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 optimisation 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 organisations.
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 organisations to make baseline safety assessments of general-purpose models.
Upon closing of the transaction, the 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 to shaping our technology vision and strategy as Chief Technology Officer."
As part of the acquisition integration, Faculty FrontierTM, Faculty’s enterprise decision intelligence product, will join Accenture’s suite of products that help organisations 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 FrontierTM 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.”
