It’s an issue that Dr Marc Warner knows he cannot avoid.
As founder of Faculty, the London Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm, until this year the soft-spoken 36-year-old was little known outside Britain’s technology start-up scene. In recent months, he has found himself unwillingly thrust into the limelight.
The reason? Faculty’s close ties with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s top adviser, and the firm’s role in a string of big government contracts helping Whitehall use big data to help battle the pandemic.
From its offices tucked away in Marylebone, London, Warner has been fending off a barrage of criticism over its alleged “cosy” relationship with Downing Street.
“It’s pretty simple,” sighs Warner, a quantum computing expert who studied physics at Imperial College London and later Harvard University before starting Faculty in 2014.
“We worked with the Government long before Boris Johnson was PM. I was appointed to the AI Council under Theresa May. The projects that we’re still most well known for were with the Home Office under May.”
Much of the controversy revolves around Warner’s brother Ben, who worked with Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign, when Faculty analysed polling and allegedly helped to identify potential Leave voters who did not normally vote. The company later worked with Cummings’s own private consultancy, Dynamic Maps. Faculty has never disclosed details of this work.
Faculty has been accused of cronyism for its close ties with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s top adviser
Credit: Reuters
Marc Warner – who is personable but reserved – rejects any suggestion of cronyism. He says these links had no influence on the award of any contracts. His brother left Faculty last year to take up a data science role with the Government.
But Warner, who was inspired by his physics teacher grandfather, remains reluctant to talk in detail about the relationship with Cummings.
“Ben and I are both bound by very strong confidentiality obligations, and we’re careful not to break them”.
“Truth be told, we don’t get to spend that much time with our families. The last thing that we want to do is talk about work,” Warner says. Even so, increasingly, the two brothers’ worlds are colliding.
Faculty, which today employs 125 people building systems to crunch vast amounts of data, has played what even Warner might acknowledge is a significant role in the Government’s Covid response.
Earlier this year, the company was hired by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), to monitor the impact of the pandemic on UK GDP and provide live updates to officials.
It later struck a £400,000 deal with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to collect and analyse the tweets of UK citizens, to determine how the pandemic was affecting them.
In the past few months, the company has even helped to train people within government in how to use data correctly, leaving what Warner hopes will be a “legacy inside the system”.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy hired Faculty to forecast the pandemic’s impact on businesses using machine learning
Credit: AFP
The project comes as Cummings is spearheading a wide-ranging shake-up of the Civil Service, aimed at modernising the way it operates and using big data to make decisions.
“It becomes a really important opportunity when you’ve got a very fast moving crisis to actually have a sense of what’s going on,” Warner says. “It’s no longer good enough to come back six months later to get some summary statistics. When things are spiking up and down, you need much more real-time information,”
Throughout the crisis, Faculty’s systems have gleaned such real-time information, but, right now, Warner isn’t sure whether they are playing a role in helping the Government decide which regions to place more restrictions on now.
“I actually don’t know how BEIS are using it,” he admits.
In fact, Warner says, it’s not Faculty’s role to know.
“We build the technology and the pipeline – and we’ve worked hard to upskill analysts [in government], so they can do that analysis and presumably that feeds into policy.”
Temporary Nightingale hospitals in Manchester, Sunderland and Harrogate could be brought back into use to deal with the spike in coronavirus cases
Credit: PA
It has not just been government departments Faculty have worked with. Perhaps the most critical work the company has undertaken during the crisis is its project with the NHS.
Since the outbreak hit in March, Faculty has been building a “data dashboard” alongside companies such as US-based Palantir, to help track spikes in Covid cases and map demand for medical equipment. “We’ve been trying to help them understand what’s going on across the NHS at a system level, so they can be thoughtful about how resources get distributed,” Warner explains.
It was this work which, ultimately, led to Warner sitting in on a Sage meeting in March – a revelation which sparked concerns over whether tech executives were being allowed to exercise too much influence over the advisory group. Warner says he hasn’t sat in any more meetings since, but stresses that “our client is the NHS… So, in as much as we can be useful to the NHS, we’ll go wherever they tell us.”
In the time since, Faculty and other tech firms have attempted to modernise a system frequently criticised for being disjointed and chaotic. “Individual NHS people have said it has made ten years of progress in the few months we’ve been working with them,” Warner says.
By numbers | Faculty AI
Even so, the project has come under scrutiny from privacy campaigners – so much so that Foxglove and openDemocracy threatened legal action to gain access to documents detailing the data-sharing deals earlier this year.
Ultimately, the documents were released on the eve of the lawsuit in June, sparking fresh questions on who owned the intellectual property for the project. A spokesman for Faculty responded at the time by saying the company had asked for the contract to be “amended to make clear that it will derive no commercial benefit from any software… the use of the intellectual property is under the sole control of the NHS”.
Warner avoids criticising the campaigners. He says it is “extremely important that people doing high profile work have scrutiny” – but equally, it is “also important that the truth gets spoken and it’s understood”.
“Let me be very clear, we have no data. It’s completely not our business model. We don’t take models, any code, any software from any of our clients to other places. With the NHS, we didn’t have access to any personal data because we didn’t need it.”
The same applies to Faculty’s private sector business – which, actually, accounts for around 80pc of its work.
“It’s just the confidentiality agreements prevent us from talking about it most of the time.”
Marc Warner CV
In the past, Faculty has been involved in projects with clients such as easyJet, which it helped to work out how many bacon sandwiches to stock on aircraft to cut waste. More recently, Faculty has worked with a US retailer helping them understand when to send a physical catalogue to one of their customers, and when to hold off. Warner says lots of companies are actually preparing for the future and not reining in spending.
It would be easy to assume that Faculty has enjoyed a boost from the pandemic – but Warner says that isn’t quite true. “Covid is hard for everyone. There’s no way this will accelerate our growth.” Whether this year has put it closer or further from profitability, Warner can’t say yet. Its financial year has not ended yet. And, actually, “we don’t aim to be profitable”, he says.
Growth is the target, and as part of an attempted revolution in Whitehall, Faculty’s services are in high demand.
Warner says: “As much as I’d like Faculty to be at the heart, being more realistic, I’d say we’re just doing a little bit to make the Government more efficient.”
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