Industry news

Salesforce is offering free Slack Enterprise access to millions of UK further and higher education students, giving participating institutions access to Slackbot and the option to introduce AI agents for student services, study groups and research. Institutions retain control over permissions, with Salesforce stating that student data will not be used to train external AI models.

The initiative adds another route into a UK Education software and IT services (SITS) market where Salesforce is already extending Education Cloud beyond university recruitment CRM towards a fuller student lifecycle proposition

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

NTT DATA UK&I has been appointed as the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) Consular & Crisis Core Technology Platform provider, in a contract worth £57m over three to five years.

The award extends work that began in 2022, when NTT DATA started developing Orbit, the department’s consular case management platform. Orbit replaced three legacy platforms and seven separate case management toolsets with a single Salesforce CRM, used by more than 1,000 consular staff. NTT DATA says the platform maintained services when demand surged during a global crisis earlier this year, and that its team added Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities quickly to communicate with hundreds of thousands of people in the affected region.

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

The technology giant reported problems with multiple services in its UK region shortly after 07:00 BST on Tuesday, with thousands of users reporting difficulties accessing online platforms.

Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among the financial services affected, while Royal Mail, parcel delivery company DPD and property website Rightmove also reported disruption.

The incident comes as UK regulators increase their oversight of major cloud computing providers whose infrastructure supports critical services across the financial sector.

Read the full article on Computing here.

The government has launched its Digital and Technologies Jobs Plan, with an ambition to create or fill 20,000 entry-level roles annually over the next decade. This is against a Skills England estimate that around 800,000 digital and technology roles will need filling by 2035.

However, the government's own documentation makes clear that the 20,000 figure is an ambition, not a forecast, and can include existing vacancies.

TechFirst Partners including Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Cognizant and Arm have committed to more than 10,000 work experience, placement and learning opportunities over three years. The government is also accelerating its TechFirst programme, aiming to reach one million young people by 2028.

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

Atos has expanded its long-standing partnership with Fortinet from a country-led arrangement to a global engagement model. The agreement covers resale of Fortinet’s technology and Atos’ managed cybersecurity services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The partnership will align joint business development, customer engagement, service delivery and commercial terms worldwide. It sits alongside Atos’ existing services in network security, security operations centres (SOCs), Zero Trust, cloud security and SASE (Secure Access Service Edge, which combines networking and security in a cloud-delivered service).

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

The problem with AI sovereignty is that it sounds like a demand for independence: a national stack, domestic models, local datacentres and a flag planted in the cloud.

Mike Bracken, the founder of the Government Digital Service and Gov.uk, sees it differently. He believes sovereignty is not about owning everything but about recovering the power to decide: which technologies matter enough to control or which vendor dependencies are acceptable.

Read the full article on Computing here.

TCS holds the number one spot in TechMarketView’s Insurance Software and IT Services rankings and is always a good bellwether of what is happening in the wider market. The BaNCS platform in particular, running NEST's £840m workplace pensions administration contract, supporting Aviva's life and pensions book through Diligenta, and now underpinning Ireland's My Future Fund auto-enrolment scheme, continues to function as both the commercial engine of the UK insurance practice and as a differentiating proof point that few rivals can match for scale and regulatory complexity. Thus, given the scale and footprint of TCS’s insurance operation its always worth spending time with the insurance SITS market leader (and its clients and partners) to gather insight in what is happening in the wider market.

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

NHS England has confirmed it will deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505k clinicians and support staff, building on a trial run across more than 30k workers in 90 organisations last October. The trial clearly proved a success, with average time savings of 43 minutes per staff member per day, with estimations that a broader rollout could free up an average of 2 days every month from admin duties.

The anticipated use cases span a wide range of roles. For clinicians and medical secretaries, the focus is on drafting letters and registrar training. Ward clerks are expected to use it for patient discharge processes, rota building, and bed management. 

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

Having launched an agentic AI financial assistant last November, Lloyds Banking Group has announced a multi-year extension of its Microsoft partnership, becoming one of the first UK banks to deploy Microsoft 365 E7, the AI Frontier Suite, company-wide. The agreement marks a step up from productivity-focused genAI towards agent-led transformation across the group.

 Back in January, we heard that Lloyds had reported that generative AI delivered around £50m of value in 2025,  with expectations to exceed £100m in 2026 as the bank extends deployment across its operations. The figures represent real returns on AI investment rather than projected benefits, marking a shift from pilot programmes to production-scale deployments.

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.

AI-powered digital transformation player, Atos is repositioning its Digital Workplace (DWP) proposition in the UK&I around a modular, AI-first, subscription-based model explicitly designed for the midmarket including manufacturers, logistic and retail, a segment it believes has been chronically underserved, with most providers optimising for either large enterprise outsourcing or smaller managed service contracts, leaving mid-sized organisations without access to enterprise-grade automation and experience capabilities.

The move reflects Atos's broader global strategy to transition Digital Workplace towards a "services as software" model, where automation, agentic AI and data platforms will fundamentally reshape the economics of end-user computing services

Read the full article on TechMarketView here.