Accenture Will Put $3 Billion Into AI To Help Companies Reinvent Themselves Faster

Accenture, a global company that provides IT services, said on Tuesday that it would invest $3 billion in its data and AI practise over the next three years to help its customers in all kinds of industries. The company said it will hire, buy, and teach 80,000 people with AI skills to double its current number.

The company said that its expanded data and AI practise will offer new industry solutions and pre-built models that will help companies in 19 industries drive value in the coming days.

The move shows how fast companies are trying to improve their products with generative AI, a technology that companies like Microsoft and Alphabet say will change how many jobs are done.

Accenture is putting money into AI because it laid off about 19,000 people in March because of a slowdown caused by high prices and rising interest rates.

“There is a lot of interest in all areas of AI that has never been seen before,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture. “The large investments we are making in our data and AI practise will help our clients move from interest to action to value in a responsible way with clear business cases.”

The company has more than 1,450 AI patents and open patent applications around the world, as well as hundreds of large-scale client solutions in fields like marketing, retail, security, and manufacturing. Accenture uses AI in all of its service delivery methods. Its market-leading tools, such as myWizard, SynOps, and MyNav, help thousands of clients improve efficiency, gain insights, and get more value faster.

It is currently working on generative AI projects with many clients. For example, it is helping a hotel group handle customer questions and a judicial system make sense of information about the judicial process from hundreds of thousands of complicated documents.

Accenture said in a press release that its new “AI Navigator for Enterprise” is a generative AI-based platform that will help clients describe business cases, make choices, navigate AI journeys, choose architectures, and understand algorithms and models to drive value in a responsible way. The platform will include tools that will speed up responsible AI practises and compliance programmes. These tools will build on what Accenture has already done.

“AI will be a megatrend over the next 10 years, changing industries, companies, and the way we live and work as generative AI changes 40% of all working hours,” said Accenture Technology’s group chief executive Paul Daugherty.

Daugherty said, “Our expanded Data & AI practise brings together the full power and breadth of Accenture to create industry-specific solutions that will help our clients use AI’s full potential to reshape their strategy, technology, and ways of working, driving innovation and value more responsibly and faster than ever before.”

The company also said that it will invest in new and current relationships across its industry-leading cloud, data, and AI ecosystems to change the kind of work it does for clients.

On Monday, Salesforce doubled its venture capital fund for generative AI startups to $500 million and launched an AI Cloud service that brings all of its AI-powered products under one roof in order to attract businesses.