One of Sage's top global executives says the accounting giant is hiring as "much as it possibly can" to its Tyneside base, where it is developing AI tools.
Aaron Harris, who is the FTSE100 tech firm's chief technology officer, says the only constraint on that recruitment is a competitive market. The seasoned Silicon Valley man, who was part of the Intacct business which Sage acquired in 2017, also hailed the firm's progress with its AI systems having developed 40,000 models which designed to complement SME accounting teams and free workers to do more meaningful work.
In an exclusive interview with BusinessLive as Mr Harris was due to address the region's TechNext conference, he highlighted efforts to build trust among business leaders - which Sage has identified as the main barrier to AI adoption. As one of Sage's key engineering hubs alongside Barcelona and Atlanta sites, its Cobalt Park base has played a major role in developing a suite of AI models including narrow, task-based systems that can read an invoice through to large language models that will underpin its AI agents.
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Mr Harris explained: "You have to imagine that we've built this AI brain that is incredibly capable. It can do virtually anything we ask it to do because it's learned how the products work and it understands accounting, and the workflows.
"In this new world where we have this incredibly powerful AI - the way that we develop and make it available to our customers is a process of building safety around it. The AI that we've developed is actually quite a bit more capable than what we've made available in our products because we have to be on this journey with our customers to enable more and more of this native capability to useful in a safe and predictable way.
"This is going to lead to agents - that's the talk right now, about agentic AI - this is AI that is capable of taking minimum direction from a human and then on its own, making decisions about how to fulfil a task or completely take ownership of a workflow and when to include a human when there is something exceptional.
"That's the way that we're going but we really have to have these fine tuned large language models that really understand our products and accounting to get to that agentic future."
In an effort to build trust among SME customers, Sage has launched its AI Trust Label which will be introduced to the market this year and gives customers clear, accessible information about the way AI functions across Sage products. It has also called for industry and the Government to work together to create an AI labelling system to encourage adoption of the technology.
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Mr Harris went on to say the 海角视频 should be more confident of its AI achievements, suggesting that any perception that the country cannot compete internationally on AI development is wrong. He added: "I think its easy to forget how much of today's AI originated from the 海角视频. Two of the grandfathers of modern AI are from the 海角视频. So many of the breakthroughs that enable to the world of agentic AI and large language models, come from the 海角视频.
"I really reject this notion that the 海角视频 can't produce world class AI and that it can't be at the forefront. I think its a self-limiting belief.
"We prove time and time again that we can hire incredible data scientists and AI engineers here. The university system here is amazing. I was raised in Silicon Valley and there may be a larger population of AI and data scientists there but the culture is completely different.
"One of the reasons I love Newcastle is the commitment to the North East. What I love about the engineers here is that it's about more than a career at a great company for them, it's working where they want to work. It's being part of a community they feel invested in. There's this long term commitment to what we're doing from the North East, that I'm not going to get if I focus my hiring in Silicon Valley."