Global consulting giant Accenture announced in its third-quarter earnings report for fiscal year 2024 that the company has secured over $900 million in new bookings in the generative AI field, bringing the total bookings for the fiscal year to $2 billion.
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In a statement, the company said: "This quarter we achieved two significant milestones—$2 billion in generative AI sales year-to-date and $500 million in revenue—demonstrating our early leadership in this critical technology field."
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said during the earnings call: "We are helping a leading global food and beverage company leverage the power of generative AI to create new value, which has already established a strong digital core in its transformation journey."
She added that the company has developed a digital shelf console pilot, a generative AI engine, to accelerate e-commerce content creation and optimize it to drive sales.
Sweet also noted that the company continues to steadily increase its data and AI talent pool, reaching approximately 55,000 skilled data and AI practitioners, with a goal to double the number from 40,000 to 80,000 by the end of fiscal year 2026.
Accenture has also established a partnership with National Australia Bank, one of the largest financial institutions in the country, to strategically implement and expand generative AI. She said: "We systematically built a secure and robust generative AI platform within the bank's existing strategic data platform, creating a backlog of 200 generative AI use cases. So far, over 20 use cases have been tested at the bank, with eight enterprise-level pilots underway, some of which have already started to deliver value."
Last year, Accenture announced a $3 billion investment in its data and AI practice. At the Davos World Economic Forum, Sweet reiterated Accenture's commitment to allocate $100 million annually to train its employees in generative AI capabilities.
Additionally, Accenture recently partnered with Anthropic and AWS to train over 1,400 Accenture engineers to become experts in using Anthropic models on AWS. The company also collaborated with Cohere to accelerate enterprise adoption of generative AI, leveraging Cohere's Command and Embed models and its retrieval augmented generation (RAG) capabilities to help organizations scale the use of generative AI.