Accenture’s North America CEO On The Race To Deploy AI At Scale

Accenture’s Manish Sharma says those who don’t go all in on GenAI risk falling behind their rivals A s CEO of North America at Accenture—the professional services firm’s largest geographic unit, which encompasses the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Costa Rica—Manish Sharma has a front row seat on the forces disrupting business.

His job is to help clients adapt and capitalize on that. Accenture is six months in to a three year plan to invest $3 billion in expanding its talent pool and capabilities in AI, with some 350 projects. Sharma says large language models like ChatGPT and Google Bard that are pre trained on vast amounts of data “will impact 40% of the working hours.” The challenge is prioritizing investments while avoiding the risks that come with the technology—and the speed with which it’s being deployed.

“You should be able to ensure that there there is no bias being created as the model is being built,” Sharma says. “The model should be able to give consistent data .. and you need to be able to explain the basis for the output.” Sharma cites a number of use cases from providing data analysis in plain English and enabling data driven negotiations to maintenance forecasting and optimizing cash flow.

But that’s not where he believes the conversation should be focused. “A lot of folks are talking about use cases,” says Sharma. “They need to move beyond and talk about deploying it at scale. The time has already come when we are now deploying GenAI at scale.” Click on the video above for more of his insights on how that can be done..