What’s Behind the 'Reinvention' Mantra at Accenture?
Accenture now sees GenAI not as a tool it offers, but as the medium it operates in. In reshaping its own organization around that principle, it’s sending a clear message to the market: reinvention begins at home
News
- India’s data boom is just getting started, study finds
- India’s Digital Future Hinges on Data Quality, NITI Aayog Says
- India’s Back Offices Become New Frontline in Global Cyber Threats
- ChatGPT Users Show Lower Brain Activity and Recall, Study Finds
- GenAI will shrink 'corporate' ranks, Amazon's Jassy says
- Apex Audit Body Taps AI for Faster, Smarter Audits: Report
In a sweeping structural shift announced at its latest earnings call last week, consulting and technology giant Accenture Plc said it would fold its five core service lines—Strategy, Consulting, Technology, Operations, and Song—into a single, unified engine, dubbed ‘Reinvention Services.’
The name isn’t just cosmetic. It captures what Accenture says clients want most right now: not incremental improvements, but wholesale change powered by generative AI.
“GenAI has been a catalyst for reinvention,” said chief executive officer Julie Sweet in the earnings call. “But GenAI alone is just a tool. The work needed to use GenAI to create value at scale is substantial.”
If that sounds like a high-stakes bet, the numbers suggest it’s already paying off. Accenture booked $1.5 billion in GenAI work in the third quarter alone, bringing its total for the fiscal year to $4.1 billion and generating $1.8 billion in revenue.
What’s changing, the company says, isn’t just the tools but the type of work being done, and how quickly clients want to move.
In the conference call, Sweet described a shift in mindset: “Our clients have moved from pause to focus and leapfrog.”
After a brief period of uncertainty, companies are now no longer cautiously exploring AI, but are racing to embed it everywhere. That means legacy tech transformations now come with AI built in from the start. Cloud migrations aren’t just about infrastructure anymore but about laying the foundation for intelligent operations, with Accenture looking to build the scaffolding to support that urgency.
At Pfizer, Accenture said it has deployed a platform called GenWizard, where AI agents handle IT support by learning from past cases and resolving issues automatically. The system reduces manual intervention and flags recurring problems before they snowball.
In the UK, the IT firm helped financial co-operative Nationwide Building Society launch a GenAI-powered security platform migrated massive volumes of security logs to the cloud and enhanced threat detection, while cutting deployment time by 40%.
At Nestlé, Accenture developed a secure cloud-based platform that uses AI-powered digital twins, or 3D virtual replicas of physical products, to streamline content creation and localization. This allows the company’s marketing teams to generate campaign-ready assets without repeated reshoots, digitally adjusting packaging and integrating products into various formats tailored to different markets and channels. Accenture said the system has already produced thousands of digital assets and reduced the time and cost of scaling digital twin production by over 70%.
Clients across industries, including shipbuilding, insurance, consumer goods, and pharmaceuticals, are increasingly integrating GenAI into core operations rather than treating it as an add-on.
Which brings us back to the structural overhaul. The company’s new Reinvention Services unit is meant to break down internal silos and mirror the way clients now think about transformation: horizontally, not vertically.
As Sweet put it, “We will be able to bring more leading solutions faster and embed data and AI more easily into our solutions and delivery.” That applies internally, too. Accenture now has 75,000 people in its data and AI workforce, with a goal of hitting 80,000 by the end of next year. It has already logged 38 million hours of training this fiscal year—up 18% from last year.
“The way I would think about the change in the growth model—it is being driven by what we see in the market in terms of our ability to grow. It is not being driven by cost cutting,” Sweet said on the call.
That belief is guiding a broader structural shift. Accenture now sees GenAI not as a tool it offers, but as the medium it operates in. In reshaping its own organization around that principle, it’s sending a clear message to the market: reinvention begins at home.
