'A large part of our Gen AI asset development happens from india'

Ghosh speaks on the sidelines of Nasscom Technology Leadership Forum in Mumbai, and shares India's role in driving the GenAI strategy

Accenture has shown early signs of winning GenAI deals among IT services players. It has signed a total of $450 million worth of such deals. Bhaskar Ghosh, chief strategy officer, Accenture, speaks to Shivani Shinde on the sidelines of Nasscom Technology Leadership Forum in Mumbai, and shares India's role in driving the GenAI strategy. Edited excerpts:

Accenture announced a $3 billion investment in AI. How significant is India’s share in it?

Of the $3 billion investment, a large part of the training dollar will be spent in India, because a very large number of people are based in India. Within the Accenture world, India is the innovation engine. Whatever Generative AI platform we are creating, a large part of it everything is built out of India. A large part of development happens in India and design happens in India, and most of the large engagement will have India components.
 

In terms of the investment, a very large part of it will be on the product development and a big chunk of that happens in India.

GenAI, so far, is all about productivity gains. How do you see GenAI being used further?

Approximately 80 per cent people today are talking about the productivity gain. But 15-20 per cent people are thinking that how exactly will this will help grow the business, and create a differentiated experience.

What is Accenture’s AI strategy for the next 3-5 years?

AI is not new and we have been working on that for years now. What has changed is GenAI. We believe that it has opened up a huge opportunity to transform the business.

When it comes to Accenture, we look at three things -- the long-term impact on the professional services industry, what it means for us, and for the 700,000 employees that we have.

When we initially did research on the impact of generative AI on industry, across all industries, it suggested that GenAI has the potential to impact 44 per cent of all working hours across industries in the United States -- 22 per cent through automation and 22 per cent augmentation.

The three most impacted verticals are banking, insurance and the capital markets. The largest opportunity lies in banking, where 72 per cent of working hours can potentially be transformed by GenAI. In insurance, the figure is 68 per cent. In the capital markets, it’s 67 per cent.

The difference about AI or GenAI, when compared to other technologies like blockchain or metaverse, is that it is much more broad-based. Second, the technology has come to a stage that it is more or less production ready.

On industry, there are three kinds of impact—productivity, creating new business opportunity and growth, and third, it will completely redefine the work and workforce. Every company will have to adopt this, if not today then tomorrow.

From Accenture’s point, we have announced a $3 billion investment. Why the $3 billion investment? Because we have a large scale of people that need to undergo talent transformation training.
 

Two, this investment will completely transform Accenture to be an AI-first company.

So, while 2023 was about prototypes, this year will be about scale. We have been telling clients to not implement GenAI for the sake of implementing this technology. It is not about the technology implementation but about the business transformation and how to get ROI (return on investment). 

How significant are acquisitions for Accenture as it builds its AI capability?

Acquisitions are a very important part of our strategy. A lot of time, if you have to build differentiated capability and scale, it takes a long time, should you have to do it the organic way. We have found that buying the right company and integrating that is a much faster and better way. We have mastered the art of integrating these companies.

We have a high acceptance for different skills, and cultures.

How much GenAI has Accenture adopted within?

I can’t give you the exact number. There are two ways in which we are working. Some of our corporate functions are embracing it. We have used it in marketing functions and others. For our core service, delivery, development, maintenance, we have also infused GenAI.