Accenture CTO says few companies have truly reinvented operations with AI

Corporate America has spent the last few years talking about artificial intelligence like it is the new electricity. Actually rewiring the building turns out to be a different matter. The technology chief at Accenture, one of the world’s largest consulting firms, says only a small group of large organizations have genuinely rebuilt their core operations around AI. He also offered some advice that may surprise boardrooms: when AI projects fail, companies should not yet pour much energy into figuring out who to blame. The numbers behind the reinvention gap Accenture’s own research puts figures on the gap. The share of firms with fully modernized, AI-led operations nearly doubled, climbing from 9% in 2023 to 16% in 2024. The firms that have made the leap appear to be pulling ahead. According to Accenture’s findings, organizations with mature AI-led operations posted 2.5x higher revenue growth than less mature peers between 2019 and 2023. The research also found these leaders were 3.3x more successful at scaling high-value generative AI use cases. They reported 2.4x greater productivity improvements than their peers as well. Accenture is betting heavily on the gap Accenture is not a ne...