Accenture Acquires Faculty to Expand its AI Capabilities

Accenture has agreed to acquire Faculty, a leading UK-based AI native services and products business built on highly technical applied AI skills and a unique decision intelligence product that features advanced simulation and optimization capabilities. The acquisition will expand Accenture’s capabilities to help its clients reinvent core and critical business processes with safe and secure AI solutions that result in tangible outcomes. Founded in 2014, Faculty has a strong track record working with public and private sector clients to deploy AI solutions in the U.K. and other key markets. Its services—which include AI strategy, AI safety and the design, build and implementation of high performance AI systems—support the scaled and safe adoption of AI by client organizations. With a longstanding commitment to AI safety, Faculty works with clients to build AI systems that are safe and ethical by design—addressing risks such as bias, privacy and unexplainable outcomes by ensuring that AI safety is embedded within every stage of the development lifecycle from development, validation and predictions to monitoring. Faculty works with some of the world’s leading AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, to ensure that AI models are safe, as well as with the UK AI Security Institute and other organizations to make baseline safety assessments of general-purpose models. Upon closing of the transaction, Faculty’s team of more than 400 AI native professionals, including highly qualified data scientists and AI engineers, will integrate with Accenture’s teams to scale world‑class AI capabilities for clients. And, in addition to his role as CEO of Faculty, Marc Warner will become chief technology officer of Accenture and join the company’s Global Management Committee. Before founding Faculty, Warner was a Research Fellow in Quantum Physics at Harvard and served on the court of Imperial College London and as a member of the U.K.’s AI Council, an independent expert committee that provides advice to government and high-level leadership of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem. “With Faculty, we will further accelerate our strategy to bring trusted, advanced AI to the heart of our clients’ businesses,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. “I’m pleased to welcome the Faculty team to Accenture and look forward to Marc’s contribution shaping our technology vision and strategy as Chief Technology Officer.” As part of the acquisition integration, Faculty Frontier, Faculty’s enterprise decision intelligence product, will join Accenture’s suite of products that help organizations make better, faster decisions by connecting data, AI models and business processes into a unified decision system. For example, Accenture and Faculty are already working together to support leading life sciences companies, such as Novartis, to use Frontier to transform the economics of clinical trial planning and execution. Marc Warner, CEO of Faculty, said, “Our vision has always been a world in which safe AI delivers widespread benefits to humanity. We have spent the last ten years supporting our clients to bring this world about, step by step. As AI advances rapidly, the ambition of our clients is now, rightly, no less than the reinvention of their business. I am delighted that by teaming up with Accenture, we have everything in place to support AI transformation from start to finish.” Faculty is known for its ability to apply AI in mission-critical settings. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Faculty built the UK National Health Service’s (NHS) Early Warning System. This was used daily by NHS Gold Command to accurately predict patient demand across the country, and to optimally allocate critical care resources to where they were needed most. Manish Sharma, chief strategy and services officer at Accenture, added, “Accenture bridges the best of technology and human ingenuity to maximize returns on AI investments. Together with Faculty we will assemble a powerhouse of talent helping clients make AI work in the real world—linking data, processes, and people so value shows up faster, orchestrated through multiple combinations of bespoke client specific solutions, partner solutions and Faculty Frontier^TM. This will help our clients stay competitive, pursue sovereign solutions, and reinvent their operations with transparency and resilience at a critical time.” Accenture will leverage Faculty’s Fellowship Program, a highly structured early career training and placement program that helps promising STEM PhD and master’s graduates as well as post-doctoral researchers transition from academia to industry. Building on the success of this program in the U.K., Accenture plans to extend the program globally to its people as well as to clients. Accenture and Faculty have collaborated since December 2023 when Accenture was confirmed as a preferred implementation partner for Faculty Frontier. Completion of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory approval. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.