Create insight and impact
Today’s leaders want to do better for their people, customers, shareholders, and the planet. Solving complex challenges demands multidisciplinary teams of experts bringing together different mindsets, experience, and skill sets. Combine this with breakthrough technologies and you’ve created the conditions to unlock opportunities – a practical route to tangible impact.
Clients need innovation that accelerates results. And with a confident understanding of the challenge from all angles, clients experience fewer roadblocks, faster progress, and de-risked long-term solutions. This approach, when combined with PA’s culture of collaboration, sets the stage for long-lasting transformation that revitalises industries, economies, and society.
Transformation through collaboration
Our teams thrive on solving the most complex challenges. And through a culture of collaboration, we create strategies and lead transformations across organisations and industries. We bring together different industries and stakeholders – the public sector, the private sector, and organisations of all sizes with diverse expertise, including start-ups, supply chains, regulators, the science community, and more – to unlock new value.
We worked with our strategic partner Jacobs to develop a National Biosurveillance Network for the UK Health Security Agency. This world-first programme combines the organisational and technology design experience of PA with the global biosecurity and complex bioscience expertise of Jacobs. And equips the UK to better respond to future pandemics. Jointly tackling some of the most difficult cross-government data-sharing challenges to keep the population safe – ultimately saving lives.
Alongside Jacobs, we also began work to deliver innovation and design capabilities to the UK’s Department for Energy Security & Net Zero’s (DESNZ) Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) programme. Driven by a desire to make a real impact on global sustainability, our team's experience in disruptive and innovative technologies will enable us to help DESNZ in their work to deliver a net-zero economy by 2050.
As digital architecture and innovation partner for HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) in the UK, we worked with service and technology leaders to explore AI’s role in enhancing productivity across the administrative support functions in the courts system. Our work aimed to allow staff to focus on the most complex tasks and accelerate backlog reduction – at a time the legal system is facing significant pressure to ensure swift access to justice.
We developed a clear strategy to drive tangible value from AI in a responsible manner. Alongside this, we demonstrated how a generative AI knowledge management solution could unlock individual productivity, and enabled HMCTS to secure investment in AI solutions to help staff manage the increasing volume and complexity of casework.
Working with PA, we sought to make innovation part of business as usual – to continually identify opportunities to apply cutting-edge technologies so HMCTS can deliver support services that improve the courts and tribunals for those who use them, and those who work in them.”
The impact of wider collaboration to transform our energy systems and better protect our planet isn’t limited to aviation. We guided three of Norway’s energy distribution system operators (DSOs) – Føie, Hallingdal Kraftnett, and Hemsil Nett – through a merger process after they all saw an advantage in coming together to gain operational efficiencies and advance digitisation. In less than six months, we set them up to offer secure, reliable, and efficient energy distribution in accordance with regulations and laws. We brought best practices and insights gathered from working with energy companies around the globe – including Denmark’s largest energy producer, Ørsted, to lead the green energy transformation, and Dutch operator Enexis, to ensure its energy grid is fit for the energy transition.
Transforming an entire industry means pooling expertise, inviting provocations, and coming together to surface evidence-led insight that challenges the pace of progress. The hydrogen economy is on the cusp of rapid growth, with huge potential to decarbonise sectors such as chemicals, heavy industry, aviation, and shipping. The hydrogen horizon report equips decision-makers, including governments and hydrogen project developers, with the science, use cases, regulatory insight, and novel solutions to water efficiency, to keep the hydrogen economy on the right track.
Innovation accelerates results
For innovation to achieve real impact, it needs to be viewed through a full lifecycle or end-to-end lens. Efforts to truly transform organisations often fail because short-term point solutions don’t take a holistic view of the challenges and opportunities. This slows down time-to-value and can incur significant risks and costs. Understanding the impact of potential changes across a complex system is imperative to securing a rapid return on innovation investment.
When Heathrow Airport needed to improve punctuality performance, understanding the airport ecosystem and its complex inter-dependencies was crucial. We worked closely with the cross-Heathrow project team to plan and manage the delivery of a set of priority projects, including real-time data monitoring, enabling informed decision-making. Together, these initiatives benefit customer experience, safety, and efficiency across airlines, employees, passengers, and the environment.
PA partnered with us to help understand one of our most complex problems, provided expertise to shape an approach, and provided the rigour to drive implementation.”
Organisations continue to look to innovation to stay one step ahead of evolving demand. We developed an AI-powered engine to fast-track Unilever’s research and development and keep the organisation at the forefront of consumer goods. DelphiAI brings product design to the fingertips of Unilever’s marketing and R&D teams, helping them identify the levers for product superiority across markets, leverage that insight to inform the design of differentiating products, and get those products to market faster.
PA had already piloted an AI tool with us to generate novel product claims. We saw the chance to widen that expertise across other product attributes. We also knew PA could bring together and manage large-scale programmes, so they were the natural partner for us here.”
Carlsberg approached us to help redefine a category where previous products struggled due to poor user experience, bulky systems, and uninspiring design. The company had found that 65 percent of customers prefer draught beer to bottled, but serving it required complex, space-consuming systems that were difficult to manage for venues with limited staff or those wanting flexibility in small batches.
Leveraging our expertise in research, UX, industrial design, and engineering, we designed and developed the Draughtmaster Extra 10 – a countertop system that stores, cools, and pours draught beer without the need for traditional installations, cellars, or pumps. Extra10 delivers an iconic experience synonymous with premium draught beer, while impressively keeping it brewery-fresh for up to 30 days – six times longer than conventional systems that require complex installations.
And when Pvolve – a US-based fitness brand – wanted to improve its digital experience to support growth, our experts unearthed an opportunity to rethink the entire brand strategy. This came at a critical point of Pvolve’s development and resulted in a more inclusive, science-backed proposition and clearer strategic direction for explosive growth.
Increasingly, clients are seeking to get under the skin of the empowered consumer to understand their drivers and align this with market expansion. Our annual Brand Impact Index analysed the attitudes of US consumers who ranked hundreds of brands across multiple industries. This innovative consumer study guides leaders to sustained growth, spotlighting top performers who exemplify the path to success.
Breakthrough technologies made real
Whether the answer to a challenge is a change in strategy, a new product or service innovation, or a wider enterprise transformation, organisations look for those who can unlock greater value from technologies, at speed, to deliver tangible impact in the real world.
Building on our successful Dry Molded Fiber (DMF) Baileys paper bottle trial with Diageo, we partnered once again to launch a commercial prototype DMF bottle for Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch Whisky. Use of the innovative technology positions Diageo at the forefront of premium, more sustainable packaging – accelerating net-zero ambitions without compromising on an iconic design expected by bartenders and Johnnie Walker fans alike.
We are constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation…The paper-based bottle trial for Johnnie Walker Black Label allows us to explore new packaging in the high intensity environment of the on-trade. We are pioneering new packaging solutions and shaping the future of the industry.”
Knowing we’re achieving real-world impact galvanises our teams to push the possibilities of breakthrough technologies. When that involves improving the lives of patients and their families by advancing new therapies, it’s not just about being faster, it’s about being smarter, bolder, and more connected. We worked with a leading global provider of clinical research services and a global life sciences consortium, unlocking cutting-edge data and digital opportunities to scale clinical trials at pace.
Proving the concept and value of AI to increase efficiencies also saw us work with Sellafield, a former nuclear generation power site in the UK, and with the country's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). With deep technical expertise in data and AI solutions, we developed and deployed DANI – the NDA and Sellafield’s first generative virtual assistant that helps engineers extract meaningful data from thousands of documents in real time, accelerating tasks that used to take months to complete.
These two use cases of real-world AI-powered solutions, accelerating clients’ journeys to the intelligent enterprise, contributed to the thinking in our newest book Next Made Real: A business leader’s guide to generative AI. Published in 2024, the book helps leaders build generative AI expertise and muscle across their organisations, enabling them to realise the full potential of this technology.
Diversity of expertise
To deliver innovative and effective solutions to previously unsolvable problems, organisations need the right blend of experts in perfect combination with emerging technologies. Our 4,000 strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers, and technologists complement and seamlessly slot into clients’ own teams to surface better solutions in accelerated timescales.
For example, our experts, including those with deep expertise in financial services, former regulators, and specialists in delivering complex regulatory change, worked at pace to enable OneSavings Bank to hit a series of compliance deadlines and shape the innovative customer-centric culture that the new UK’s Consumer Duty demands.
We also seamlessly transitioned the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) from a long-standing Private Finance Initiative contract to a new model of infrastructure ownership and capability service delivery model. This involved leading a consortium of experts to enable the MOD greater flexibility to adapt to evolving defence challenges and capitalise on the latest innovations in space technology.
Working with PA, we were able to evaluate our ability to respond both to operational and financial crises in the compressed time fashion we’d experience in real-life.”
Our work with Norway’s leading fruits and vegetables distributor, BAMA, involved pulling together a cross-functional delivery team, including digital strategists and experience experts, data scientists, and supply chain experts, and leveraging our Alliance with Microsoft to optimise supply chain efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance sustainability. One of the ways this was achieved was the development of a new app, which has already led to significant cost savings for BAMA with more expected through brokering better deals with transport providers.
In 2024, as the UK transitioned to a new government, our experts and thought leaders set out to explore 10 critical questions shaping the UK’s future. With national renewal high on the agenda, the country stood at a pivotal moment – facing economic pressures, a need for greater productivity, and the challenge of delivering more with less. Our A Decisive Decade series of insights examined how leaders across the public and private sectors could navigate these pressures, harness innovation, and drive place-based growth to secure long-term prosperity.
