Scotland's Technology Council 2025-26 Report

Key Recommendations and Outcomes

Scotland’s Technology Council has set out a series of strategic recommendations intended to strengthen Scotland’s position as a globally competitive technology nation. These proposals focus on addressing structural frictions, enhancing leadership capability, and unlocking long-term economic opportunity.

Strategic Direction: Building a Nation of Leaders

The Council emphasises the need to attract, develop, and retain globally ambitious founders and highly skilled professionals. This leadership focus is seen as fundamental to accelerating the growth and resilience of Scotland’s tech economy.

Addressing Four Critical System Frictions

The Council identifies four key barriers that currently limit the pace and scale of growth:

• Talent – prioritising speed over supply: ensuring companies can hire rapidly enough to maintain momentum.
• Leadership capacity – shifting from founder-led to scale-led organisations: strengthening executive capability as companies mature.
• Markets – overcoming procurement barriers: positioning public sector and corporate procurement as enablers of innovation rather than blockers.
• Finance – improving capital timing and scale: ensuring investment arrives at the right stages and at globally competitive levels.

Core Economic Objectives

The Council’s recommendations reinforce national ambitions around increasing the volume and quality of technology jobs, accelerating the number of scaleups, strengthening investor-ready propositions, and addressing critical infrastructure gaps such as low latency digital connectivity.

Strategic Intent and Emerging Moonshots

While the Council has articulated a set of moonshot ambitions and four underpinning strategies, it notes that detailed implementation pathways will be required to translate this intent into delivery.

Opportunity Areas and Priority Actions

Proposed next steps include:

• Leveraging Scotland’s universities and the NHS as engines for commercialisation across AI, biotech, cleantech, and advanced manufacturing.
• Building a more investor-friendly environment to attract global capital.
• Investing in enabling infrastructure, including data centres, resilient connectivity, and green energy capacity.
• Accelerating technology adoption through initiatives such as AI Scotland and targeted SME support schemes.

A Focus on Global Competitiveness

The Council stresses the importance of pursuing ambitions comparable to leading international ecosystems such as Singapore and Estonia, ensuring Scotland can compete for talent, investment, and innovation at a global scale.

Strengthening Industrial Collaboration

Finally, the Council highlights the need for deeper collaboration with existing major industries, alongside new partnerships with globally significant companies headquartered elsewhere, to enhance market access and accelerate innovation.

Key Outcome: a dedicated AI Sub-group

Early recommendations from the Council led to the establishment of a dedicated AI Sub-group, created to explore emerging opportunities, shape early stage ideas, and provide structured advice to the Scottish Government on matters relating to artificial intelligence. Their role includes advising on priorities, identifying capability requirements, and ensuring the strategy reflects both national strengths and global trends.

This group and Council members provided strategic input into the development of Scotland’s AI Strategy 2026-2031, which was published on 20 March 2026. This strategy sets out how we intend to harness the potential of AI to drive economic growth and give Scotland a genuine competitive advantage in the years ahead.

Through this work, the Council has played a critical role in shaping the direction of AI Scotland, acting as a key conduit between industry expertise and government policy development.