Solace blog

In 2009 Lars Malmqvist and Denis Kaminskiy had an idea to harness the power of cloud-based technology in such a way to make it accessible to the public sector.

Lars and Denis met at the Judge Business School in Cambridge studying for MBAs. As students they did not have the resources to open an office so decided to start their business using a rather battered BMW as their base.

Their vision was to disrupt the market offering an alternative to the established players in the market and enabling them to save costs and spend precious resources in the most effective way which is good news for all of us.

What started off as a consultancy service, quickly developed into something bigger. Within a year of starting, they employed Don, a former mental health nurse as their first employee.

Don had juggled life on a barge, with a challenging work life and studying computer science part time. He was a perfect fit.

Arcus carried on growing, new staff were employed, revenue doubled year on year. New products were built and we carried on exploiting technology to be able to offer customers the best service.

Innovation and product development are fundamental to Arcus, each year 30% of revenue is invested into research and development. So it’s hardly surprising when Arcus harnessed the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a digital technology that can assist local government.

Lars comments.. there is a close fit between the kind of AI used to augment human productivity and the kinds of work done by most local government officers. They are typically highly trained professionals who, on a day-to-day basis, deal with a perplexing variety of requests ranging from utterly mundane inquiries to critical, once in a career decision. This is exactly the kind of scenario where machine learning algorithms will shine, not as a replacement for human expertise but as a way of crystallising it and allowing it to focus on the right problems.

He continues… routine tasks and interactions can be automated. Steps in complex processes that don’t require deep judgement can happily be taken over by robots. The huge trove of data contained in council systems can be automatically analysed and made available to support the officer in natural ways. This will leave the people that ultimately deliver front-end services with more time to focus on the remaining tasks that really do require human judgement.

Lars says AI is inevitable for local government…

Ultimately, the robots are coming. We should try to make their coming a welcome event. Local government has a real need for transformational technology and AI technologies are in many ways perfectly tailored to address that need.

Today Arcus employs 120 staff in Cambridge, a long way from its beginnings in a BMW car. Our growth and innovation has been rewarded by various awards over the years. We were particularly proud to be listed in the Deloitte Fast 50 and the Deloitte Fast 500 EMEA.

The Fast 500 is a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and energy tech companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Arcus grew 491 percent during this period. The Fast 50 is for UK businesses only. Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over the last four years.

If you’d like to hear more of our story and how we work then please get in contact with us on
01223 911841 or email us info@arcusglobal.com.

A blog from Arcus Global, Business Partner