Auticon - Neuroinclusion and Technology Consultancy for Work

Auticon is an IT and technology consultancy that employs autistic adults as its core workforce, placing them as consultants into client organisations for roles spanning software development, data services, quality assurance, penetration testing and Salesforce administration. It describes itself as a majority-autistic organisation, meaning most of its own staff are autistic, and its offer to employers is straightforward: technical delivery carried out by neurodivergent professionals, supported by a structure built around their working needs rather than around masking or conforming to a neurotypical office norm.

The company traces its origins to 2011, when Dirk Müller-Remus founded it in Berlin after his own autistic son struggled to find employment despite clear ability. He matched that gap against a separate shortage — the ongoing demand for IT specialists — and built a consultancy designed to connect autistic technical talent with companies that needed it. In 2022 the Berlin-founded business merged with Unicus, a Norwegian social enterprise founded in 2009 by Lars Johansson-Kjellerød that had been doing comparable work across the Nordic countries. The combined organisation now describes itself as the largest autistic-majority company in the world, with more than 500 employees operating across roughly fifteen markets, including Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US. The UK arm launched in 2016 and is run from an office in Bermondsey, London.

Auticon’s operating model has three parts. Consultants are recruited and technically trained; they are then matched to client assignments based on both their technical skillset and their individual working preferences, typically working on-site or embedded within a client’s team; and throughout the placement a dedicated job coach acts as a liaison between consultant and client, managing expectations on both sides and addressing anything affecting the consultant’s working conditions as it arises. In the UK this coaching function is led by Russell Botting, who joined in 2018 and brings a clinical psychology background along with prior NHS experience in autism diagnosis. The stated purpose of the coaching layer is to safeguard consultants’ wellbeing at work while helping client managers understand and make use of a neurodivergent working style, rather than expecting consultants to adapt to standard office practice unaided.

Beyond placing individual consultants, auticon sells a separate line of neuroinclusion services to client organisations: training programmes (some of which are CPD-accredited), advisory work, ongoing coaching-as-a-service, and a maturity assessment intended to help an employer gauge how genuinely inclusive its existing practices are. The company also runs auticon Labs, an internal unit developing tools aimed at problems autistic professionals commonly encounter in workplace technology. On the workforce side, auticon reports that 32% of its consultants hold a Master’s degree or higher, underlining that the talent pool it draws on is highly qualified even though conventional recruitment routes often overlook it. Named clients include KPMG, NatWest, Virgin, Deloitte, PwC and Intellect Design Arena.

Internally, auticon publishes its own workforce survey figures rather than independent outcome studies: 82% of its employees report feeling able to be their authentic selves at work, 82% report feeling valued, and 80% report improved wellbeing and increased confidence since joining. These are self-reported figures from the company’s own staff base, not third-party verified outcomes, and should be read as such. The organisation frames its broader case in labour-market terms — citing that an estimated 15–20% of the population is neurodivergent, that neurodivergent unemployment runs several times higher than for the disabled population generally, and that a global technology skills shortage is forecast to reach 85.2 million workers by 2030 — positioning autistic technical talent as a practical response to that shortage rather than as a matter of charity or goodwill alone.