New research from RingCentral reveals a significant gap between UK and US AI adoption.
According to the company, just 16 percent of UK businesses have fully deployed AI, compared to 41 percent in the United States. The findings raise fresh questions about what is holding British organisations back.
Russell Tilsed, VP of International Sales at RingCentral, points to two structural barriers.
First, UK businesses carry more legacy infrastructure that is not yet cloud-ready, creating integration challenges from the outset.
Second, UK decision-making involves more stakeholders. Where US AI investment tends to be IT-led, UK deployments require sign-off from digital transformation leads, IT teams, and multiple business lines. “You can imagine a scenario where use cases are being tested by HR, by legal, by various functions,” Tilsed says. “But that isn’t getting taken to the board or getting quick access to funding.”
The result: 54 percent of UK businesses remain stuck in the pilot stage.
The ROI Paradox
The research surfaces a striking contradiction. Almost no organisation that has deployed AI reports a negative ROI. Yet roughly a third of UK respondents still cite cost as a primary barrier to deployment.
“The ROI story isn’t yet enough for UK businesses to make the bold move,” Tilsed says. “There’s a trust issue, and it likely comes back to the multi-function decision-making process.”
Process Over People
Tilsed argues that agentic AI is fundamentally different from earlier technology investments. Previous tools augmented individual workers. Agentic AI, properly deployed, automates entire end-to-end business processes. “The intelligence has never been there before,” he says. “Now machines can do what humans did — at pace and accurately.”
He also points to a shift in what counts as a system of record. Voice, video, and collaboration tools are now where key customer interactions happen, making them a richer data source than legacy CRM or ERP systems.
