Accenture: Accenture spots about 10% revenue upswing via GenAI

Accenture has started to see a potential revenue upswing of about 10% with the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in some important business units, a top executive of the American technology services company told ET.

Its clients across key sectors, which include banking and insurance, consumer goods, retail and software and platforms, are beginning to see potential increase in revenues through their integration with GenAI, Senthil Ramani, global lead – data and AI at Accenture, said in an exclusive interview.

“Early results from the insurance industry indicate a revenue increase of up to 10% is possible, if companies reinvent the entire workflow of underwriting,” Ramani said.

Based on learnings from 700 client projects, companies that build a strong foundation of AI by adopting and scaling it now will be better positioned to reinvent, compete and achieve new levels of performance, he said.

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The professional services giant is also seeing promise with highest demand in the consumer industry with the hyper personalisation that is helping “change context to relevance in terms of net revenue”.

Life sciences and software and platforms, too, stand to benefit from GenAI.“The velocity with which this tech is moving, it’s so fast that it’s yet to be completely proven in some like the clinical and drug discovery process,” Ramani said. “But there is a lot of promise and hope… Even a six-month acceleration of AI and GenAI into that will mean a lot from a revenue perspective.”

The overall impact heavily varies across the 19 industries tracked by the company, he said.

Accenture, which has committed an investment of $3 billion in AI, has already signed a total of $450 million worth of GenAI deals in the first quarter of FY24 ended November. This is a 50% pump up in the pipeline from $300 million in the last six months of FY23.

Also read | Eye on GenAI, Indian IT companies seek opportunities to build and expand

According to Ramani, GenAI has been a catalyst in driving a lot of this in businesses.

The economics of GenAI, he said, is going to get normalised because it will start to become consumer tech from being engineer tech.

“Engineer tech is when it actually is expensive and you’ve got to spend on it. But consumer tech is when you and I can use it on our phones… And that’s definitely starting to happen,” he said.

In a bid to become an AI-first company, Accenture has also doubled its headcount in data and AI to 40,000 globally.

“So far, we have trained 600,000 employees globally on the fundamentals of AI. This year, we will train 250,000 of our people globally on the fundamentals of generative AI. We have already mapped over 30,000 people globally to new and emerging roles in data and AI,” Ramani said.

Over 20,000 of these people are in India and the country will play a significant role in Accenture’s journey towards becoming a AI first company, he added.

The company has made six acquisitions in the data and AI space in financial year 2023 and in financial year 2024 so far.

Accenture is tracking over 1,020 foundational models in the GenAI space today and Ramani suggests that organisations must focus on their core competencies to drive those up the value chain.

Speaking of AI models and partnerships to use AI, he said, “Some cases will just need prompting, some cases will need fine-tuning. In some cases, you can even do something called pre-training to effectively train the model.”

Ramani said the learning component is going to be important.

“This is an alarming statistic that less than 5% of organisations globally are spending on reskilling of people and educating them on GenAI, so 95% of people in organisations need to do that far more… The best learned folks are going to be the fastest on this because the technology is moving so fast,” he said.