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Patrick Harvie raises a number of important points. First and foremost is the point about the balance between addressing the risks of AI and capturing its massive benefits at the same time. That should be reflected in regulation. As he says, it is also important that we guard against divergence from EU regulation, given that many of the companies in this country export to the EU. We have a UK Labour Government that is making targeted interventions to address the AI risks, whereas the EU has taken a much more comprehensive approach to the issue. I assure Patrick Harvie that we in Scotland are refreshing our AI plan and we will take his valid points on board.

The member has raised an important point, but he will be aware of the obstacles for seafood exporters in Scotland that Brexit created and the damage that those obstacles have caused the sector. I am therefore surprised that he has now reversed his position and is saying that being out of the European Union is causing problems and leading to difficult negotiations. Perhaps his party should not have supported Brexit in the first place, given all the damage that it has caused seafood exporters the length and breadth of Scotland. I am sure that, unlike the member’s party, Mairi Gougeon, the cabinet secretary responsible for the negotiations, takes the interests of the fishing industry very seriously.

Regulation on AI is reserved to the UK Government, so the Scottish Government does not make direct decisions about AI regulation.

Scotland was the first of the UK nations to publish an AI strategy in 2021, and we continue to provide AI support to business through our enterprise agencies and the Scottish AI Alliance.

Although AI is reserved, the UK Government position can influence devolved responsibilities. We have to continue to engage with the UK Government to advocate that its approach to AI regulation considers the interests of the citizens and businesses of Scotland.

The seafood processing sector in north-east Scotland generates more than £100 million in gross value added a year, contributes £700 million of the region’s £2.2 billion food and drink manufacturing turnover and provides more than 4,000 direct full-time-equivalent jobs.

To support the sector’s economic growth, we have provided £10 million from 2023 to 2025 to support the implementation of Scotland’s food and drink strategy, which was developed in collaboration with producers and which outlines how we are driving growth for businesses across various sectors, including the seafood processing industry. In addition, we have since 2014 invested more than £7 million in the Scotland food and drink export plan, which has helped Scottish businesses, including seafood processors, capitalise on key market opportunities both now and in the future.

Liz Smith raises a very important point, which we—and I personally—have raised time and again with successive UK ministers, including the ministers in the new UK Government. One of the issues of concern to the Scottish Government is that, although the UK has tended to talk about the long-term frontier threats of AI, that has come at the expense of talking about and addressing the short-term risks of misinformation, deepfake images, or other more immediate threats that the public and business community, which want to use AI in a way that can be trusted, are very concerned about. That is a point that we are conveying to the UK Government.

I know that the issue is close to Karen Adam’s heart, given the importance of seafood processing and the catching sector to her constituency. The funding that we have provided for the food and drink industry strategy to date has increased the seafood sector’s value and reputation at home and internationally.

A number of such projects have been led by Seafood Scotland. I am a big fan of the organisation, and in my role as trade minister, I am happy to meet it to discuss any further steps that should be taken to support the international opportunities that are being realised in that fantastic sector.

I have enjoyed this debate. There was quite a lot of consensus on the importance of innovation to the future of health and social care services in Scotland. I paid particular attention to what we heard from the Conservative Party, because we are sympathetic to its amendment, in that we believe that we have to go further and faster and that there is a lot to learn from other Administrations and other countries. We are leading in some areas, but other countries are leading in other areas, and we should get to the pace that they are going at and learn from them as well. I am not quite sure that the Conservative spokesperson reflected the tone of his amendment in his opening speech, but we will support the amendment.

I point out to Brian Whittle that Alexander Graham Bell was forced to emigrate to Canada in 1870. The SNP was not in power in 1870—I think that it was the Liberals or the Tories, but it was certainly not the SNP. I know all about him and he is close to my heart because he taught in Elgin twice before he came up with the invention of the telephone and achieved other great things.

Scotland has a great pedigree in medical and health-related innovations. Examples include chloroform; the hypodermic syringe; penicillin; Dolly, the first cloned sheep; the first application of the ultrasound scanner; and beta blockers—the list goes on and on. I could fill my whole speech talking about Scotland’s innovations in the healthcare and social care space over many years.

I do not recognise the picture that the member paints. Of course there are challenges and more barriers to be broken down. We have to be faster and go further, as many other countries are doing. However, an independent report that was published in September 2024 made exactly the same points about NHS England, so the situation is not unique to Scotland.

The pace of innovation is very fast at the moment, so we have a lot to do to keep up with it. However, Karen Adam and others spoke about the innovations that are taking place in NHS Grampian with the use of AI in breast cancer screening. In the news this week, we have heard every hour about more innovations in this space. Today, I noticed a post from Edinburgh Innovations, about a team of 20 data scientists and clinical researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee. They are using CT and MRI brain scans from across the Scottish population, representing 1.6 million images, with the aim of building a digital healthcare tool that radiologists can use when scanning for other conditions to determine a person’s dementia risk and diagnose early stages of related diseases such as Alzheimer’s. That is happening here and now. There have been a lot of references to the inability to use data in Scotland, but that is a real example, which was announced today, of what is happening using Scottish data that is available, and what that team is doing is very innovative.

We have debated that before. How we encourage Scottish companies to scale up is important. A lot of effort is under way to attract more investment capital into the country.

I do not really like getting personal in speeches in Parliament, but I think that I have a duty to do so in this instance. On Sunday, I was out on my bike, cycling through the sunshine in the Moray countryside. I mention that in a debate on innovation in the NHS and healthcare because I was thinking about 10 months ago, when I was lying in a hospital bed, getting emergency open-heart surgery; I also had sepsis. Once I came to, I lay there—as the Scottish Government’s minister for innovation—thinking about all the innovation around me that had just saved my life. From the crane that lifted me so that I could get off my bed to the electronic zimmer machine that I used once I had a bit of strength, those things were there because someone had innovated and created them. Every time that I had a side-effect after the operation, I would mention it to the doctors and nurses, who would say, “We have a special drug for that.” I would get the drug and it would solve the problem. I was constantly taken away for assessments with lots of fancy machines and fancy procedures. Those are all innovations that saved my life, and they have saved lots of people’s lives. Joe FitzPatrick, for example, mentioned the care that his father received.

Those innovations are deployed here and now in Scotland’s NHS, and they are saving lives. Many more innovations are coming into the NHS. We have the building blocks for faster adoption of innovations: we have the companies, the ingenuity, the invention, the company entrepreneurs, the academic side and the research side. All those ingredients together will give us a much better NHS and better outcomes for patients in the years ahead.

I urge the chamber to support the Government’s motion.

That is what ANIA is about—in his opening remarks, the cabinet secretary mentioned that initiative to accelerate innovation in the NHS. It is also why we are developing an innovation strategy that will involve introducing innovations to public services and the public sector.

Last night, I spoke to 200 members of Technology Scotland who were gathered in the Parliament’s garden lobby. They were mainly from the critical technologies sectors—the semiconductor, quantum photonics and sensing sectors. The debate is therefore timely, with many members reflecting on the roles that those technologies can play and how they are being used. They do not just underpin industry or exports; they are also helping to transform the world around us and our society, and there is no better example of that than the transformation of our health services.

AI, robotics, 3D printing, virtual reality, augmented reality and nanotechnologies are transforming and will further transform our NHS and health and care in Scotland and around the world. Those technologies will provide faster and better diagnosis and deal with admin tasks to free up staff for other priorities. The list of benefits from deploying innovations in our NHS goes on and on: new cures for life-threatening diseases; easier to access services no matter where patients live in Scotland; cuts to waiting lists and waiting times; cost savings and more efficiencies; and people living longer and better lives. Many innovations are already being deployed in the NHS and the social care sector. In the years to come, the experience of our health and social care services will be very different from the experience today. There will be better outcomes for patients and people, and more lives saved.

As innovation minister, I am delighted to have the opportunity to participate in and close a debate in which the cabinet secretary announced two of the latest remarkable innovations to improve health outcomes for patients. Scotland’s triple-helix approach to collaboration between the NHS, industry and academia means faster adoption of those life-changing, research-driven innovations.

Our ambition for Scotland is that we are recognised globally as a destination of choice for health science. At the same time, we can improve patient and clinical experiences and outcomes. Today’s debate has provided many examples of how that is happening in Scotland as we speak.

We should also celebrate our world-class life sciences sector. A great part of my job is being able to go round many of the life sciences companies in Scotland. I have scratched the surface, as, with more than 700, there are so many of them. I am learning first hand about the incredible life sciences work that is coming out of this country. It is one of Scotland’s success stories. As we can see today, by addressing some of the most pressing health challenges, improving lives and driving economic growth in Scotland, that work is making a huge difference to our country.

From groundbreaking research in biotech and pharmaceuticals to advanced manufacturing and precision medicine, companies and universities in Scotland are at the forefront of global progress in this critical field. All of them are playing a pivotal role in transforming our public services, creating high-quality jobs and providing higher wages, which bolsters our economy. The life sciences sector is identified as one of the four key growth sectors in the Government’s innovation strategy.

Since its inception in 2020, the Scottish National Investment Bank has invested £27 million in life sciences businesses. I will give a few quick highlights—or maybe just a couple, because I have not got a lot of time.

EnteroBiotix is a manufacturing centre in Bellshill that has secured not only £6 million of funding from the bank but inward investment from the United States. The company’s work is making breakthroughs in gut health medicines and aims to deliver less invasive treatments for patients.

Another innovation and home-grown company in Scotland is Stirling-based iGii. The bank has invested £4 million in iGii to develop a cost-effective and highly scalable means of producing a novel 3D graphene-like structure that has been marketed for use as a biosensor in point-of-care diagnostic devices, opening up the possibility of quicker responses and removing the requirement to send tests to laboratories for processing.

I will take one more intervention.