New Accenture Microsoft Business Group Excited About AI, Vertical Opportunities

… use techniques like cloud-native and container-based solutions as Azure provides through the Kubernetes framework to really open the acceleration that they need to drive digital transformation today for their businesses and align that rapid development of products and services.

The second place where we really get to focus around really making sure that capability that Microsoft has is within security and our strength and capability within our security business. A third item will be around data and analytics and the investment we’ve already made. It’s about scaling that and leaning into that industry that industry dialogue.

As those workloads get shifted again into the cloud, it opens up the opportunity to think differently about how you can operationalize how an organization works on the insights of digital on the inside. The fourth major pillar for us is around Industry X.0. Our sort of real strength in our Industry X.0 space is to really drive some differentiation using AI and data analytics to really drive maximize value there. And the fifth one is obviously to take the Microsoft Workplace and Office 365 and Teams, and to tie that in to the way we talk about workforce of the future.

CF: Through this new group, to what extent do you see providing managed services versus just pure advice and consulting and integration services?

EM: I don’t think this is as simple as it once was, because if you look at implementing an AI-based solution, because of the very nature that AI is learning, it’s not like you deliver a solution and you either run it, or you hand it back to the client and they run it themselves in some kind of service model. It becomes much more around a continual rotation and a continual learning, and I think we have to go case by case. You end up with a blurring of the lines between what we would have considered previously to be traditional consulting versus traditional outsourcing. It becomes much more of a blended-teams approach around the different types of commercial models as we start to see maturity growing around some of these solutions. We have an expectation over the size of the consulting capability versus the delivery capability, if you will. There is the need to run it, but it is evolutionary in that journey rather than setting targets.

CF: Where do you sense that the needle is moving? Do you see more clients across the board that want you to manage these processes for them, or do they want to run it themselves?

EM: We increasingly see clients are wanting to feel more in control of the content — to really understand how their business is running but wanting support from organizations like ours to really help them really think about how they can run those solutions and processes in new ways that they couldn’t before. So you end up in this in a very collaborative way and working much closer in much more of a partnership than an individual deal-by-deal basis.

For example, the telcos, who are really, really trying to face …