Accenture CEO: AI is now required at work (with Julie Sweet) | Rapid Response

Today AI is how we do work, right? So I don't see that as coercion in any way. You have to work in the way we work in order to be successful here. When I was selected as the CEO, a big reason was because I hadn't grown up here and I was willing to change things and just ask the question like why can't we do this?

Thanks for having me, Bob.

Well, Bob, it's interesting if I just start with Iran, right? Because you know I'm getting actually a lot of questions particularly Europe where you know if you think about potential energy crunch it's expected to hit harder in Europe than say you know the impact on the US. Everyone believes that this environment where you know energy is a risk right is just their new norm and actually there's more optimism because if you can compare this to you know 2022 right when the Ukraine war started, Europe is in a much better position from a resilience perspective and it's a theme that we've been seeing for quite some time. You know, I got the same questions even a couple months ago when we had, you know, sort of again this whole issue around tariffs and imposing them is that CEOs are really just expecting the unexpected like it's being built in and that's why resilience is such a big theme. There's also the big questions are continuing on AI etc. But I wanted to address kind of the latest which is the impact of the Iran war.

The reality is as a CEO, you can't bake anything into your plan simply because it is so unknown. And that's where transparency really matters is being able to say here's what we know, here's what we don't know, and then we're making our action plan with those things in mind. Right? And so when you think about like when do you know to act or not act, in my view, you're always acting. It's intentional decisions. It's an action to say because I don't know this, I can't alter my plans. One of the biggest risks right now is even less around the impact on the economy from what's going on on the Strait of Hormuz and energy. The bigger risk that many companies are talking about is do we have a cyber attack or attack on critical infrastructure that spins out of that and for that there are actions you can take right because we're helping clients look at their cyber resilience right there's already been a big growth area for us because AI itself has increased the attack surface but when you think about what the risks are you can't really tell what's going to happen on the energy front, but knowing what do you know, what don't you know, and are there actions that can be taken? And then you act. And that's why right now, you know, there's a million different scenarios that are really bad for the global economy, but there are just scenarios right now, right? And so trying to take actions, build it into, you know, your guidance and your plan, you know, could result in a lot worse impact on your company than simply understanding whether or not those unknowables really prevent you from executing.

So first of all we have to remember the technology while changing fast is still really early and there's a lot of actual value that companies are doing before they get AI and advanced AI has been kind of a catalyst. So let me give you an example. We work with a pharma company that takes drugs to market and there's a process that once the drug is approved you have lots and lots of regulatory stuff. So like what you write to explain it to the physician takes a long time. We've said for a long time like you could actually cut that instead of it being months it could be much shorter if you change the process to be standardized if you keep your data in all one place. None of that requires Gen AI or advanced AI but for most companies they haven't done that. Okay. So when we worked with them because AI advanced AI was now the catalyst because that enables if you have all the standardized processes you to actually create the content faster right but the first piece always could have been done and hadn't been done. And so much of the work that we're doing is actually work that companies are saying, 'Okay, wait a minute. Before I spend the money on the advanced AI, I should clean up my processes that are fragmented, right? I should standardize things. I should not have as many people in middle management like completely not because of agents, but why would I spend money to create an agent to replace a manager that I shouldn't have in the first place?'

Yeah, I mean I think there was this view at the beginning where companies thought because it's so easy oh are they just going to do it all right do like I just ask this model and this model is going to tell me how to change my company 100% that is not you know the models don't know how to change the company, right? And if you spend money on your current structure, just replacing it, you're at best going to get incremental value when the real value is actually reinvent everything you do. And that reinvention doesn't start just with the advanced AI, but a lot of really basic lessons where companies haven't had the will to fix it. I tell it with CEOs every day like in three years you should be able to tell what did I use AI to make the impossible possible because if the only thing you're doing is sort of incrementally improving how you're operating right you're not going to get the biggest value the biggest is in the core operations of a company like things you're going to be able to do with asset management and any industrial company things you're going to be able to do with the grid and the utilities, the tech isn't completely there yet. It's still error-prone, right? That's why everybody's tracing how long does the tech work, right? The memory piece of it. And so where you get value today is things like customer anything with like customers because those are short interactions. So the tech has to continue to improve and the strategy has to be I'm going to use this tech to do something I couldn't do before.

First of all, it is hard. And the reason why it's hard is it requires your leaders to understand what AI does and this is so different than the digital era right understanding digital technology and moving to the cloud and stuff a lot of it was plumbing so as a leader you didn't have to understand it because it was being handled by the tech folks to be AI first you have to say what can AI actually do so you have to understand things like oh wait a minute it has to have a certain amount of memory to actually be able to do something. You have to understand what it's actually able to be accurate about and then think about your business to say where can I get a big enough return for using something that's like in this cost. So it starts with leaders having to understand technology in a totally different way. So like when ChatGPT first emerged in you know November 2022 the people who received the most training initially were actually my top 50 leaders because I knew that if they didn't understand the power they would not be able to help us actually transform how we're delivering our services and what our clients could use it for. So leader learning is a huge unlock and then AI first is asking yourself right is this something that AI could do versus me just approaching it and it's something as simple as Bob like the way I used to gather information you know there I call somebody and I'd say go do the research right and now like I have an agent that can go like gather everything synthesize it still needs to be read it's not always accurate by the way. But like that's a completely different way of thinking. Like that's like a small example, but imagine if that's throughout everything you do with your business. You have to first ask the question, can we approach this totally differently?

I'm spending time literally every day, right? Learning, getting the latest updates, interrogating things like I'll read something like oh this latest release and I'll ping my team you know and say okay guys like you know let's talk about what this really means what did we see in advance a lot of the technology that's being released today is not being tested in enterprises first which is a big shift stuff that's being released before it's actually been tested at scale. In September we introduced AI agentic AI training for every person at Accenture, whether you work in HR or you're, you know, a technologist, and it's an hour of computer-based training, it's two hours of in-person training, and then we have another two hours of a course that we created with Stanford. Everybody needs to understand this wherever they are because it's going to become a bigger and bigger part of how we're operating as a company in addition to what we're selling. And because a lot of the tools are being introduced really at a consumer level before they're at an enterprise level.

Well, no. I mean, we're using it internally. The thing that we bring to ourselves and to our clients is we understand where the technology is and where it should be used and where it's not ready to be used. Right? So, what you're pointing out something different. You know, a lot of people ask me about entry-level jobs and why are they going, 'Wait, we're hiring globally in all our major markets more entry-level jobs this year than we did last year.' What's the number one advantage? The number one advantage for the college graduates we're bringing in is that they are much more AI fluent than someone who's even been here two or three years, right? Because they're using it in their education. They're using it every day.