Valcon has appointed David Miranda as its head of artificial intelligence in the United Kingdom, a newly created post at the European technology, data and transformation consultancy. The firm set out the appointment from London on 13 October 2026, naming Miranda as the first executive to hold the brief in its UK business.
Miranda will set the direction of Valcon's artificial intelligence work in the United Kingdom and lead its delivery alongside the firm's technology, data and consulting teams. Valcon framed the remit around applying artificial intelligence responsibly and converting emerging technology into measurable business outcomes, language that points squarely at the gap between experimentation and production that has become the defining problem of corporate adoption programmes.
Laura Casci, managing partner of Valcon UK, announced the appointment and said that Miranda brings an excellent combination of technical expertise, strategic thinking and leadership experience to the role. Miranda said he was delighted to be starting at the firm at what he called a pivotal point in its growth trajectory and an important juncture in the evolution of artificial intelligence.
He joins from PA Consulting, where he spent almost eight years and most recently served as head of AI engineering. Before that he was chief technology officer at Resident Advisor and head of development at Totaljobs Group. His background spans software, data and artificial intelligence, and he has advised chief executives and other senior leaders while leading complex technology modernisation programmes across transport, consumer, manufacturing and financial services.
The hire is consistent with the direction the firm has taken in its data practice. Valcon recently launched a highly secure, on premise, air gapped data platform in partnership with Databricks, built to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption in sovereign environments where data cannot be allowed to leave a controlled perimeter. That is an engineering proposition rather than an advisory one, and it is served better by a leader who has run build teams than by one who has only written strategy decks.
Two things are worth reading into the structure of the appointment. The first is that the role is new rather than inherited, which indicates the firm is treating artificial intelligence as a distinct capability with its own delivery discipline rather than as a theme spread thinly across existing data and technology teams. Consultancies that keep artificial intelligence diffuse tend to report activity; those that give it a named owner tend to report delivery. The second is the choice of an engineering leader over a strategy partner. Across the British consulting market the bottleneck in client programmes has shifted from deciding what to do with artificial intelligence to industrialising it safely, and the scarce skill is now the ability to put models into regulated production and keep them running there.
The competitive context is unforgiving. The large systems integrators and the Big Four have all built artificial intelligence units at scale, and a mid sized European consultancy cannot win on headcount. The route open to Valcon is specialisation: secure and sovereign deployment, data engineering depth, and sectors where the compliance burden makes a generic platform answer unusable. Miranda's record in transport, manufacturing and financial services maps onto exactly those sectors. The test of whether the appointment works will not be the breadth of the UK pipeline but the share of it that reaches live production, because that is the measure clients have started to ask for and the one the firm has chosen to stake a named role on.
