Tools fail without skills. The good news: the UK is investing heavily in AI training, and some of it is free. Here’s how UK employers can fund AI skills in 2026, cited to official sources. (dgm implements osFoundry as an independent partner.)

The AI Skills Boost (free)

The headline is the AI Skills Boost — a government initiative under the AI Opportunities Action Plan that has delivered over 1 million free AI courses, with an ambition of up to 10 million workers by 2030. For an employer, that’s a free, accessible way to lift baseline AI literacy across your team.

Devolved and other skills funding

  • Wales — the Flexible Skills Programme (via Business Wales) part-funds workforce upskilling in AI, data analytics and cyber.
  • Apprenticeships — the apprenticeship levy and apprenticeship standards can fund data/AI-related training routes (check current standards and your levy position).
  • Scotland and NI — Techscaler education (Scotland) and Invest NI skills support also touch digital/AI capability.

KTPs: capability, not just courses

A Knowledge Transfer Partnership is the deepest capability route: it embeds a graduate Associate and a university partner to deliver an AI/data project, funded at up to ~67% for most SMEs (75% in Wales). The Associate often stays on, leaving genuine capability behind — far more than a course can.

Why skills matter as much as the tool

AI adoption fails when teams don’t know how to use it well or govern it — when to trust output, how to keep humans in the loop, what data may be used. Funding the skills protects the investment in the tool. Treat capability-building as part of the project, not an afterthought.

Where osFoundry and dgm fit

dgm implements AI on osFoundry and supports your team’s understanding of the setup. Because osFoundry is source-available with documented SDKs and a visual configuration editor (osStudio), your people can learn and adjust the stack — prompts, routing, retrieval — rather than just rent a black box. That makes internal capability-building realistic. For UK data-sensitive work we’d use an EU region or self-hosted deployment (osFoundry publishes US/EU/JP regions, not a UK one).

dgm is an independent integration partner with zero integrations so far. Formal training funding goes through the relevant schemes. To plan an AI project that builds your team’s capability, book a consultation with dgm. General information; confirm scheme details with the official sources.