Accenture Places $3B AI Bet Following Multiple Acquisitions

‘Companies that build a strong foundation of AI by adopting and scaling it now, where the technology is mature and delivers clear value, will be better positioned to reinvent, compete and achieve new levels of performance. Our clients have complex environments, and at a time when the technology is changing rapidly, our deep understanding of ecosystem solutions allows us to help them navigate quickly and cost effectively to make smart decisions,’ says Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, in a prepared statement.

Global IT solutions provider Accenture Tuesday said it plans to invest $3 billion over three years in its data and AI practice as a way to help its clients to be able to quickly leverage AI in their own businesses.

The new $3-billion investment comes after a spate of acquisitions of AI-focused solution providers the New York-based company has made in the past year.

The $3 billion will be invested in several areas aimed at helping Accenture work with clients to develop their AI strategies, AI operating models, AI business cases, and the digital core architecture they need to take advantage of the technology, the company said.

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This includes investing in developing the assets and industry solutions needed to increase its AI capabilities, as well as double the number of employees focused on AI to 80,000 people via a mix of hiring, training, and more acquisitions, the company said.

Accenture is also investing in its new AI Navigator for Enterprise, a generative AI-based platform to help its clients define their business cases, make decisions, and navigate their AI journeys from choosing their architectures to implementation and compliance.

The company has also set up the Center for Advance AI, a unit within Accenture aimed at making the R&D and other investment to take advantage of generative AI and other emerging AI technologies.

Also new are pre-built industry and functional models to take advantage of generative AI and create accelerators for AI across 19 distinct industries.

Accenture was not available to provide further information by press time.

However, Accenture chairperson and CEO Julie Sweet said in a prepared statement that the investment will help clients move from interest in AI to action and value.

“Companies that build a strong foundation of AI by adopting and scaling it now, where the technology is mature and delivers clear value, will be better positioned to reinvent, compete and achieve new levels of performance,” Sweet said. “Our clients have complex environments, and at a time when the technology is changing rapidly, our deep understanding of ecosystem solutions allows us to help them navigate quickly and cost effectively to make smart decisions.”

Accenture has built a solid AI practice via a combination of organic investments and multiple acquisitions, with the pace of acquisitions increasing in the past year or so.

The company early this month acquired Nextira, and AWS premier partner with experience in AI, machine learning, and data analytics to help clients build, launch, and optimize high performance computing environments.

Accenture in May invested in Stardog, the developer of Stardog Enterprise Knowledge Graphs, a technology that combines data from multiple sources and makes it machine-understandable without changing the underlying data. The aim is to allow such data to be easily searched, and it is being touted as a way to improve searches using generative AI.

Accenture in March acquired Flutura, a company which “democratizes AI for engineers, enabling manufacturing and other asset-intensive companies with the carbon intelligence to reduce emissions, energy consumption and lost output due to unplanned downtime of industrial assets,” said Senthil Ramani, senior managing director and Accenture’s Applied Intelligence leader for growth markets, in a statement at the time.

Accenture in April of 2021 acquired Core Compete, a developer of cloud analytics and cloud-native artificial intelligence technologies.