Karthik Narain

Group Chief Executive of Technology & Chief Technology Officer, Accenture

Search every verified Karthik Narain interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Karthik Narain, Group Chief Executive of Technology and Chief Technology Officer at Accenture, has been discussing the economic impact and enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence. In a June 2025 appearance on DisrupTV, he stated that AI will take growth to the next level, comparing it to the digital technology wave of the late 2000s, which he said led to the US IT sector growing 109% over the following decade while GDP grew 39%. He has also emphasized the need for organizations to lay a proper data and AI foundation to scale into production, noting that concepts like drift and performance degradation are features of AI, not defects. Narain has advocated for confidential computing environments to protect data privacy and prevent attacks during inferencing, and has discussed Accenture's collaboration with UC Berkeley and Opaque Systems on a confidential computing project with a government agency. Narain has also spoken about the shift from experimentation to scaled implementation of AI, advising organizations to look at AI from a value and people lens. He has described three forms of AI availability: consumable (co-pilots and chatbots), configurable (agentic systems), and engineered tech (custom, specialized AI systems for differentiation). He has stated that Accenture is investing in upgrading its talent, aiming to make 80,000 to 100,000 employees data and AI proficient within two years. In a keynote conversation at the IITBAA Leadership Conference in December 2024, he said that for 2025 he expects a shift to AI specialization and that enterprises must become "reinvention ready" to survive rapid technological change. He has also highlighted Accenture's long-standing partnership with Microsoft, noting that the two companies formed their joint venture Avanade in 2000 and helped Microsoft migrate to Azure 15 years ago.