Daniel Hulme

Daniel Hulme is a British academic, entrepreneur and thought leader whose work spans artificial intelligence research, commercial innovation and forward-looking philanthropy. He holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in artificial intelligence from University College London (UCL), where he studied computational intelligence and neural modelling and later remained closely involved as Entrepreneur-in-Residence and lecturer in computer science. At UCL he also directed the Applied AI Master’s programme, grounding his research and teaching in practical uses of AI to tackle complex business and societal problems. Hulme’s academic pedigree also extends through visiting and advisory roles: he is an Impact Board Member of the Computer Science departments at both St Andrews University and the University of Sussex, bringing academic insight to how AI and intelligent technologies are taught and governed.

In the commercial world, Hulme is well-known as the CEO of Satalia, the company he founded to build practical artificial intelligence products and enterprise solutions for optimisation and decision science. Satalia was acquired by WPP in 2021, and Hulme continues to lead it, positioning the business as a hub for intelligent systems work within the global marketing and communications group. Concurrently, he serves as Chief AI Officer at WPP, where he helps shape and coordinate AI strategy, capability and ethical deployment across the company’s agencies worldwide.

Hulme has been recognised as one of the top 10 Chief AI Officers globally. He has been elected a Founding Fellow of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences, in recognition of his contributions at the intersection of AI and applied mathematics. Hulme was also a Co-Founder and director of Faculty AI. In 2026, Accenture announced it had agreed to acquire Faculty for $1bn - a rare second major exit within five years.

In 2024 Hulme co-founded Conscium, a commercial research organisation with a unique focus on the deeper and more speculative frontiers of AI. Conscium’s mission is to build trusted, independent tools for agent verification, ensuring that autonomous systems behave as intended and can be verified against standards of safety and alignment. This includes the development of VerifyAX, an agent verification product designed to assess, certify and benchmark intelligent agents on criteria such as reliability, fairness, transparency and risk. Beyond verification, Conscium invests in neuromorphics — research into brain-inspired computing architectures that could enable more efficient and adaptive intelligence — and it actively explores questions around machine consciousness and sentience, probing whether advanced systems might ever become conscious or sentient and what ethical frameworks that would require.

Hulme’s engagement with big-picture issues also extends into philanthropic and policy-oriented projects. He has been involved with PRISM (the Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines), supporting interdisciplinary work on the ethical, philosophical and verification challenges posed by potentially conscious machines. His public advocacy and charitable interests often centre around preparing society for profound inflection points such as the technological singularity — the hypothetical moment when AI achieves superintelligence — and the economic singularity, where automation transforms labour, wealth and opportunity. Through speaking, writing and supporting research communities, Hulme encourages a robust and responsible discourse about how humanity navigates intelligent technologies as they become increasingly powerful and pervasive.

Across his academic, commercial and philanthropic activities, Hulme blends rigorous study with applied innovation, emphasising trust, verification, ethical governance and the thoughtful integration of intelligent systems. His work highlights both the immediate value of AI in solving real-world problems and the need to scrutinise and shape its long-term trajectory as questions of consciousness, autonomy and societal impact become more salient.

Hulme is a serial TEDx and keynote speaker on AI, ethics, innovation and decentralisation, and is a faculty member of SingularityU. He has advisory and executive positions across companies and governments where he actively promotes purposeful entrepreneurship and technology innovation.