Accenture’s fourth-quarter earnings not only surpassed expectations but also marked a moment when the consulting giant, which is playing a pivotal role in corporate America’s adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), disclosed its own AI-related reorg. The company initiated a “six-month business optimization program,” recording up to $865 million in related charges, which includes a new talent strategy with three prongs. These charges include two divestitures of previously acquired companies, Accenture said.
First, its primary focus is investing in upskilling people. Next it will be “exiting people in a compressed timeline where reskilling is not a viable path for the skills it needs,” and third it will identify areas to drive more operating efficiencies. CEO Julie Sweet said on the subsequent earnings call that Accenture expects savings of more than $1 billion from its business optimization program, which the company says will be invested into the business and its people. Regarding exits, she said Accenture is “trying to, in a very compressed talent timeline where we don’t have a viable path for skilling, sort of exiting people so we can get more of the skills in we need.” On the earnings call with analysts, Sweet said the company still expects to increase headcount overall in 2026.
Investing in upskilling
“We are investing in upskilling our reinventors,” Sweet said on the call, using the term that Accenture adopts for all of its employees. She said she sees a “huge difference” in how people are using AI in their individual lives that is incredibly easy and how to use it in an enterprise. Many companies are grappling with “fragmented processes and siloed organizations,” and leaders need new skills to shape a business strategy that makes the most of AI. “The workforce needs new skills to use AI, and new talent strategies and related competencies must be developed.”
“It is well recognized that advanced AI has taken the mindshare of CEOs, the C-suite, and boards faster than any technology development we’ve seen in the past two decades,” Sweet said. At the same time, she noted the widespread reporting that “value realization has been underwhelming for many,” and besides some digital-native firms, companies are finding adoption at scale to be slow going. That’s why clients are turning to Accenture, she added. To put it in perspective, Accenture has roughly 9,000 clients and reported 37 new clients with quarterly bookings greater than $100 million in the fourth quarter alone—it reported 129 such bookings for the year. That is “reinvention” at massive scale.
Later during the call, Sweet said “gen AI seemed so simple” early on in its implementation, but Accenture is increasingly finding that “it’s not the technology that is the biggest barrier. It is actually being able to get the mindset reorganized around how best to use it, the ability to do the change management, the process reinvention.” For example, she said, most CEOs would say their organization is too siloed, and many clients have a good proof of concept, “but then just can’t scale it.”
Shortly before the earnings release, Sweet sat down with Fortune’s Alyson Shontell, and elaborated on how Accenture is grappling with this transformation just as much as its clients. This included the emotional and strategic difficulties involved with the departures of senior team leaders and overhauling structural models, some of them established over many years.
Humility and courage to reinvent yourself
Sweet told Shontell, “First of all, I think we’re a good lesson in something that I’m advising CEOs all about: In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you really have to be willing to rewire your company.” She added that many times when she hears clients say that they aren’t seeing a return on investment from AI, “it’s because they’re trying to apply it to how they operate today.”
Sweet added that collaboration is “super important” but it’s “not a business strategy.” Accenture has to be the reinvention partner of choice for all its clients, she said, and that extends to Accenture’s own affairs. Along the way, they realized this was “harder than it needed to be, because our strategy and our structure were not aligned.”
Sweet told Shontell that it was clear that “we really have to change, and this change is so big, this is reversing five decades of how we’re working.” If there isn’t alignment among strategy, structure, ways of working, and ways of measuring performance, she added, then “we just simply are not going to be able to go fast enough, and it’s not delivering what our clients need.”
Restructuring on this scale presents immense challenges for employees. “For our people and our clients, it was hard…How do you have the courage to do that? That’s where you have the humility, but also this idea of embracing change and innovation.” Sweet said Accenture’s culture of change enabled it to “ultimately make the hard decisions, which is what we’ve done.”
