At a Downing Street summit last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged the country's leading tech companies and artificial intelligence researchers to fight the outbreak. The meeting was attended by about 30 different companies from across the UK online and science sectors. Each company was asked to volunteer resources.
Tech companies lacking in engineering or data tool capabilities pledged other sources. Uber offered to provide free taxi rides to medical staff, while food delivery service Deliveroo offered to keep hospital workers fed. Amazon said it would provide its video conferencing tools and other aspects of its cloud computing services to the health service for free.
Prime Minister’s lead adviser Dominic Cummings asked each business to offer what they could towards the effort, before passing the details on to representatives of NHSX to work out how best to deploy them.
