Accenture has announced that it has agreed to acquire UK AI startup Faculty for an undisclosed sum, a potentially significant move in a consultancy sector currently scrambling to add greater artificial intelligence expertise.

According to Accenture, Faculty’s UK-based workforce of 400 “AI native professionals” will be integrated with its consulting teams, allowing the company to offer its customer base “world‑class AI capabilities.” The company 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,” commented Accenture chair and CEO, Julie Sweet.

One detail that marks the acquisition as unusual is that Faculty’s current CEO, Marc Warner, will reportedly join Accenture’s Global Management Committee as chief technology officer (CTO). If confirmed, this means that a company employing a few hundred people will take a key board 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.