Fujitsu brings AI-focused consulting business to Oceania

Fujitsu is bringing it's 'AI-first' consulting business to Oceania, aiming to differentiate its offering from the Big Four by emphasing its background as a 90-year builder of technology.

Uvance Wayfinders, Consulting by Fujitsu was first launched in 2024 across Japan, the USA and select countries in Europe, with the mission of integrating data, security, operations, and execution to ensure AI runs reliably within the day-to-day businesses of clients.

Locally, Fujitsu has carried out “small pockets of consulting in Oceania for some time”, said Mat Franklin, head of Uvance Wayfinders Oceania and managing partner, as well as acquiring a number of firms who contributed consulting capability to the region in the last five years.

“We've now brought together about 60 consultants and about eight partners in Oceania, and we've got a presence in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and Canberra; we're [planning] to be at about 12 partners and about 120 [consultants] by March next year,” explained Franklin.

“That's a fairly aggressive growth rate and it's a good challenge. We're finding people that have been successful in the old consulting model, but are really interested in exploring what we're going to have to do differently to create the consulting model of the future.”

Franklin claimed part of that ‘model of the future’, as Fujitsu sees it, is that owing to "a transition to an AI economy”, companies need partners that “truly understand the tech” rather than mere generalist consultants.

“I think [independent consultants] are fantastic, but what you really want at a point of transition is expertise and people that can help you make a difference, because there are simply not enough people in the world that have been there and done that with AI, that can understand where your business is going, what your competitors are going to be doing, and what you need to do to adapt really quickly, including adapting your people,” he told techpartner.news.

“When this hits a point of maturity in 10 to 20 years' time, I could certainly [see] the argument [for an independent consultant], but right now you need people that know what they're doing.”

The business will offer agentic transformation, focused on the redesign of people, work, and systems to help AI perform in real business operations; cyber security, aiming to strengthen resilience by exposing real attack paths and security blind spots; and a forward deployed engineer and consultant, a move that intends to turn business challenges into working solutions, from prototype to production.

In addition, the company’s AI-focused technology offerings span the likes of Kozuchi Enterprise AI Factory - the company’s proprietary platform for autonomously operating enterprise‑exclusive AI - through to supercomputers, HPCs and quantum.

"Nobody is competing in our market”

Shin Shuda, the Tokyo-based global CEO and senior managing partner of Uvance Wayfinders, echoed Franklin’s sentiments, stating that part of the reason he joined Fujitsu last year after a combined 20+ years at Accenture was that “if you don't understand the mechanism of the tech stack at a very deep level - the level that our engineers and our R&D team understand it - it's very hard to implement that in the client side”.

“PowerPoint [slides] and providing advice and roadmaps is good too - I'm not saying it's bad - but clients, at least our clients, are looking for ‘I need to understand how we're going to implement this, because I don't want PoCs, I want to really embed these agents into our business process. How do I do that?’,” he said.

Franklin claimed that while he sees the company competing with Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC on talent, “nobody is really competing in our market [because] we offer very differentiated value”.

“Because we aren't a legacy consulting business, we're building an AI-first operating model, people model and value model; we're going to build value for clients with the sort of speed, cost or quality that the other firms are going to struggle to compete with,” he said.

While Shuda said that IBM Consulting’s offering would be “something very close” to what Uvance Wayfinders is doing, when it comes to the likes of the large consulting firms locally ”who are trying to get into products, they don't have a 90-year heritage of R&D”.

“They're never going to get to the depth that we have; there's no way to catch up,” he claimed.

“In that respect, there's not a whole lot of competitors out there. We're very unique. We do everything from agent creation to apps to data to AI infrastructure to computing; we have our own network business too. Nobody has that kind of vertical stack.”

Public sector and defence to drive revenue

Around the world, Uvance Wayfinders’ customers cover sectors ranging from manufacturing and FSI to retail and healthcare, but a large part of the company’s work – and a majority of its revenue to date - comes from the public sector and defence.

Talking up its credentials in this space, the company claimed that it has more security-cleared employees than any other technology services consultant in Australia, with “only three government departments in Australia” having more security-cleared personnel than Fujitsu does.

This focus plays well to an area Shuda said is “very hot today” - sovereignty.

“Our tech stack for AI was always designed for sovereignty,” he said.

“We actually sell servers now. We call them private GPTs, but they're basically AI servers.

“We are going to launch our own CPUs next year [which] you can put on-prem, you can connect to the network, but it runs Kozuchi on top, so by design it's sovereign”.

“No value from just advice”

Shuda admitted that while Uvance Wayfinders will engage in ‘traditional consulting’ where it's required – advising clients on how they plan to use AI or what benefits they want as a result of implementing AI - the main focus is trying to “shorten that [process] as quickly as possible and get that to implementation as quickly as possible, because you're not getting any value from just advice”.

“When you implement the tech, that's when you actually start to get output and see results,” he told techpartner.news.

“The consultants that we have, including myself, a lot of us are ex-engineers, so a lot of us understand the tech, we can talk to our customers [but] if it's out of our depth, we bring our R&D team and they can talk in depth about architecture; if you have a very archaic system, we know the path to modernise that.”

Shuda concluded that while Uvance Wayfinders is the consulting arm of the business, its “very much integrated with the rest of Fujitsu”.

“We're not an independent consulting firm within Fujitsu, although our name sort of suggests that - we're very much part of Fujitsu.”