more timely.

So my hope for the year ahead is that this Company continues not only to honour its traditions, but to renew them through action; not only to celebrate Welsh talent, but to widen who is seen, supported, and encouraged; and not only to admire the future from a distance, but to help shape it.