How the North needs to leverage its strengths and offer better returns to London - Tom Clayton

We are doing this on a regenerated colliery site and building on an expertise in engineering that is as deep and rich as the Barnsley Seam in the old coalfields.

Manufacturing is in our DNA. Our forefathers gave the world the coal, iron and steel to power the mass production and mechanisation of the industrial revolution and were rightly revered. But as those old industries faded away, the North has failed to fire up the new engine rooms to provide investment opportunities for the City.

We are bringing together expert domain knowledge of manufacturing with immense computing power from the internet to drive a new revolution, return wealth and prosperity to our industrial heartlands and help factories across the world to step up their output.

Where I grew up in Sheffield, 90 per cent of the dads in my neighbourhood worked in manufacturing and related industrial roles. When I was 16, me and my mates didn’t think about going to work in financial services, we thought about going into manufacturing (and playing for Wednesday). Everything was geared towards industry. I did my electromechanical engineering apprenticeship, worked my way up through the sector and started my own company, 53North, a decade ago. Today, it is a leading UK maintenance engineering and asset management business.

With financial backing and tech knowhow from Yorkshire AI Labs, the new venture capital firm led by UK-US entrepreneur David Richards, we have launched IntelliAM to help global manufacturers cut downtime and boost productivity by changing the way that people interact with machines and make decisions in industry. Our technology offers a new way of operating with insights and instruction on equipment effectiveness, raw materials, supply chains, energy consumption and carbon emissions and can eat into the $1.5 trillion annual cost of unplanned downtime.

We have the potential to deliver high percentage point improvements to manufacturing productivity, which will create new well-paid jobs in engineering, data science and software development in South Yorkshire.

AI can be a tool for job creation, not job destruction, and applied to manufacturing can help rebalance the country in a way that political slogans cannot.

Politicians make endless promises on the campaign trail – “this time it will be different” – but back track when they realise the sums don’t add up. It has been the same story for decades. London and the South East will never vote for ‘levelling up’ because taxpayers know large sums of their hard-earned money will be wasted, especially if the North cannot offer anything meaningful to add value or increase productivity.

What we do have is manufacturing expertise and an incredible opportunity to leverage this with powerful AI applications now available via the democratisation of technology.

Tom Clayton is CEO of IntelliAM AI.