15 minutes with: Thomas Sweetman

How would you describe your job to somebody you’d never met before?

One of my sons asked what I do, and his five-year-old brother said, “you make the world work better, don’t you?” That’s the short answer. The longer answer is that I lead a team which solves strategic challenges for government, industry, and the third sector by accelerating the adoption of frontier technologies for problem spaces. It might be the net zero transition, increasing productivity in social care, or improving the ability to predict and prevent crime. For almost every project, you have a specific set of conditions, a funded challenge, a group of users, and a candidate technology – but what you don’t have is a solution at scale. That’s what we do. We take candidate technology from lab to market at scale. We also deliver insight to policymakers, so they understand a given problem through research, data, and quantification. This has allowed us to develop a series of interventions which we’ve refined over the last couple of years.

What challenges are your clients facing, and how are you solving them in ingenious ways?

We’re helping to secure critical national infrastructure (CNI) by addressing a systemic memory‑safety weakness in widely used software codebases and the processor architectures they run on. As we rapidly digitise our CNI and defence architecture, this vulnerability is increasingly critical. We’re closing the gap by creating a market mechanism to aggregate demand, map the path to adoption, and bring together people from defence, energy, and telecoms to pull innovation through the system.

The supply chain is monolithic, but we’ve had a kick-off event with what we call ‘the adoption collective’. This builds on the work in low-carbon concrete and the PA and PulPac Bottle Collective, but applied to semiconductors. We got top defence primes, energy networks, and regulators all in the room. There’s something really quite impactful there, and you can apply the same methodology to any number of areas, which is what we’re looking to do.

We’re also looking at quantum annealing to optimise the maintenance and planning of the gas transmission network, and using quantum sensing to detect faults. And we’re deploying AI to help understand people’s sentiment regarding the net zero transition so we can make better, faster decisions about new infrastructure. We’re about to launch the world’s first global autonomy cluster for developing, commercialising, deploying, and exporting autonomous technologies across defence, energy, and resilience.

We’re also helping government to get better at adopting new technologies for improved efficiency and productivity. For example, DESNZ policymakers need to know how to support the role of nuclear in an integrated energy system. We’ve partnered with Sellafield and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to create DANI2, the industry’s first AI Agent. DANI2 transforms knowledge management and supports safety, tracking back through decades of extensive nuclear regulations to automatically assess and flag necessary updates to the nuclear programme.

What makes PA different?

To find a pathway to adoption for a given solution, you need three things. You need inspirational challenges, you need to be radically inclusive, and you need to be relentlessly iterative. But often, innovation happens in a lab or a skunk works, and the people who need to pull innovation into the market at scale to achieve impact and return aren’t involved until it’s too late. PA takes a very different approach.

It’s a full offering. And we’re relentlessly iterative. People are curious, driven, keen to collaborate. We’re the catalyst in a chemical reaction, operating outside of silos with the freedom to tackle problems head-on and in new ways. We’ve got 80 years of experience, and we’re trusted. When government wants to deploy AI or quantum technology, we’re top of the list in that diamond score of consultancies. Importantly, our link with Jacobs enables us to tap into huge manufacturing capability on a global scale.

Which of your projects have been particularly impactful?

We’ve co-published a body of work with the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) that establishes the evidence base and rigour around innovation, diffusion, and adoption.

We’ve also worked with the country’s National Technology Advisor directly on the technology adoption review.

What I love is that we actually do stuff with our research. A couple of years ago we worked with Plymouth South Devon Freeport to establish a regulatory sandbox for maritime autonomy, which played a big part in making sure that industry didn’t go offshore.

Our semiconductor work is genuinely pivotal in terms of securing CNI and supporting the UK economy by taking advantage of a re-platform moment. Re-onshoring key parts of the semiconductor supply chain so we have sovereign capability is incredibly important for the world we’re about to enter, where threats are converging to create global instability. And we’re working with the Local Innovation Partners Fund and University of Plymouth to create the world’s first global autonomy cluster, which speaks to the defence resilience challenges we have around subsea cables for energy. I’m really proud of that.

We’re also working with government to improve service quality. I’ve worked previously in the past with the Argenti team to bring innovation and technology adoption to social care ensuring frontline staff and care workers are at the heart of technology adoption, to ensure it actually works in the real world.

On the geekier side, we’ve partnered with the UK’s Science, Technology and Facilities Council to apply AI to the diamond light source. We’re generating huge amounts of data from technology which is taking years to analyse – there was a two-year gap between the Large Hadron Collider starting its discovery work on the Higgs boson and the point at which we could confirm its existence. How do we trim two years down to months, weeks?

What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to do what you do?

If you want to make the world better, you’ve got to lead by example and encourage others to do the same. You have to accept that it’s not going to be easy – but what powers you through is authenticity.

What are your future goals, personally or professionally?

Professionally, I’d like to make a real impact with our clients. Eventually, I want to revisit where I started, through formal politics or the civil service. Personally, I want to give my family strong foundations and support them to do whatever they want to do next, because time goes very quickly, as I’m realising. One thing I’d like to do is to learn to sing properly – I tried it a while ago and it was great for relieving a bit of stress!