Vivace community member Faculty was founded in 2014 by three university friends, who had already spotted that artificial intelligence (AI) was going to be one of the transformative technologies of our time.
What started with a fellowship, a training programme designed to help academic STEM PhD students transition from campus to commercial data science roles, has grown to a business that employs more than 300 people, with business units covering government public sector, health and life sciences, energy and retail and consumer.
The company, which all three founders still work for, as CEO, CTO and head of fellowship, also offers 'plug and play' software products designed to help businesses of all types use AI for deeper insights, and hence more informed decisions.
Tom Nixon, Faculty's head of government practice, said that Faculty's "absolute core" is building AI systems for real world decision-making: "Essentially, 80% of our team's work is building production AI, that is teams of data scientists, engineers, a delivery manager etc coming together, working on a customer problem to build an AI solution to that problem."
Using AI to work smarter
The aim is that users, in everything from supply chain management to a multinational, the NHS or law enforcement, can use AI to improve elements of their jobs.
Faculty became aware of ACE through existing government work and has been a member of the Vivace community for about five years, working on around 30 commissions.
One has been looking at the potential to use large language models (LLMs) to create synthetic
