The UK's creative industries are a powerhouse of the UK economy. Generating £108bn annually, over the last decade the sector’s output has grown at over one and a half times faster than the rest of the economy and its workforce has grown at almost five times the average UK rate.

When politicians talk of boosting productivity in the UK, our creative industries are a model for what is possible. Yet the offered solution to making our wider economy more productive - AI - is presenting very real threats to this major success story of UK plc.

Once thought more immune to the impacts of automation, work from the BRAID / UKRI-funded CREAATIF project has heard from frontline creatives about the major changes already underway to both the quantity and quality of their work – much of it experienced by freelancers who don’t enjoy the same protections as so many other workers in the wider economy. So how can we remain a creative powerhouse, and also benefit from innovation?

Co-hosted by IFOW and UK Music in the South Wing Screening Room at Somerset House, this will be a chance for leading figures from the creative sector to deliver key election asks around sustaining job quality in an age of AI, and for politicians with responsibilities for creative industries to listen and respond.

Supporting the session will be new research from the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, that reveals how exposure to these kinds of new workplace technologies impacts job quality – and thus workers’ wellbeing.

Panel includes:

Jonathan Reekie - Director, Somerset House
Lara Carmona - Director of Policy & Engagement at Creative UK
Paul Clements - CEO of the Music Publishers Association
Dr Magdalena Soffia - Principal Sociologist, IFOW, and author of a major new study of the impact of technology on job quality
Cassie Quarless - Director, and British Library Eccles Fellow

What do the UK creative industries need from a new government?