On 12 May 2026 the Financial Times published A mistake markets make when they value software groups, a letter from Neil Lawrence. It replies to FT reporting on Visma’s postponed IPO and to the question whether a group of some 170 businesses can “create the operational change centrally” for AI.

The letter rejects that premise. AI is not one thing applied once from the centre. Value comes workflow by workflow — a payroll team in Oslo and a tax team in Lisbon face different regulations, customers and data — in the hands of people who understand the work. Federated structures, properly supported, sit closer to where that value is made, not further from it. “Centralised deployment” is a story about suppliers; “useful deployment” is a story about demand. The same confusion, Neil argues, runs through UK AI policy when it privileges compute and frontier models over how nurses, teachers, planning officers and small businesses adopt tools in their own institutions.

The argument aligns with the group’s AI Adoption programme and with Mind the gap.