The Consultancy Empire strikes back: Feeling the heat from AI, Accenture buys the UK’s Faculty

Since the rise of Generative AI, the consultancy sector has felt increasing heat coming from a tech industry encroaching upon its largely human-powered services industry, forcing incumbents to acquire technical depth before their own clients get wise to the whole thing. The solution, perhaps, was to acquire AI startups, and that is exactly what has just happened in the UK.

Accenture has agreed to acquire Faculty, one of the UK’s most prominent “AI-native” services firms, in a deal that underlines a deeper shift underway in the global consulting industry. Faculty had raised a total of £38 million since 2014, with investors including Apax Digital (at the series A) and Mercuri on the Secondary Market, according to CrunchBase and Dealroom. LocalGlobe, co-founded by Saul Klein, also backed Faculty since its seed round in 2016.

The transaction (with terms undisclosed and still subject to regulatory approval) will see Faculty’s 400-plus AI specialists folded into Accenture. Accenture was also, no doubt, attracted by Faculty’s Fellowship Programme, which converts PhDs and post-docs into industry AI operators.

As part of the deal, Faculty CEO and co-founder Marc Warner will become Accenture’s Chief Technology Officer and join its Global Management Committee, putting him at the heart of the firm’s decision-making process. 

Warner is a former Harvard quantum physics researcher and ex-member of the UK’s AI Council.

In a statement, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet described the acquisition as a way to “bring trusted, advanced AI to the heart of our clients’ businesses.” 

Faculty, founded in 2014, has built its reputation not on generic ‘AI strategy’ pitch decks, but on deploying applied machine learning in mission-critical environments. The UK National Health Service’s COVID-era Early Warning System, used daily by NHS Gold Command to predict hospital demand and allocate ICU capacity, was one such example.

Faculty’s core asset is Faculty Frontier, a decision-intelligence platform that combines data, AI models, simulation, and optimisation into a single system. Some industry observers have even described Faculty to me as ‘the UK’s Palantir’.

Accenture is already deploying it with clients such as Novartis to re-engineer clinical trial planning — an area where marginal efficiency gains can translate into hundreds of millions in value.

AI safety as a commercial moat

The move is also significant in that Faculty has positioned itself as a leader in “AI safety by design”, working with frontier model labs and institutions, including the UK’s AI Security Institute. In the consultancy industry, “safe AI” is crucial as both a compliance requirement and a sales differentiator, especially in the era of the EU AI Act.

By bringing AI capability in-house, Accenture may now have a crack at insulating itself from the problems presented by opaque US AI models, which could create legal and reputational risk, especially in the era of the Trump administration.

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