Northern Ireland’s only tech unicorn Kainos has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) product business.

Actonomy is the latest innovation from the London-list Belfast IT group.

Kainos said the product business will focus on “unlocking the transformative potential of AI for enterprises”.

Ruth McGuinness, who heads AI operations at Kainos has been named as CEO of the new business.

The FTSE 250 firm said Actonomy specialises exclusively in production AI i.e. deploying an AI model in a live system to serve real users and businesses.

Built on Microsoft and Anthropic, with flexible deployment across cloud and local NVIDIA infrastructure, Kainos said Actonomy has emerged out of its experience of delivering hundreds of scaled enterprise AI deployments over the past decade, spanning machine learning, generative AI and now agentic AI.

The Belfast tech group said it has reduced the time required to deploy AI into production by up to 75%.

Early customer deployments include a UK specialist lender targeting a reduction in non-performing loans across a multi-million-account portfolio, and a leading UK water utility unlocking AI-driven efficiencies within £40 million of operational spend.

“We’ve seen widespread adoption of AI for personal productivity, but far fewer examples of AI creating meaningful value at departmental and organisational scale,” said Ruth McGuinness.

“That’s the challenge Actonomy exists to solve.

“The combination of our platform approach, refined over many years and supported by our experienced FDEs, gives us a unique edge in unlocking that AI impact for clients”.

Kainos CEO Brendan Mooney said AI represents the most significant technology shift in a generation.

“Kainos has been a leader in delivering AI solutions to clients for a decade, having invested across our people, our technology and our customer engagements. Actonomy is the next logical step of that journey,” he said.

“By bringing together a platform and deep AI engineering expertise, Actonomy gives us a focused way to help organisations capture greater value from AI.

“The early market response gives us confidence that we are addressing an important and growing need.”