Theresa May should concentrate on the economy of tomorrow

In her first speech at the CBI annual conference, Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed the announcement of new jobs from "the Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB - news) ".

It was rather a granny-like way to refer to the social network. And a lot of the "modern industrial strategy" she unveiled in her speech also felt old-fashioned.

Her diagnosis is correct, though. The UK remains a world leader in research, both at universities and within start-ups.

:: Facebook to increase UK staff by 50% in 2017

But we do a pretty bad job at turning those breakthroughs into big businesses.

As the PM said: "While the UK ranks third in the OECD for the number of start-ups we create, we are only 13th for the number that go on to become scale-up businesses."

Take graphene, which scientists at Manchester University discovered how to extract. Now (Frankfurt: 11N.F - news) it's a fast-growing industry, but only 1% of patents worldwide are from the UK.

Or Artificial Intelligence, one of the sectors mentioned by Mrs May in her speech.

The UK produced two breakthrough companies here, DeepMind and Magic Pony Technology.

Both were bought by US technology giants, Google and Twitter (Frankfurt: A1W6XZ - news) respectively. That knowledge, developed in Britain, now contributes to Silicon Valley's bottom line.

So when the PM pointed to Softbank (Swiss: SOFB.SW - news) , it raised an eyebrow. She (Munich: SOQ.MU - news) described "a record £24bn investment from Softbank in Britain's future".

That was a reference to ARM, a chip designer that was hitherto the UK's biggest tech success story, being bought by a Japanese conglomerate.

That's not an investment - it's a crown jewel being picked off.

Mrs May said that investment - in particular a £2bn research and development fund - would help commercialise research.

She added that the Government would look at investment flows to turn "our bright start-ups into successful scale-ups".

That's fine, but it's probably not enough. We need a lot more talent in UK technology and that means starting at schools and universities.

Brexit only makes it harder in the short term for UK start-ups to attract talent from the rest of the continent. But even this is rather short term.

Mrs May also said: "We are leaders in global professional services from architecture to accountancy, from law to consulting."

Services are vital to the UK economy. But the coming age of AI will see many of these jobs automated, whether it's in accountancy, architecture or journalism.

We see these as quintessentially human jobs, but robots will take more and more of them over. According to one study, 47% of all jobs are at risks of automation.

That's a risk to the UK economy, one that requires a radical rethink of the skills we want from our workforce.

Mrs May's speech was looking at the economy of today and with the uncertainty of Brexit, that's fair enough.

But it's the economy of 2040 we need to worry about.