Accenture to acquire UK AI startup Faculty

Accenture has agreed to acquire AI startup Faculty, a potentially significant move in a consultancy sector currently scrambling to add greater artificial intelligence expertise.

It plans to integrate Faculty’s UK-based workforce of 400 “AI native professionals” with its consulting teams, a move Accenture said will enable it to offer its customers “world‑class AI capabilities.” Accenture will also integrate Faculty’s AI decision intelligence platform, Frontier, into its services.

“With Faculty, we will further accelerate our strategy to bring trusted, advanced AI to the heart of our clients’ businesses,” Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said in the statement.

One detail that marks the acquisition as unusual is that Faculty’s current CEO, Marc Warner, will become Accenture’s chief technology officer (CTO) and join its Global Management Committee. This means that the head of a company employing a few hundred people will take a key position in a huge consulting outfit with nearly 800,000 employees worldwide.

Accenture still lists its CTO as Rajendra Prasad, who will presumably step back from this role to focus on his other day job as the company’s Group Chief Executive – Technology. CIO.com contacted Accenture and Faculty to confirm the new roles, but had no response by publication time.

AI reinvention

Traditional tech acquisitions are usually motivated by the value offered by a company’s patents, products and customers. With AI companies, just as important right now is human expertise.

Faculty offers all of these. Co-founded in 2014 as ASI Data Science by then Harvard quantum physics research fellow Warner, it was renamed Faculty in 2019. This might have been an attempt to disassociate it from allegations, which it strenuously denied, that it was part of the same internship program as scandal-hit company Cambridge Analytica, through the latter’s parent company, SCL Group.

Since then, Faculty has established a solid reputation through its work with the UK government, including the creation of an NHS Early Warning System (EWS) system used to predict hospital admissions and ventilator requirements during the Covid pandemic.

This dovetails well with Accenture’s direction; it has spent the last year undergoing an AI makeover. In June, the company folded five business units into a single division, Reinvention Services, as part of a plan to “re-invent Itself for the Age of AI.” At the same time, it started calling its employees “reinventors”.

The company has also formed alliances with OpenAI and Anthropic which will see tens of thousands of its employees trained to use and promote both companies’ chatbot and agentic technologies.

“We are writing the playbook for how to be the most AI-enabled, client-focused professional services company in the world,” said Accenture CEO Sweet in this week’s announcement of the acquisition.

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.