UK-based Decision Intelligence company Quantexa has been awarded a GBP 175 million, ten-year partnership by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to modernise the tax authority's data infrastructure and enable sovereign, governed AI across its operations. The contract represents one of the largest Decision Intelligence deployments in the UK public sector.
The programme will support the modernisation of HMRC's core data infrastructure, providing the tax authority with a more connected view of its data to improve operational performance, identify tax at risk, and strengthen controls. It also lays the groundwork for advanced AI capabilities designed to support wider transformation efforts, from closing the tax gap to improving the customer experience for UK taxpayers.
Platform capabilities and deployment scope
Quantexa's Decision Intelligence Platform addresses a structural challenge common to large public sector organisations: fragmented data held across disparate systems that limits the quality and speed of decision-making. The platform unifies fragmented data into a governed foundation for advanced analytics, enabling augmented and automated decision-making while maintaining the sovereignty, auditability, and explainability that public sector AI deployments require.
The deployment at HMRC will apply these capabilities across key workflows, with the stated objectives of protecting public funds, enhancing efficiency, and delivering faster, more seamless customer service. The programme also supports HMRC's broader digital transformation agenda, including efforts to address the tax gap, the difference between tax owed and tax collected.
Public sector and regulatory context
The HMRC contract arrives as governments internationally face growing pressure to accelerate digital transformation while managing the complexity of data sovereignty, AI governance, explainability requirements, and ageing infrastructure. The tension between the speed of AI adoption and the accountability standards required in public sector decision-making has become a central challenge for technology deployments of this nature.
For HMRC, the modernisation of its data foundation is a prerequisite for deploying AI reliably at scale. Tax authorities handle large volumes of sensitive data across fragmented legacy systems, and decisions made on the basis of that data carry significant financial and legal consequences for both the authority and taxpayers. A governed, unified data layer reduces the risk of errors, improves the defensibility of AI-assisted decisions, and supports compliance with the accountability standards expected of public sector AI use.
The scale and duration of the contract, ten years at GBP 175 million, signal a long-term institutional commitment to data modernisation rather than a point-in-time technology upgrade, reflecting the depth of the infrastructure change involved.
