Accenture forms Nvidia business group to scale enterprise AI adoption

Accenture has formed an Nvidia business group with 30,000 professionals to receive training to help enterprises scale up for the AI era.

The aim is to train Accenture’s team to help clients reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption with AI agents, said Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture, in a press briefing.

“We are living in the future we are envisioning, starting with our own company,” Guan said. “We are reinventing this business.”

Accenture is tapping its existing workforce for the talent, but it is also training current employees and hiring new people to meet the 30,000-person goal for the new group, Guan said. She did not disclose how many new hires there would be. She also did not say how much each company will invest in the partnership.

“Demand for GenAI is not slowing down,” Guan said. “We are coming together to increase adoption so they can use generative AI as a competitive advantage.”

Justin Boitano, Nvidia’s vice president of enterprise AI software, said in a press call, “Every job function can benefit. There are a lot of great early successes. Customers are not always AI experts. The Accenture team has invested a lot” in this expertise.

The new group amounts to an expanded partnership between Accenture and Nvidia. With generative AI demand driving $3 billion in Accenture bookings in its recently-closed fiscal year, the new group will help clients lay the foundation for agentic AI functionality using Accenture’s AI Refinery, which uses
the full Nvidia AI stack—including Nvidia AI Foundry, Nvidia AI Enterprise and Nvidia Omniverse—to
advance areas such as process reinvention, AI-powered simulation and sovereign AI. This software foundation will help Nvidia sell more of its AI processors.

Guan said the Accenture AI Refinery will be available on all public and private cloud platforms and will integrate seamlessly with other Accenture Business Groups to accelerate AI across the SaaS and Cloud AI ecosystem.

“We are breaking significant new ground with our partnership with NVIDIA and enabling our clients to be at the forefront of using generative AI as a catalyst for reinvention,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO at Accenture, in a statement. “Accenture AI Refinery will create opportunities for companies to reimagine their processes and operations, discover new ways of working, and scale AI solutions across the enterprise to help drive continuous change and create value.”

I asked if the group was a division of Accenture. The company replied The Accenture Nvidia Business Group is wholly owned by Accenture. Accenture has business groups with its largest and most strategic ecosystem partners. The groups bring together the leading technology from partners with Accenture’s innovation and industry experience to help joint clients reinvent their businesses. The Accenture Nvidia Business Group will leverage Accenture’s AI Refinery and Nvidia’s technology to help enterprises rapidly deploy and scale AI-driven solutions.

“AI will supercharge enterprises to scale innovation at greater speed,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, said in a statement. “Nvidia’s platform, Accenture’s AI Refinery and our combined expertise will help businesses and nations accelerate this transformation to drive unprecedented productivity and growth.”

Scaling agentic AI for enterprises

The new Accenture Nvidia Business Group will accelerate momentum with generative AI and help clients scale agentic AI systems — the next frontier of gen AI — to drive new levels of productivity and growth. This significant investment will be supported by over 30,000 professionals receiving training globally to help clients reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption.

Agentic AI systems represent a leap forward for generative AI, the companies said. Instead of a human typing in a prompt or automating pre-existing business steps, agentic AI systems can act on the intent of the user, create new workflows and take appropriate actions based on their environment that can reinvent entire processes or functions.

Accenture and Nvidia are already helping clients adopt and scale agentic AI systems. For example, Indosat
Group announced the first sovereign AI in Indonesia that enables businesses to securely deploy AI while ensuring data governance and adhering to regulations. It is collaborating with Accenture to build industry-specific solutions on top of Indosat’s data center, which includes Nvidia AI software and accelerated computing, to support local enterprises. With an initial focus on the financial services sector, the new solutions, powered by the AI Refinery platform, will help Indonesian banks harness AI to drive profitability, operational efficiency and sustainable growth in a highly competitive market.

Accenture will also debut a new Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprint for virtual facility robot fleet simulation, which integrates Nvidia Omniverse, Isaac and Metropolis software, to enable industrial companies to build autonomous, robot-operated software-defined factories and facilities.

Accenture will use these new capabilities at Eclipse Automation, an Accenture-owned manufacturing automation company, to deliver as much as 50% faster designs and 30% reduction in cycle time on behalf of its clients.

Network of AI engineering hubs

As part of its Center for Advanced AI, Accenture is introducing a network of hubs with deep engineering skills and the technical capacity for using agentic AI systems to transform large-scale operations.

These hubs will focus on the selection, fine-tuning and large-scale inferencing of foundation models, all of which pose significant accuracy, cost, latency and compliance challenges when development is scaled. Building on existing hubs in Mountain View, California, and Bangalore, Accenture is adding AI Refinery Engineering Hubs in Singapore, Tokyo, Malaga and London.

In addition to its use of agentic AI at Eclipse Automation, Accenture’s marketing function is integrating the AI Refinery platform with autonomous agents to help create and run smarter campaigns faster. This will result in a 25% to 35% reduction in manual steps, 6% cost savings and is expected to achieve a 25% to 55% increase in speed to market.