AI Training St Helens

AI training for St Helens businesses

St Helens sits 14 miles from Liverpool and 22 miles from Manchester, giving its 4,800 businesses access to both city regions. The borough generates £2.7 billion in GVA and supports 59,000 jobs. With the A580 East Lancashire Road, the UK's first purpose-built inter-city highway, running through the borough and direct motorway access via the M6, M62 and M57, St Helens businesses operate at the crossroads of the North West economy.

The borough's manufacturing heritage runs deep. Pilkington established its glass works here in 1826 and invented the float glass process in the 1950s, a technique now used worldwide. Today that heritage is evolving through Glass Futures, a £54 million Global Centre of Excellence built on a former United Glass site. The 165,000 sq ft facility is the first in the world to give the glass industry access to an experimental-scale furnace for commercial R&D, and has already created 80 direct jobs with more through apprenticeships and training.

The town centre is undergoing significant regeneration backed by £32 million from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and £3.25 million from the UK Government Towns Fund. Phase one includes a new Market Hall, a 120-bedroom Hampton by Hilton hotel, 56 apartments and over 4,000 sq ft of new retail space. The Parkside development, the largest strategic employment site in the Liverpool City Region, has secured £80 million of investment for 800,000 sq ft of commercial floorspace and is forecast to create 1,330 jobs.

Logistics is one of St Helens' strongest sectors with 6,500 jobs in the borough. The Haydock Industrial Estate at Junction 23 of the M6 is a major hub, with the proposed Haydock Point development adding up to 1.8 million sq ft of logistics and manufacturing floorspace. St Helens is also part of the Liverpool City Region Freeport, one of only eight in England, expected to create 14,000 jobs and boost the local economy by £850 million.

St Helens' information and communication sector is growing at 29% year on year, nearly six times the England average. Professional services firms, accountancy practices, recruitment agencies and marketing consultants across the borough handle high volumes of written work, client communication and research. These are exactly the tasks where AI training delivers the fastest return. Most business owners here have tried ChatGPT but have not built it into their daily operations, and local AI expertise is scarce compared to Liverpool or Manchester city centres.