I spent Tuesday at the Digital Media Centre, Barnsley at the AI for young people event, hosted by Timi Imomotebegha, as part of her PhD on how people and machines get along. She ran a genuinely interesting day, a few talks, live polls, and a lot of honest conversation in-between. The technology occasionally refused to cooperate, which at an AI event hosted in the media centre I found rather ironic.

She opened with a frightening statistic: just over a million 16 to 24-year-olds are neither in education, employment or training, the highest in over a decade [1]. There is an acronym for them NEET. It is driven, she said, not just by young people who cannot find work, but increasingly by those who have stopped looking. Over a fifth cite a health condition, mental health being the biggest among them [2].

The day widened to Barnsley, and Richard Brown from TechSY walked us through the town becoming the UK’s first government-backed tech town [3], an eighteen-month programme now six months in. The idea is to build an innovation cluster, so a young person doesn’t have to go to Sheffield or Manchester to work in tech. Coincidentally on Tuesday an AI upskilling fund was also announced, with around £800,000 for AI training in Barnsley [3]. For a town used to watching opportunities happen somewhere else, that’s important. There were also mentions of Innovate UK, UKRI, Bridge AI, Pathways to work, and Youth Guarantee Schemes. I’ll be looking into those further.

To Timi’s credit, she questioned what happens when the grant money runs out. Programmes start, burn bright and go quiet, she said, and the problem is still here after the funding has gone. A sad but true fact and nobody had a clear answer.

Tracey Johnson, TechSY’s project director, did a session on women in tech. Having been in it since the nineties, she was direct about why she left. She was paid less than men doing the same job, put in situations she was not comfortable in, and fast forward to 2026 it is still happening. She said we need equity to get equality, and consequently she was leading the Women in Tech Investment Taskforce, The FoundHERy with nine female founders, and fourteen women being trained as angel investors [5][6]. She saw the problem and did something about it.

A main theme was the first rung of the job ladder, as that’s where the young are being squeezed out. The World Economic Forum’s figures showed on paper that more jobs were being created than lost [4]. I have a view on that but this is not the article to address it. Unsurprisingly the new work sits in technology, data and AI, and the losses are mainly entry level clerical and admin jobs which used to be the way in. She was also blunt about how hiring works now, and it’s almost never through the job boards, rather through human connection of networking and ringing companies directly. Some advertised roles have up to seven or eight thousand applicants, and a fair few are not even real jobs at all. Somebody in the room had applied to a friend’s company and been told the post did not exist, it was up to harvest data. She confirmed that it is hard to get the first job and getting harder to get the second and the third too, but her advice was clear. Build things, show off your skills and show rather than explain what you have actually made.

The part which made my ears prick up was an almost disposable comment on how sticky you can make a system. Timi’s take was don’t look away from how addictive it gets, study it, so you know where the guardrails go. She also talked about cognitive debt, the point where a tool stops being a tool and becomes a crutch, and anchored it on the Character AI case, a boy of fourteen who talked to a chatbot and later took his own life, a case settled out of court [7]. There should have been guardrails, she said, long before it got that far. I wrote about the addictive nature of tech systems months ago and it is a topic close to my heart, and will be a topic that I touch on in the study I’m planning to do.

The one thing she did not go into was defence or national security, as she did not have the clearance to, which made me curious, especially as I had written only on Monday about the Alan Turing Institute’s pivot in that direction.

In a poll near the end, asked what they would want to do in AI, hardly anyone chose to build the technology. Most chose governance and policy. That is the British problem in miniature, Timi said, everyone wants to govern it, but nobody wants to build it.

I felt that, because governance is my lane, but building an agent and building a system to direct the system are two different things, and directing it towards the outcomes you define is the hard part, and most of what contAIn™ is. When it came round to me at lunch I talked about the unglamorous scaffolding I put around AI to contain the slop, and described an agent being let off the lead as an ADHD spaniel, gone the moment it sees a squirrel. People seem to think agents do as they are told to, but I can assure you without rules they do not.

Overall it was an interesting day with a great mix of people, I wasn’t the oldest either which was a nice surprise. It reinforced that the interest in AI is unprecedented, and there is no doubt that it can be of help if used well, I know the other side too the one that doesn’t get a lot of airtime like the hundreds of hours you can waste on correcting failures and the generally skimmed over topic of what happens to the vast amounts of data fed into the models on a daily basis.

I’m very glad I am not starting a career right now. The numbers are grim and the bottom rung is genuinely broken, but a room full of people gave up a Tuesday to discuss the young people who have to live in whatever is built next. Barnsley seems to be pushing in the right direction, and the quality of people and initiatives in the room might just make it happen.

Samantha Maeer | Founder and Creator, contAIn™ | the methodology layer that directs AI to the outcome you define | contain.digital

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5439-3645

configure YOUR system. contAIn™ the chaos. control YOUR outcome.

References

[1] House of Commons Library, “NEET: Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training” (research briefing SN06705): https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06705/

[2] Department for Education / ONS, “NEET age 16 to 24, annual brief 2025”: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/neet-statistics-annual-brief/2025

[3] GOV.UK, “Barnsley Tech Town’s £800,000 AI skills fund opens for applications”: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/barnsley-tech-towns-800000-ai-skills-fund-opens-for-applications

[4] World Economic Forum, “The Future of Jobs Report 2025”: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/digest/

[5] TECH SY, “The FoundHERy”: https://www.techsy.co.uk/witi/foundhery

[6] TECH SY, “Female Angel Investors”: https://www.techsy.co.uk/witi/female-angel-investors

[7] CNN Business, “Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits over teen mental health harms and suicides” (7 January 2026): https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/business/character-ai-google-settle-teen-suicide-lawsuit