Dr. Daniel Hulme
Daniel Hulme, EngD is the Global Chief AI Officer at WPP, CEO and Founder of Satalia, and CEO and cofounder of Conscium. A globally recognized authority on artificial intelligence with more than two decades of academic and applied experience, he builds and advises companies that bring AI to commercial and societal problems while pursuing the frontier questions of machine consciousness and AI safety.
Daniel founded Satalia in 2008 as an enterprise AI company that combines machine learning and optimization to help organizations such as Tesco, PwC, BT, DFS, and Unilever transform their operations and solve computationally hard problems. Its products include Satalia Workforce, which optimizes the allocation of people to tasks, and Satalia Delivery, a fleet routing and scheduling system.
In August 2021, WPP — one of the world’s largest marketing and communications companies — acquired Satalia, and Daniel was appointed WPP’s Global Chief AI Officer, working with the group’s Chief Technology Officer and agencies to define, curate, and promote AI capability across the organization, advise its ethics and governance committees, and support the AI sustainability work within WPP’s Net Zero initiative.
In 2024, Daniel cofounded Conscium, described as the world’s first commercial organization dedicated to the understanding, verification, and validation of conscious AI. Conscium pursues three workstreams: the verification of AI agents through its VerifyAX platform, which runs simulated environments to test whether autonomous agents behave as intended, the development of neuromorphic computing systems that process information more like a biological brain, and research into artificial consciousness, led by the neuropsychologist Mark Solms.
Conscium also seeded the creation of PRISM, the Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines, a UK nonprofit preparing society for a future with conscious — or seemingly conscious — AI, of which Daniel is a founding partner.
Alongside building Satalia, Daniel was a cofounder and director of Faculty AI (formerly ASI Data Science), the British applied-AI company. In 2026, Accenture announced it had agreed to acquire Faculty for a reported $1 billion, a rare second major exit within five years. Daniel has been recognized by AI Magazine as one of the world’s Top 10 Chief AI Officers, and in 2026 he was elected a Founding Fellow of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences in its inaugural cohort, in recognition of his contributions at the intersection of AI and applied mathematics.
In 2017, he was among 116 founders of artificial intelligence and robotics companies from 26 countries who signed an open letter to the United Nations warning against the development of lethal autonomous weapons. Daniel has maintained a long association with University College London (UCL), where he is the Computer Science Entrepreneur-in-Residence and previously served as Director of its Applied AI MSc in Business Analytics.
He is also an Impact Board Member of the Computer Science department at the University of St Andrews and the Informatics department at the University of Sussex. He is a faculty member at Singularity University, a lecturer at the London School of Economics Marshall Institute, an advisor to bodies including the UK Home Office, the UAE National AI Strategy, and the International AI Governance Association, and an investor in emerging technologies. A sought-after keynote speaker for the world’s largest technology companies and a serial TEDx and Google speaker, Daniel speaks on AI, ethics, innovation, decentralization, and organizational design, and has presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Watch Big data and dangerous ideas and The Impact of AI – How humanity can use AI for its own growth.
Daniel earned his MSci in Computer Science with Cognitive Science from UCL in 2003, graduating with First Class Honors, where his master’s research simulated artificial life, using evolutionary algorithms to generate emergent intelligence in agents controlled by artificial neural networks.
He went on to earn his Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in AI and Computational Complexity from UCL in 2009, with doctoral work spanning the modeling of bumblebee brains and mathematical optimization. His thesis was titled The Path to Satisfaction: Polynomial Algorithms for SAT. He also completed entrepreneurship and management electives at London Business School between 2007 and 2008.
In 2008, Daniel was awarded an international Kauffman Global Entrepreneur Scholarship from the Kauffman Foundation, which included a placement at Cisco’s Silicon Valley headquarters and a tour of Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard. His early research produced peer-reviewed work in computational complexity, SAT solving, and cryptanalysis, including A New General-Purpose Method to Multiply 3x3 Matrices Using Only 23 Multiplications. Born on February 21, 1980, in Morecambe, England, Daniel is based in London.
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