user: Summarise in a single concise paragraph for the intro:
Faculty AI: An analysis of their customers, business model, and brand messaging.
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Table of Contents
- Customers
An explanation of Faculty AI’s existing customers and the customers they aim to reach.
Faculty AI serves an extensive number of industries, as described on their website’s header under “Industries” [1], but we can see from the number of customers within each industry that their main industries are:
“Financial Services”, specifically risk management, fraud detection, and customer analytics. Faculty AI serves three customers in the industry: Tide, a challenger credit bureau, and a private equity firm.
“Health & Care”, specifically improving patient outcomes and operational efficiency. Faculty AI serves five customers in the industry: NHS and their AI Lab, Cera, Hywel Dda University Health Board, and a medical device company.
“Energy”, specifically energy consumption optimisation, grid management improvement, and predictive maintenance enhancement. Faculty AI serves six customers in the industry: Northern Powergrid, Veolia, NESO FastOut/VoltaVisor, a gas distribution network, and Drift.
This aligns with the common trend within the AI and data science community [2], since these industries often have significant data-driven needs and challenges that AI can address. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll focus on one customer from each of the three main industries and what Faculty AI have done for them; there’s a more verbose list in Appendix A.
Tide (financial services)
For Tide, the Head of Product is quoted saying that “Partnering with Faculty enabled us to quickly validate the idea of MemberSummarise. Together we scoped, built and iterated on a proof of concept to leverage their expertise in data science”, affirming their belief that Faculty AI could and did help.
Specifically, Tide wanted to reduce overall customer service handling time by leveraging generative AI to both combine documentation with customer data and summarise customer data for human agents.
This technology reduced overall customer service handling time by 10%, attributed heavily to their technology.
NHS (health & care)
For the NHS, the Chief Data & Analytics Officer is quoted saying that “By using this leading technology developed with Faculty, we are helping to support frontline staff in their ongoing mission to save as many lives as they can by equipping them with the most accurate information”, demonstrating the critical role that Faculty AI played in the height of the pandemic.
Specifically, Faculty AI developed the Early Warning System for operational users across the NHS to forecast hospital demand at multiple levels (local, regional, national), using positive case data, 111 calls, and mobility data from Apple/Google.
This allowed the NHS to plan effectively to reduce strain on the healthcare system, relying on a system 112% better than a simpler model.
Northen Powergrid (energy)
For the Northern Powergrid, the Head of Forecasting is quoted saying “We chose Faculty because of their expertise implementing AI solutions for critical national infrastructure”.
Whilst the quote is generic, it affirms their confidence in Faculty AI to solve the problems occurring within their business, specifically that the flexibility within their least-cost service has too much uncertainty for many asset owners to participate, since it’s the most flexible.
Faculty AI helped by communicating a forecast and associated uncertainty, developed with historical load data, weather forecasts, as well as other factors, which has led to an automated market-based solution which is predicted to save up to £51m in operating costs by 2033.
- Business Model
An explanation of how Faculty AI makes money, what products or services they offer to do so.
2.1. Value Proposition
Faculty AI offers three things:
Frontier, a product (web application) described as “AI-powered simulation technology which improves the speed, quality and execution of decisions”.
AI Services (delivered alongside an existing team), “End-to-end support for… AI”, split into six core services (strategy, design, infrastructure, development, operations, and change) and two specialist services (due diligence and safety).
AI Talent (delivered in the style of a placement), a “Fellowship programme” of “pre-screened PhD and MSc graduates trained by the industry’s leading AI experts”.
Essentially, Frontier the web application offers an on-demand simulation to help teams make more informed decisions, AI Services integrate part of Faculty AI‘s team with a company to help them work with AI, and AI Talent reduces the cost of experimenting with AI, as well as reducing the follow-up hiring cost by offering academics transitioning into the practical world in the style of a placement.
The two services aren’t comprehensively described, only suggesting that they’ll extend a “state of the art methodology” onto their customers. However, the product, Frontier, has a public white paper [3] detailing the technology, methodology, and approach.
For details, the white paper itself is a very good resource, and a summary can also be found in the appendices (see Appendix B). Briefly, they use some technology called a Computational Twin Engine, which can provide simulations to optimise decisions, whilst maintaining governance, and then deploy these final decisions.
Whilst not explicitly mentioned, this technology would require extensive computational resource, network infrastructure, human resources, and data resources.
2.2. Complete Business Model
Faculty AI has few revenue streams, which we can infer from the products/services they serve as well as public finance information [4]. For example, they’re Venture Capital-Backed with $53.8m raised by the time of writing this (Nov. 2024), which implies that Faculty AI may not yet be profitable and still in its growth phase, 10 years after being founded.
The product “Frontier” is most likely to be the main revenue stream, possibly as a subscription with the cost proportional to the size of the business requesting access, as products are much easier to scale and offer to many customers with low overhead. This overhead would likely consist of infrastructure costs and development costs, which are mitigated by Faculty AI‘s partnership with Microsoft Azure and OpenAI.
The “AI Services” would probably come secondary to “Frontier”, offering end-to-end support with consulting fees or project-based contracts. This would likely contribute proportional to the length of projects, with the main costs being marketing/sales costs and employee costs.
Lastly, “AI Talent” would be a smaller revenue stream compared to the others, depending on demand, with the revenue coming from placement fees or ongoing contracts. The cost would be relatively minimal, apart from talent acquisition costs and possibly marketing/sales costs.
All of these, however, are business-to-business, rather than direct to an end consumer. For instance, “Frontier” helps forecast to aid planning within a business, “AI Services” helps a business adopt and use AI, and “AI Talent” helps a business grow its employee population.
Faculty AI doesn’t seem to publicly share if it has any recurring customers or partners, apart from those already mentioned, instead opting to work with customers to solve a particular problem or upgrade their systems to utilise AI and then move on. This would require them to market themselves more heavily to maintain a consistent stream of customers, which would explain why they take advantage of website traffic, on top of marketing in trade shows such as “Demo Day” (a recurring show on their YouTube channel [5] for 9 years as of Nov. 2024) and social media, predominantly on X (previously known as Twitter) but also with guest appearances on podcasts.
2.3. Business Model Canvas
Incomplete, so far.
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- Brand Messaging
An explanation of how Faculty AI communicates its brand and engages with customers through storytelling.
Faculty AI‘s brand has recently had an overhaul, moving from messaging that was quite like the rest of the market and innovating to a more modern aesthetic. For that reason, this document won’t go into the details of the previous brand apart from this acknowledgement due to its recency.
References
[1] Faculty, “Faculty AI,” [Online]. Available: https://faculty.ai/. [Accessed: Nov. 2024].
[2] A. Abdallat, “The Top Five Sectors Where AI Is Poised to Make Huge Industrial Impacts in 2022,” Forbes, Feb. 24, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2022/02/24/the-top-five-sectors-where-ai-is-poised-to-make-huge-industrial-impacts-in-2022/. [Accessed: Nov. 2024].
[3] Faculty, “The Computational Twin Engine: Powering Intelligent Decision Making,” [Online]. Available: https://www.datocms-assets.com/142357/1731001343-frontier-white-paper-a4-mockup-2024-v4.pdf. [Accessed: Nov. 2024].
[4] PitchBook, “Faculty PitchBook Profile,” [Online] Available: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/120001-87. [Accessed: Nov. 2024].
[5] Faculty, “Faculty YouTube Channel,” [Online] Available: https://www.youtube.com/@faculty_ai/videos. [Accessed: Nov. 2024].
Appendices
Appendix A: Extensive list of industries and associated customers
Defence: Threat detection and resource allocation.
Dstl
Military headquarters
Information domain
Military forces
Education: Learning experience personalisation and administrative efficiency.
Elastik
Infrastructure & Environment: Sustainability, resource management, and infrastructure optimisation.
Network Rail (AI Services)
Signalling company (AI Services)
Insurance: Risk assessment, claims processing, and customer insights.
Leading insurance company
Insurance intermediary group
Legal: Document review, legal research, and case prediction.
Axiom
Leading law firm (AI Design, AI Infrastructure, AI Development)
Law firm (AI Strategy)
Life Sciences: Drug discovery, clinical trials, and patient data analysis.
The Francis Crick Institute (AI Services)
Branding Science (AI Services)
National Security & Law Enforcement: Crime prediction, resource management, and data analysis.
NPCC
Public Services: Service delivery enhancement and operational efficiency in government agencies.
Verian
LOTI
Retail & Consumer: Customer experience, inventory management, and sales forecasting.
Mention Me (AI Design, AI Infrastructure, AI Development, AI Change)
Yuu (AI Design, AI Infrastructure, AI Development)
Jewellery brand
Law firm (AI Strategy)
Telecoms, Media & Technology: Customer experience enhancement, network optimisation, and content personalisation.
Media and telecoms company
Academic publisher (AI Services, AI Design, AI Development)
Appendix B: How does Frontier work?
Frontier works using technology called “The Computational Twin Engine”, which combines AI, simulation, optimisation, and causal inference into a cohesive framework with four main capabilities:
Simulation:
Discrete-event simulator providing coherent (maintains set relationships), probabilistic (provides quantified uncertainties), causally accurate (maintains cause-and-effect relationships), and explainable outputs (for root cause analysis, using “Shapely values”).
Generates multiple trajectories to simulate possible futures.
Decision Optimisation:
Compares decisions based on downstream business KPIs.
Utilises Bayesian optimisation for finding optimal scenarios and tuning decision parameters.
Decision Governance:
Framework for setting operational bounds and monitoring compliance.
Policies can influence or enforce decision outputs to prevent violations, by tracking metric values against defined thresholds.
Decision Deployment:
Integrates optimised decisions into operational systems.
Supports both decision automation and augmentation.
You can design within the framework using structural objects (Elements, Processes, Stages, Decisions, Resources, and Metrics) and simulation objects (that govern event generation and state mutation during simulations). [Timestamp: 2024/11/27 11:52:57]
ai: This analysis of Faculty AI explores its customer base, business model, and brand messaging, highlighting the company’s focus on industries with significant data-driven needs, such as financial services, health and care, and energy. Faculty AI partners with notable clients like Tide, NHS, and Northern Powergrid, providing tailored AI solutions that enhance operational efficiency and decision-making. The company’s revenue streams primarily stem from its flagship product, Frontier, along with AI services and talent placements, all aimed at supporting businesses in their AI adoption journey. Additionally, Faculty AI has recently revamped its brand messaging to better resonate with its target audience, reflecting a modern and innovative approach in a competitive market. [Timestamp: 2024/11/27 11:54:22]