Accenture to Acquire Faculty to Scale Safe AI and Decision Intelligence as Marc Warner Becomes CTO

Accenture to acquire Faculty, bringing decision intelligence and AI safety to enterprise scale. The deal adds 400+ specialists, Frontier, and Marc Warner as Accenture CTO.

Accenture to Acquire Faculty: Decision Intelligence and AI Safety at Enterprise Scale

London, Jan. 6, 2026 - Accenture has agreed to acquire Faculty, a UK-based AI services and products company known for applied AI, simulation, and optimization. The move is aimed at helping enterprises reinvent critical processes with safe, secure AI and clear business outcomes.

Why this matters for executives and product leaders

Shift from pilots to production: Decision systems that connect data, models, and workflows to improve speed, cost, and quality.
Built-in safety: Bias, privacy, and explainability controls embedded across the lifecycle, from development through monitoring.
Option value: Support for sovereign and regulated deployments, important for sectors like health, finance, and public services.
Talent at scale: 400+ AI specialists, plus a proven program for developing early-career technical talent.

What Faculty brings

Services across AI strategy, AI safety, and the design, build, and implementation of high-performance systems.
Frontier, an enterprise decision intelligence product that uses simulation and optimization to tie decisions to outcomes.
Deep work on AI safety with leading labs (OpenAI, Anthropic) and the UK AI Safety Institute, including baseline safety assessments of general-purpose models.
Safety embedded by design-addressing bias, privacy, and unexplainable outputs with governance and monitoring.

Leadership and integration

Upon close, Faculty's team will join Accenture to scale delivery for clients. Marc Warner, Faculty's CEO, will become Accenture's chief technology officer and join its Global Management Committee.

Accenture will also extend Faculty's Fellowship Program globally, helping STEM graduates and researchers transition into industry roles-useful for organizations building persistent AI capability.

Proven use cases

Healthcare: During COVID-19, Faculty built the NHS Early Warning System to forecast patient demand and allocate critical care resources where needed most.
Life sciences: Accenture and Faculty are working with companies such as Novartis to use Frontier for improving clinical trial planning and execution economics.

What to do now

Identify 3-5 high-value decision areas (e.g., supply chain, network planning, clinical ops, workforce scheduling) where simulation and optimization can compress time and cost.
Set AI safety baselines: bias testing, privacy protection, model validation, incident response, and ongoing monitoring with clear ownership.
Prepare data for decisions: define authoritative sources, decision variables, constraints, and feedback loops tied to KPIs.
Design for productization: APIs, retraining pipelines, model registries, and observability that support multi-team use.
Clarify vendor strategy: when to use partner solutions, custom builds, or a hybrid approach-especially for sovereign or regulated contexts.
Pilot with guardrails: time-boxed proof of value, success criteria, and a staged rollout plan backed by governance and change management.
Invest in people: upskill product, engineering, and operations teams to work with decision intelligence and safety processes.

Deal status

Accenture and Faculty have collaborated since December 2023, with Accenture as a preferred implementation partner for Frontier. Completion of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approval. Terms were not disclosed.