New Accenture Microsoft Business Group Excited About AI, Vertical Opportunities

… the challenge, and they’re starting to think of how they’re going to rotate their organization. They need to transform their core. They need to grow that core and they need to scale into new revenue streams, and they need to balance that and do that around a wide pivot. What organizations are not keen to do is just hand over all of the new skills to Accenture. What we’re doing actively with them is standing up scrums or squads where we’ve got our teams working collaboratively together, and as they’re able to grow that capability, we can move people into the next piece of work that needs to be done or their teams are able to take more on.

CF: What is the biggest challenge in bringing AI to clients. Do they want it, are they afraid of it, do they think it’s still a lot of hype? Where can they bring it into their business in a in a way that is demonstrable to their business but also their employees and customers can easily embrace?

EM: I think there [are] a couple of areas and we’re starting to see increased maturity in certain functional capability. I would argue it is much more about automation and it’s using AI to drive improved automation. There has been a relatively good uptick around using AI to drive better automation experiences which drive cost savings.

CF: Speaking of the AI functionalities in Azure, there’s the Microsoft Bot Framework, and of course you have on the front-end Microsoft Teams, which has its bot capabilities. Do you see Teams and its AI functionality serving as an entrée into some of these capabilities?

EM: I think that’s part of the opportunity for us. When we think about workforce transformation, this is more than just helping people be more efficient and working virtually. It’s about properly bringing AI to change the way we manage our workloads and understand where we’re spending our focus time by helping prioritize our inboxes and our calendars. It’s still early days on that journey with Teams, but this is super exciting in terms of the opportunity to bring AI to the employee as a as an assistant in a way that goes well beyond just the natural language-processing benefits that we’ve seen with Siri and Alexa and the like. This is where I think you start to get real value from an employee’s perspective and it’s something we were really working on.

CF: And Accenture is doing this for its own employees. How is that going?

EM: As you are probably aware, Accenture is one of the – if not the – biggest buyers of Microsoft technologies in the enterprise. And the other thing that we’re really thinking about is when we look at the skills and capabilities of our people. If we can use AI to understand and accurately capture the skills that people have, and if we can embed AI into the way we work to understand how they’re spending their day, it’s easier for us to continually offer experiences to our people to help them rotate their own skill sets.

CF: How are you doing it and bringing it to your clients?

EM: We have a program that’s been running within our operations teams, and this is where we’re doing business-process outsourcing. We’ve already automated over 35,000 roles for clients over the past three years, but those people have all been able to reskill by offering them opportunities. Like your role is being automated, but you have all this …