Companies see AI as a growth engine: Accenture CEO
New Delhi: Julie Sweet is CEO of Accenture, the world’s largest IT consulting and services company, with revenue of $70 billion. After a 10-year legal career, Sweet joined Accenture as general counsel in 2010 and was appointed CEO in 2019. In her first interaction with the media in India, where Accenture employs 3.5 lakh people, Sweet spoke about AI’s transformational capabilities, how LLMs are becoming the new malls, and AI’s impact on talent.Companies building AI tech are making big investments. How is business adoption of AI?Demand is significant and shifting. Our latest quarterly survey of C-suites across 20 countries found that the biggest value for AI is driving growth. This is a shift from the discussion about productivity and efficiency. For clients, it is the old maxim: You cannot cut your way to growth, and the bigger opportunity is to drive growth. For example, LLMs are going to become a new mall. This is an entirely new channel and very different from what it was in search of. All the main model providers and big tech ecosystems are creating the technology now (to buy on LLMs). To show up in these models and engage a customer, businesses must have different kinds of content and enable the ability to buy. That is like making the impossible possible. Small and medium-sized businesses around the world now suddenly have a marketplace they did not have before. AI’s productivity improvements are great, but more importantly, that is giving companies more capacity to invest in AI for growth and create new products.Equity investors seem wary of the impact of AI tools on IT services. How do you see this?AI is very early in terms of technology. So, there is a fair amount of uncertainty about how AI develops and what the impacts are. The only certainty is that companies need to adopt it and they need help. There are all these debates around models, chips, and energy. What no one is debating is that adoption is the biggest barrier, and that is where Accenture can help, with its industry expertise, functional expertise, and ability to execute at scale. We did the biggest reinventions over the last several years; we have the largest AI workforce and experience of any of our peers in terms of actual execution. So, we are focused on this big opportunity.As AI becomes more autonomous, who is accountable – the board, the CEO, or the developer?Humans remain in the lead. Governance does not change because technology evolves. Companies have boards and CEOs who are responsible for everything that happens. Leaders manage far more technology today than a decade ago, yet accountability has not shifted. But responsibility ultimately rests with the board and CEO.Accenture is stopping AI-specific revenue disclosures. How should investors track progress?When ChatGPT surged, there was uncertainty about its business impact. In 2023, we reported $100 million in advanced AI sales to demonstrate leadership and transparency-rapid growth, but from a small base. None of our peers broke out pure advanced AI revenues the way we did. At the time, most of the work was proof-of-concept, so it was easy to isolate. We reported only advanced AI, not the classical AI we delivered for years. Now it is integrated into large transformations, making separation less meaningful. That reflects market maturity. Ultimately, investors judge us on top-line growth and bottom-line results. AI’s value lies in driving enterprise-wide impact, not sitting in a silo.Close to half of your 7.8 lakh employees are in India. Give us a sense of the role your India employees are playing.In India, we will hire more people this year than last. At the same time, how we onboard and train talent is changing dramatically. Graduates today arrive far more AI-native than those who entered the workforce 5 years ago. Entry-level employees are critical because they bring new ways of working and thinking. Everyone at Accenture is being trained in agentic AI, and India has one of the largest AI workforces in the world, tightly integrated with our hubs in the US, Europe, and Japan. India is not just a delivery centre – it is central to our AI capability build-out.What is your advice for youngsters and universities, given how AI is changing job roles?You have to walk in with AI fluency. That was not true 3 years ago. So, it is absolutely critical that universities work with the private sector to truly understand the skills employers need now and make sure that their youth have those skills.
