CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
AI Economic Production Stack Explorer
Artificial intelligence is not a single industry or product; it is a general-purpose technology spanning an 8-layer economic value chain. Select any tier in the interactive production stack below to inspect its System of National Accounts (SNA) accounting treatment, UK residency implications, CPA/SIC linkages, and empirical measurement challenges.
Value Chain HierarchyDownstream (Top) to Upstream (Base)
MLOps & ToolingLayer 3
MLOps, AI Tooling & Frameworks
Developer frameworks (PyTorch, LangChain), vector search engines, model evaluation, safety benchmarks, and deployment tooling.
National Accounts (SNA/ESA) Treatment
SNA Transaction Category:Intermediate Consumption (P.2) or Capitalized Development (P.51g)
Asset Boundary Classification:Software tooling / Safety assurance service
UK Residency & Cross-Border Flows:Strong UK presence in AI safety evaluation and technical benchmarking.
Classification Linkages
CPA 2008 Product Groups:
CPA_J62 (Consultancy & programming)CPA_M712 (Testing & analysis)
UK SIC Industry Mappings:
SIC 62.02 (Consultancy)SIC 71.20 (Technical testing)
Key Measurement Challenges
- •Separating general software developer tooling from AI-specific MLOps.
- •Open-source tooling contributions.
Citation: ONS S1 Table 3 Category 10 & 13Test Disaggregation