Name: How Accenture’s CEO Took the Leap From Law to Consulting
Uploaded: 2025-09-04
Duration: 11 min 25 s

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet leads one of the world’s largest workforces—and is navigating an era defined by AI disruption, geopolitical volatility, and shifting global markets. In this segment of the Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry vodcast, she shares how she advises fellow CEOs to reinvent their companies, reflects on her unconventional leap from law to CEO, and opens up about the lessons that shaped her rise to one of the most powerful roles in business. 

How Accenture’s CEO Took the Leap From Law to Consulting

Alyson Shontell sits down with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet

Leadership

Julie Sweet shares how she her unconventional path from lawyer to CEO—and what it takes to rewire companies in the age of AI disruption.

From law to the corner office: Accenture CEO Julie Sweet reflects on her rise and why today’s leaders must rewire their companies to withstand AI and shifting markets.

You are able to take a lot of noise and just be like this is the path going with conviction. How do you make those decisions? It starts with a great team. We are constantly challenging each other and our assumptions, and that makes me able to make decisions with a lot of confidence. AI is transforming every industry, and it puts even the biggest companies at risk. Top venture capitalists. The Node COSLA predicts that the 2030s will see the demise of more Fortune 500 companies than at any point in history. This transformation is the number one thing on every Fortune 500 CEO's mind, especially for Julie Sweet, who runs one of the largest workforces in the world with more than 770,000 employees. In order to capture the opportunity with AI, you have to be willing to rewire your company. I recently sat down with Julie about how she's advising other CEOs to transform their companies and how she's trying to keep AI from eating Accenture's own lunch. Our conversation was packed full of advice and it was personal. Her journey from a small California town to becoming one of the most powerful people in global business is inspiring, especially as she has battled and beaten cancer now twice. I'm your host, Importance's editor in chief, Allison Chantel. Please enjoy the first episode of my podcast, Fortune 500, Titans and Disruptors of Industry with Accenter CEO Julie Sweet. Julie, it is so nice to be here with you today. Thank you for joining me. It's the inaugural Fortune 500 podcast podcast episode of Titans and Destructors of Industry, and who better to have in you. Well, thank you, Allison, and I'm really honored to be your first, so that's that's really exciting for me. So thank you for having me. Since becoming CEO, Sweet has nearly doubled Accenture's value and grown its workforce to over 770,000 employees across 52 countries. That's more than 20 times the size of a key rival, McKinsey, ranked number 211 on our Fortune Global 500 list. It's also among the mere 5% of Fortune Global 500 companies that's run by a woman. First off, you're on Accenture. You've run it since 2019. It is in the top five largest workforces in the world. On top of that, you generate some of the largest revenue in the world. You're number 211 on our Fortune 50 Global 500 list, right, that ranks companies by revenue. I think it's like $65 billion. In a year or something that a center does and then also just you are incredibly powerful. You rank number 11 on our most powerful people in business lists. So I'd just love to start with an economic snapshot from your vantage point. What are the major things on your radar that are affecting your business, but also the businesses of all the CEOs that seek your counsel and work with the center? Well, there's a lot of trends that are literally affecting the world, right? So one, the obvious one, has been tariffs and trade. And that affects countries differently, but there isn't a country that's not being touched by that, so that's one. Second, there has been an ongoing shift in geopolitics, and you know, sometimes people say to me like, oh, right now it's so volatile and uncertain, and you know, I've been CEO for 6 years and I'm kind of like, that's been the story of the last 6 years and And we'll talk about that later, I'm sure, but you've been seeing a shift in geopolitics for some time, like the role of the Middle East. We look at Southeast Asia as things have changed with China, and so making sure that you understand the opportunities and the challenges. So oftentimes people think about the supply chain, but it's also a huge opportunity and are you positioned to take advantage of where growth may come. In the future, so those are two of the big ones. And of course then you can't go, you know, you can't walk past AI, so you'll notice I didn't start there, the obvious one. When I think about AI, the thing that for me is so exciting is that, you know, the last several years have been a series of what were once black swan events. And now the CEOs around the world have a powerful set of tools that they didn't have for some of those events before. Now those tools are hard and they're complex and they have a lot of different, you know, aspects to consider. But as I look forward, it's, you know, very rare as a CEO that you're handed something that is brand new, wasn't part of the toolkit, and allows you to look at the world and really shape your future, and we talk a lot about You know, how do you set the next performance frontier, and AI is definitely something that allows you to think very differently about your future trajectory. So those are the three of the big ones. There's more demographic changes we can go on and on, but those are 3 that I'm talking to a ton of CEOs about, and of course underlying all of that are the talent implications. Unlike traditional strategy focused consulting firms, Accenture doesn't just advise. It also takes on operations and services on behalf of its clients, and its clients span a wide range of industries from banks like Citi and Barclays to Nestle, Saudi Aramco, and pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer. Since we took the helm in 2019, she's helped boost the company's revenue more than 50% to $65 billion. But Sweet's path to CEO was far from typical. In her years before joining Accenture, Sweet had a high profile legal career, earning a scholarship to Claremont McKenna College, graduating from Columbia Law, and making partner at an elite firm within 8 years. In 2007, she landed on the cover of American Lawyer as dealmaker of the Year. So when you decide to come to the center, by the way, you've already had a tremendous career as a lawyer, a career that I think most people wouldn't have said, Oh, I'm just going to forget this path. You rose to partner at one of the top law firms within 8 years, and I'm curious, why did you make that career change? Why say I'm going to go into this crazy tech consulting firm that I don't really don't know that much about, and I'm going to leave this really cushy setup I've created for myself and go try something totally different. How do you weigh a big career change like that? Well, and Allison, one of the things I look back to and now that's like not many people realized was I made the change when I had a 2 year old and a 3 year old as well. I respect that. I took this job when I had a newborn, exactly, which I'm like it all up at the same time. Exactly. You're like, I'm like, oh my gosh, what was I thinking? Well, you know, it is interesting because I was in my office and I love my law firm, so I love the job and I got a call and my assistant had had stepped away and I, this was like a very You know, like a law firm where you had somebody answer always answers your phone, you know, and we had like iced tea delivered 3 times a day to my office, you know, I had a beautiful office. And so I pick up the phone because she'd stepped away and it was a head hunter talking about like this great opportunity and You know, I look back, I was 42, and my father had actually just passed away recently, and I think that definitely affected me because he died quite young at 68. So I'm like listening to this and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to take a meeting. And when I did that, I said to myself like, I know I'm 42, I'm super successful, and I absolutely know what my future is going to be like at Cravath, right? Like because it's like the deals would change, but I made partner and I was like, OK, I could see my future and Then I went and I interviewed with Accenture, who I knew about because I'd done actually a securities deal for a competitor where, you know, we had to like learn about Accenture as a competitor and so I respected the company. Their CEO Bill Green was incredibly charismatic. He had the best line ever for me. Like I, I just fell for a hook line and sinker in my interview. He said, I'm not looking for a lawyer, which is kind of funny because he was hiring a general counsel. He said, I'm looking for a business leader with legal experience. And I'm like, that's what I want to be. And so I ended up taking, you know, taking the leap, and it was the it was the right time. And you know, when I, you know, think back to it, I'm sure my dad's passing had something to do with it, but also just the possibilities of making an impact and uh you know, I've just, I was so fortunate because I absolutely love Accenture. It's an amazing company. I was very privileged to join and I feel really privileged every day to leave this place. So it sounds like a big new opportunity and challenge, a chance to try something new, but to really expand who you were. So you've said that when you were 42 and you came in as general counsel to Accenture, you didn't have the skill set then to be the. CEO, but you're the CEO. So what happened? What was missing and how did you work on those things and know to work on those things? Well, just to start with, I didn't understand technology when I joined, and Accenture is all about technology, and I figured out pretty quickly that If I wanted to be the business leader with legal experience, I had to deeply understand the business. And so after I'd been here nearly 12 months, probably, I made friends with someone named Bhaskar Ghosh, who was running our India technology practice at the time. He would eventually become our global head of technology and now my chief strategy officer, and I asked him, I said, Will you teach me technology? And it really was because I thought of myself as a business leader and I didn't deeply understand the business that we were in. And so we used to meet every 2 weeks for about 18 months, and he would send me off to meet people to learn things. I still remember the guy that taught me, you know, what cloud was, and and that really set me on a very different path because I think my boss at the time, Pierre Naner, saw me differently too. He saw me showing up differently and so did my colleagues. And so anywhere in do it because sometimes it can feel like, oh, I just want to act like I know this thing, but I really don't know this thing, but You seem pretty fearless about just going in and saying like nope, don't know it, tell me everything. I think one of my superpowers is asking for help, you know, I, and maybe that goes back to humility and the idea of building great teams, and so I've always been that way. I've always, you know, if you focus on how you deliver value, then it becomes very natural that you have to have a team and you have to ask for help because at the level that we operate, no one delivers value alone. And one of the things I I coach a lot of people because the people come to me and say, Well, how do I network, etc. and I'm like, look, don't think about networking. Think about connecting with people that can help you deliver more value or who you can help deliver more value and focus on that as opposed to someone who can get you your next job, because the more value you can contribute to your company, the more likely you're going to get that best next job and I've always thought about that with my clients, right? It's like, what do my clients need? They need me to better understand this. And when I was the general counsel, my, my client was actually the company, and what did they need from me? They needed me to understand the business better, to be a better general counsel. And so that focus on value has really been, I think, a big part of my career trajectory.