Today we have a real treat and to go behind the curtain. Jim VandeHei and I, who write a behind the curtain column and have been writing a ton about AI because it's just so important and people are so hungry for illumination. And a place that we turn for expertise is Julie, who's the chair and CEO of Accenture. We talked to her recently for a column. We were so excited about her insights and so we were thrilled and grateful when she said let's do it live at Davos. So Julie Sweet, welcome to Axios.
Thank you, great to be here. So Julie is amazing for the breadth of visibility that she has. Accenture has how many clients?
We have 9,000 clients and counting.
And so just like an amazing window into what's happening into the biggest enterprises in the world. And something that you are big on, we're talking about on the main stage today is agentic commerce. And it's a way to look at AI that is a way to bring revenues that doesn't take away humans. So tell us what you think about agentic commerce and how that will come to pass.
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. And AI, the big promise of AI is to create something that we couldn't do before or an insight that we couldn't do before. So that is what agentic commerce is. So think of your LLM as a giant shopping mall. So where are we in that dream? First the LLM became the place where you started to learn about products. So now there's a new term. Have you heard of GEO? Search engine optimization is still relevant and now you have generative engine optimization. Then came being able to not just find out about the products, but actually buy them. We're in an early, early stage. I mean, no company has every product there, but you can now just click and buy. And then the next stage will be having agents who will go out within guardrails and purchase things without you. Now, there's a ton that has to get figured out, trust, guardrails, etc. But the first two things happened pretty quickly. And so if you think about disruption, that's payments, like Ryan McInerney was talking on stage with me today, like how what they've done to completely reimagine the credit card and how what they have to provide. It's going to impact supply chains and of course all about consumers and how they buy and how you engage. This is something that for any consumer-facing business right now you have to be paying attention to. You've got to win that battle. But it's also going to be relevant for B2B companies. So I think it's exciting because AI should create new things, new capabilities, new things, new services. And this is definitely a new area.
Now capability is far outrunning adoption. You have 9,000 clients ballpark. How many would you say are deep into AI?
So today we track how many of our clients have real projects with us around AI and that's about 1,300. And so we see that as a big opportunity. So on the one hand if you think about two and a half years ago that was three, right? So rapid in terms of clients really working with advanced AI, but it also tells you how much more opportunity there is. We think we're the leader. We have 11,000 projects, right? We're the only one that tells our revenue, right? We're like, you know, $5 billion in revenue, $11 billion in sales since we started. So just tells you it is still extremely early days.
And how do you look at the role of human talent in AI transition?
I want to be super clear. The future of AI and companies is human in the lead. I think the greatest disservice we've done...
Human in the lead as opposed to in the loop.
Human in the loop, because I think the human in the loop has been a huge disservice because companies are led by humans. When we introduced RPA, robotic process automation, you know, around 2015, we didn't suddenly say, you know, humans are in the lead loop to validate, right? Leaders at all levels will have more technology that they're managing and fewer humans. That is true from today if you compare it to 2015, right? That does not change that companies are led by humans and they will win by tapping into human creativity. And I think we have to actually get rid of that narrative because it's not inspiring to people to be a human in the loop.
So something that Axios Finish Line has written a lot about, and thank you for reading Axios Finish Line, is simplicity, efficiency. What can we look at in our life and work that we can just stop doing? And in the green room just off the stage here, you said something very interesting that was new to me. You talked about the AI transition as an opportunity to shine a light on what we have now. Share with our guests what you meant by that.
I often get asked, are people laying off because of AI? And I said, no. Companies have used AI to shine a light on their enterprise and what are the opportunities today. Many companies today have too many managers, more than they need, not because of what AI can do, but they simply have too many managers. Things have been operated the same way. Most companies talk about fragmented processes, duplication. None of that has anything to do with advanced AI. And in fact, if you think about it, if you have too many managers, you're probably slower. You know, you're not able to adopt things. But why would you create an agent to replace a manager that you actually don't need today rather than get your organization ready to be fast, to be lean? And a lot of the work we're doing today are reinventions that just start with building the foundation. And when Accenture started in marketing, for example, we use agents in our marketing. We did not give them any budget for GenAI because we had too many marketers. We didn't know where our data was. We didn't know what we were doing. And the last thing I wanted to do was give a lot of new tools to people who were not... we couldn't even look at the quality because we didn't know what we were creating.
