Scottish AI startup Airts wins international contract with PwC

Scottish software startup Airts, which has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) supported product to manage resource planning in the workplace, has signed a six-figure deal with PwC’s Poland-based Service Delivery Centre.

The six figure contract with the accountancy giant comes as the Edinburgh firm is deploying intelligent, real-time staff scheduling for the first time in the sector.

Founded by Andrew Bone and Dr Alastair Andrew in 2013 with the aim bringing the benefits of advanced AI technology from academia into industry, Airts said its team are rapidly gaining traction with several additional UK and international opportunities, and are continuing to hire on both product and commercial fronts, having brought in Richard Cassidy from Administrate in January as Commercial Director.

The firm’s Braid technology supports professional services firms by streamlining the engagement workflow and scheduling processes, for both client-facing and service delivery centre environments. It eliminates the firefighting caused by last-minute staff changes and helps firms achieve utilisation goals, as well as informing strategic business decisions by modelling out scenarios based on resource capacity, eligibility, preferences, and skills.

CEO and co-founder, Andrew Bone, said: “Major professional services firms like PwC constantly have to decide how best to allocate staff to client engagements in a way that balances the competing needs of the customer, the well-being of staff and, ultimately, the bottom line. Braid supports companies to overcome this challenge at scale by optimising the schedule as circumstances change. It’s like hundreds of resource planners working in the background 24/7, only much faster!”

The team places a big emphasis on ensuring its technology is easy to use and considers both the needs of employees and the organisation as a whole, in order to create efficiencies in a people friendly way.

“We love working with Airts,” said Bartosz Krajewski, senior manager at PwC, “they took time to deeply understand our business and made the whole project a collaborative experience. It’s exciting to be at the forefront of something that we feel will re-invent industry best-practice.

“We have expanded rapidly and now have over 1,000 colleagues working on 8,000 engagements per month, supporting PwC teams across Europe. With these volumes, manual scheduling was fast becoming an unsustainable administrative process. Braid coordinates what should be happening and when, giving us a joined-up view of our workload and resources, which lets us focus on continuous growth and improving our quality of service.”

Airts, chaired by former Wood Mackenzie senior executive, Paul Chowdhry, is a Scottish EDGE award-winning startup and raised £300k of seed investment in Q2 2016 from Scottish angel investors to fund the growth of the team.

Airts said it is set to explore further funding options later this year and is in the process of relocating its Edinburgh headquarters to CodeBase.