AI-pocalypse Barnsley, a town in South Yorkshire, England, best known for coal mining and glassmaking, is being thrust into the limelight as the country’s first "Tech Town" – shoehorning AI into everything from local businesses to public services.

According to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT), Barnsley will blaze a trail for the rest of the UK to follow – all in the name of advancing the British government’s reliance on AI to improve productivity and make the UK great again (MUKGA).

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Local residents could see improved public services, better support in local schools, faster access to NHS care and new opportunities for jobs and skills, DSIT says. Needless to say, the word "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: "If we are going to get AI to work for Britain, we need Britons and British public services that can work with AI. That is why Barnsley’s ambitions are crucial, because if we can show that AI helps young people learn, supports local businesses to be more productive, and improves public services, then we can show what’s possible for the whole country."

The scheme is to include free AI and digital training for the town’s residents, through Barnsley College and the South Yorkshire Institute of Technology.

It will also involve testing educational technology tools in schools and Barnsley College, to gather evidence of the impact on pupils’ learning and if it can reduce teacher workloads.

The existing Seam Digital Campus near the town center is being expanded to offer small businesses support when adopting new technology and scaling up.

Barnsley Council will receive an initial £500k ($683k) in seed funding as part of the program.

Companies that have signed up to the scheme include Microsoft and Cisco, each – we’re told – with a particular focus on AI skills in adult education and SME support.

Confirmation of the companies involved in testing AI tools in health services is expected some time in the not-too-distant future.

However, while the government talks up new opportunities for jobs, Microsoft slashed 15,000 staff by the middle of last year, citing AI as one of the reasons. And the company’s AI tools are so successful that just 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users have opted to upgrade to a paid version of Copilot Chat.

The UK government itself found no discernible gain in productivity from a three-month trial of Microsoft’s M365 Copilot, as reported last year.

Cisco also ditched 7 percent of its global workforce – about 6,000 employees – as part of a restructure that saw a shift towards AI. Meanwhile, a study released last year claimed that a fifth of jobs could disappear at businesses that implement AI.

The Register asked DSIT what assurances it could give that rolling out AI across services in Barnsley would not lead to a loss of jobs rather than new opportunities, but it declined to directly answer that question.

Georgina O’Toole, chief analyst at TechMarketView, commented: "The scope covers GP triage tools, school AI assistants, and business support. But what’s missing is more telling. There’s mention of digital infrastructure – connectivity and cybersecurity – but nothing about data foundations. No discussion of data quality, integration, or governance frameworks. No talk of an ethics framework for AI use in healthcare or education. Those foundations are crucial. Without them, you’re building on shaky ground."

Barnsley Council Leader Sir Stephen Houghton CBE said in a statement: "One of the key missions in our Inclusive Economic Growth Strategy is for Barnsley to become the UK’s leading digital town."

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"This is one of the most important investments in Barnsley in our history and will help secure our long-term economic future."

The town no longer mines coal – the last sites were closed in the early 1990s. The fossil fuel might have helped to power the datacenters the UK government wants to pepper the country with – not that coal would help with net zero emissions. AI server farms famously consume a lot of energy and at present the Brit government wants to build datacenters where power exists. That might not aid the facilities under construction in London.

Last week, DSIT unveiled a new AI Growth Zone in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, centered around a datacenter campus in Airdrie owned by operator DataVita. The government promised this would bring more than 3,400 jobs over the course of the coming years, although the company itself admitted the majority of these would be in constructing the site rather than running it afterwards.

TechMarketView’s O’Toole said of the Barnsley project: "An 18-month timeline to transform healthcare, education, and business support risks spreading resources too thin to deliver real impact in any of them. It also suggests a technology overlay rather than the process transformation required for genuine change.

"There’s also the trust problem. Public sector organisations have been burned by technology pilots before, investing substantial time, having their day-to-day disrupted, but seeing minimal benefit. Without that trust, and without evidence that this time will be different, ‘we don’t have the bandwidth’ often means ‘we don’t believe the ROI is worth the effort.’

"The real draw here is probably pro bono support from US tech giants in a budget-constrained local government environment. The problem is that it is unlikely to solve the fundamental capacity problems within the public sector organisations themselves. As an example, implementing AI triage in a GP practice requires mapping existing workflows, integrating with patient management systems, staff training, and sustained monitoring. In other words, a substantial – and resource-heavy – ask from organisations that are already overstretched. If NHS Trusts, schools, and GP practices can’t commit that bandwidth, much of the ‘transformation’ will stall regardless of the tech.

"If Barnsley fails to deliver measurable improvements, it won’t just prevent national roll-out; it could make other regions more cynical about investing at all. The absence of clear success metrics compounds the risk. For any town where residents are crying out for their council to get back to basics – to rid the roads of potholes or have the bins collected on time – the question should be whether heralding Barnsley as a ‘Tech Town’ is a distraction rather than a solution."

Here, here. Well said TechMarketView. ®