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Faculty partners with Tech Nation to support the next-generation of startups applying AI
Jeremy Wright MP, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced last Tuesday at CognitionX the launch of Tech Nation Applied AI 1.0. This is the first ever programme dedicated to young companies applying artificial intelligence (AI) in practical areas to create real-world impact.
As partner for the programme Faculty will be supporting Tech Nation to help the community of founders tackle specific challenges related to bringing AI products to market.
Scaling a company is tough; scaling a company that has AI at its core is particularly tough. Start-up companies face a variety of challenges:
- It takes longer to find product-market-fit in this young, fast-evolving space
- Putting algorithms into production can be hard due to patchy infrastructure and legacy systems
- Talent acquisition is very competitive: good data scientists and machine learning engineers with the right level of technical skills and commercial acumen are rare
- Educating customers requires time, big businesses don’t always embrace change at the same pace as start-ups
- Many young founders lack the commercial expertise to make their ideas real
During the 6-month programme Faculty will share learnings from successfully completing over 300 commercial AI projects across many different sectors of the economy (see our work), and transitioning from a small start-up to a team of 80+ people.
Angie Ma, Co-Founder at Faculty, commented: “Tech Nation has been incredible in supporting and nurturing the startup community in the UK. As part of this community, we’ve benefited from a similar programme, Upscale. We’re excited to have the opportunity to give something back to the community. We’d love to share these learnings as part of the Applied AI Programme to help the next generation of start-ups to make AI real.”
The Applied AI 1.0 application deadline is 8th July 2019. Applicants can apply on the Tech Nation Website here.