Key insights
- A former Accenture employee speculates that ACN could replace a large portion of its workforce with AI, potentially improving margins. This could lead to a competitive race among consulting firms to develop automated solutions. While potentially positive for ACN's bottom line, it raises concerns about broader social disruption and the future of consulting roles.
Inspired by this thread, especially this post I worked at Accenture for almost six years and I think just about every role there could be replaced by AI.
The jobs in the USA are mostly product & project management and communication with offshore delivery teams. Accenture also has deep industry-specific knowledge bases to train AI agents on and a talent for developing in-house orchestration systems which leads me to speculate that ACN could jettison 80% of their roles which aren't regulated (Healthcare, Finance, Aerospace) in the next few years and if they can maintain their margins, do quite well.
Accenture is an organization that is optimized for "the race to the bottom" and I fully believe they will replace any meatsack they can and send their remaining meatsacks to other organizations to tell them how they, too, can get rid of their meatsacks.
It's going to be a knife fight between Tata, Wipro, CapGemini and Accenture to see who can build the Automated Meatsack Replacement (AMR) system first.
Anecdotally, I think CapGemini and Accenture are probably the best positioned for AMR implementation due to their deep expertise in industry verticals, and while I'm not ready to jump in, I will be watching.
This is a recipe for social disruption not seen since 1177 BC.
May God have mercy on our souls.
For a company like ACN, meatsack is the biggest cost, and those meatsacks are pretty useless.
If AI can replace meatsacks, and also improve performance, would they be able to turn this around?
Having worked in a corporate previously, the role of a consultant firm is not really to help a company, but
- The management can claim they got an opinion from a third party expert 2) The management can blame the third party expert when there is a problem
Unless the corporate culture changes, the role of consultant firms like Accenture won't change