Martha Lane Fox on Building the Internet and Shaping the UK’s AI Future

Baroness Martha Lane Fox took the Mainstage at Tech Show London not simply to revisit the early days of the internet, but to reflect on how its founding optimism compares with today’s AI-driven reality.

Describing herself as a “dot-com dinosaur”, she recalled co-founding lastminute.com in the late 1990s, when convincing customers to enter credit card details online felt radical. The prevailing belief was that the internet would decentralise power and widen opportunity.

“It was a moment of such optimism,” she said. “We didn’t think about the consequences too much of some of the things that we were building.”

That early optimism, she suggested, underestimated how systems scale — and how power concentrates.

From Disruption to Concentration

The original promise of the web was dispersion. Control would move away from institutions and towards individuals. Instead, over time, market power consolidated.

“If you’d told me that a handful of companies in Silicon Valley were going to dominate the UK tech landscape by 2025… I wouldn’t have believed it,” she said.

What followed the early dot-com wave was not just innovation, but consolidation. The 2000s and 2010s brought growing awareness that technological progress does not automatically distribute benefit evenly. Alongside advances in AI research and infrastructure came rising inequality, digital exclusion and escalating cyber risk.

The lesson was not that innovation failed; it was that scale changes outcomes.

Access Beyond Connectivity

A significant part of Lane Fox’s keynote centred on digital access, an issue she has championed through parliamentary and public service work. During the pandemic, she encountered families sharing a single mobile phone between children for remote schooling.

“If you lived through Covid without any access to the internet… just not possible,” she said.

But connectivity alone is no longer sufficient.

In an AI-driven economy, access increasingly means capability; the ability to use, build and adapt technology, not merely consume it.

“Access matters,” she stated, advocating for AI tools to be available in job centres and public services so individuals rebuilding careers can work directly with emerging technologies. To illustrate how dramatically the landscape has shifted, she described building a simple seating-plan app in an hour using modern AI tools.

“The price of initiative has collapsed,” she said.

As barriers fall, the ability to build and experiment is opening up to a far wider group of people than before.

The UK’s AI Opportunity

Lane Fox referenced a Stanford study placing the UK as the third-largest AI power globally. Her question was whether the country recognises its own position.

She argued that Britain should show greater confidence in its research base, talent and investment strength. But capability alone is not enough. Adoption beyond specialist sectors will determine whether AI meaningfully improves productivity.

“We should be proud of the story that we can tell,” she said.

The challenge is diffusion — ensuring that AI moves beyond elite institutions into SMEs, regional economies and public services. Scale, again, is the defining variable.

Governance and Representation

Lane Fox addressed diversity within technology leadership directly.

Citing venture capital statistics showing limited funding for female founders and minimal representation in senior decision-making roles, she was unequivocal.

“This is not okay,” she said.

Her argument was not framed purely as fairness, but as economics. Homogeneous teams build narrower products. Narrow products miss markets. She referenced early health technology examples that overlooked women’s health features — an omission that carried commercial consequences.

Governance, in this context, extends beyond regulatory compliance. It includes the values embedded into systems, the assumptions coded into platforms and the incentives that shape development priorities.

AI, she argued, must be shaped intentionally rather than left to default settings.

Skills for an AI-First Era

During the Q&A, Lane Fox emphasised that career stability will increasingly be replaced by career evolution. Younger workers, she suggested, may experience more than 20 distinct career phases.

Rather than advocating narrow technical specialisation alone, she prioritised critical thinking, resilience and adaptability. Businesses, she argued, must take responsibility for sustained reskilling.

For entrepreneurs, her message was direct:

“You have to be AI first.”

At the same time, she cautioned against strategy without execution. Drawing from her experience in government digital service reform, she concluded:

“The strategy is delivery.”

Ambition, in other words, must translate into application.

Tilting Towards Optimism

Despite outlining structural challenges, from concentration of power to skills gaps and governance risks, Lane Fox closed with optimism.

“I want to tilt towards the light,” she said.

The UK, she argued, has the institutional strength, research capability and entrepreneurial culture to shape AI responsibly. But that outcome is not inevitable. It depends on participation, access and intentional design.

This is not another dot-com cycle. The systems are more embedded, the stakes are higher, and the consequences are more immediate. Yet the opportunity remains open: to widen participation, strengthen governance and ensure that innovation serves more than a narrow set of interests.

The internet was once built in optimism. The next phase must be built with intent.

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