Accenture plans to buy UK-based AI firm Faculty, a Palantir competitor, and onboard the company’s CEO as Accenture’s new chief technology officer. The move suggests the two companies, while partners today, could start taking each others' business.

Faculty was founded in the UK by New Zealand-born physicist Marc Warner in 2014, ostensibly to make AI useful to the world and “safely deliver the AI revolution.”

The company works with customers on AI strategy, design, infrastructure, development, and operations and creates a computational twin of an organization to simulate and refine business decisions. Accenture is adding all 400 of Faculty’s employees to its payroll, according to the press release announcing the deal.

Terms of the deal – which is subject to regulatory approvals – were not disclosed.

The move further positions Accenture as a direct competitor with Palantir, according to Forrester Vice president and Principal Analyst Boris Evelson. He said both Accenture and rival consultancy McKinsey are hoping to capture more of the spend that is headed to Palantir in 2026.

Evelson said that, while McKinsey has built a project internally, at this stage it is the consultants’ relationships with their customers that wins deals.

“If I need to start from scratch, I’ll go to Palantir or C3 AI, but if I’m Citibank and I have a great relationship with Accenture, Accenture already outsources about 10% of my IT and other relevant projects. If I’m the CIO and I don’t go to Accenture first for something like this, then I’d be shooting myself in the foot,” he told The Register. “So Accenture and Palantir, I would say, they would be direct competitors.”

When asked about potential competition and the role that Faculty plays, both Accenture and Palantir responded to The Register with a link to a December press release that announced Palantir and Accenture had expanded their global partnership with a specialized unit.

The Accenture-Palantir Business group is supported by forward-deployed engineers from Palantir and more than 2,000 Accenture staffers who know Palantir’s platforms.

“The teams will work side-by-side with clients to move from siloed data to integrated, AI-powered decision making,” the release states.

Evelson, who described Faculty as a smaller Palantir competitor, said the soundness of the partnership will play out in the trenches.

“If an enterprise wants to get Palantir, but they have a great relationship with Accenture in terms of all sorts of IT, outsourcing, integration, et cetra, then, that’s a good combination,” he told The Register. “But, again, if I’m an enterprise that’s already entrenched with Palantir, I’m not going to switch to Accenture. If I’m an enterprise that’s already is entrenched with Accenture, I’m not going to switch to McKinsey.”

UK pride

Warner left a career in physics that included a Marie Curie Fellowship at Harvard University in quantum sensing research to move all in on AI in 2010, more than a decade before the hype.

In the years since its founding in 2014, Faculty has become a go-to destination for data scientists in the UK thanks to its fellowship program that invites PhDs, master’s graduates, and post doctoral students to win hands-on experience in AI, which Warner has credited with giving Faculty a chance to meet with top talent. The program received a Princess Royal Training Award in 2022, which recognizes outstanding training and skills development programs.

Warner said of the 500 fellowship winners about 90 now work at Faculty.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 10 Downing Street tapped Faculty to organize the UK’s response. The Faculty founder worked directly with government leaders during Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration, and his company has been credited with saving thousands of lives by coordinating sewage data with logistics to monitor surges in the disease and provide resources when and where they were needed.

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Warner has been outspoken that the UK must build its own tech talent and has taken digs at “foreign tech” companies. “People are going to have to recognize that to an extent a win for a foreign tech company is a loss for British sovereignty,” he told the hosts of Anglofuturism, a podcast, in April.

Accenture was originally spun out of US accounting giant Arthur Andersen as its consulting arm, and still trades on the New York Stock Exchange, although it's headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Not the UK. ®