Sir Nick stated he had actually ended up being” somewhat radicalised”by his experience in Silicon Valley, which had actually persuaded him of the requirement for Europe to “get its act together” on AI.
Sir Nick, previously the leader of the Liberal Democrats and UK deputy Prime Minister in the Cameron-Clegg coalition from 2010 to 2015, subsequently acted as Meta’s chief policy choice maker until in 2015.
He just recently took a seat on the advisory board at Efekta Education, an AI-powered English language platform, primarily utilized by trainees in emerging markets across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Speaking at a roundtable hosted by Efekta, Sir Nick advised European companies to “push the boat out with this technology and not have it driven, once again, by American players”.
He stated the UK had an “impressive level of over-reliance on American tech”, identifying this “a level of reliance that is not suitable with the sort of firm and basic sovereignty– not complete sovereignty– that a nation like ours must aspire to”.
While the UK’s high energy expenses and copyright and content rules “essentially rule it out being a significant fitness instructor of frontier LLMs locally”, Sir Nick highlighted possible routes to less US-dependency including open-source designs and backing European LLM laboratories.
Efekta, a spin-off of Swiss study abroad company EF Education First, has a big UK footprint and was developed specifically for emerging markets.
Among the failings of US-based ed tech companies is they’re designing their product for the US education system Stephen Hodges, Efekta Education
Sir Nick promoted Efekta’s “counterproductive” path, having actually not been developed for the most industrialized school systems “but to explicitly appeal to emerging markets, which have very particular issues of instructor shortages and absence of training and so on”.
Efekta CEO Stephen Hodges highlighted the business’s partnership with the Brazilian federal government, which approached the business during Covid after identifying English as the subject with the largest instructor lack in Brazil.
“I think one of the failings of US-based ed tech companies is they’re developing their product for the US education system,” stated Hodges.
“And an US education system looks vastly different than if you go to Egypt or Mongolia or any of the places we’re selling in, in that they make an presumption that there’s a competent teacher, that there’s lab equipment and such.”
According to Hodges, “10s of countless teachers” were now using the platform in Brazil, approximately 95% of whom were formerly unqualified to teach English.
Elsewhere, he emphasised Efekta’s growth to Rwanda, moneyed by the Mastercard Structure, where it offers a– rather limited — offline item to reach rural schools without internet connection.
< img src ="// www.w3.org/2000/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%200%200'%3E%3C/svg%3E"/ > < img src="https://thepienews.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/TheStayClub-600x500-copy-1.jpg"/ >