Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO, Accenture
Moderator: Alan Murray, FORTUNE

CEO Initiative 2023: The Widening AI Skills Gap

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So in a recent survey by accenture 79% of CEOS asked, said that the pace of technological innovation is a driving factor in their company's reinvention. In fact, they cited it as the biggest factor ranking it above shifting consumer preferences, inflationary pressures and talent shortages which seemed to be ongoing issues for us. So, uh but our next guest says business leaders need to take some key steps before implementing A I and one of those steps speaks directly to workforce re skilling and its benefits and the other is knowing exactly where your data is. So let's find out more about why those are important. One of those steps. Um So we have Julie Sweet who is chair and CEO of accenture, uh the global professional services company with more than 730,000 employees. That's enough to fill a city in Oregon. Uh But she's also one of the fortune's most powerful women, by the way, our new list is coming out soon. Um Julie joins Fortune Ceo Alan Murray for a conversation on the best practices for business leaders to help drive growth in a changing landscape. Please welcome them to the stage, Julie. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. You know, we just heard from Eric again that this wave of, of technology change is different from previous waves in a couple of ways. One is it just moved into the enterprise much faster and you know, didn't hang around with consumers and then move in. And second, it's the first in my memory probably since the Manhattan project where the creators said things like this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread or it's going to be lights out for all of us. Jennifer referred to the fear of missing out versus the fear of getting in you. You talk to more CEO S probably than, than anybody. I know. Uh how are they balancing the fear of missing out versus the fear of getting in? What's, what's the calculus? Well, I was waiting backstage and kind of with bated breath to find out if my job was gonna be automated when Eric was saying CEO S. So I'm, I'm uh I'm glad that I still have a job for the near future. Uh It, it is definitely the topic of conversation with every CEO and uh uh last week I was with about 20 CEO S over the course of the week. It was a busy week. And uh what I would say coming out of those conversations is that there is universal agreement that there is more tech enabled reinvention ahead of us than there is behind us. And A I is certainly going to play a role. But for many, many CEO S gen A I is something they wanna look at and understand, but they have a lot of other things to do before they can actually use it at scale. So what do I mean by that? Um You cannot use gen A I, if you can access your data in general, you cannot access your data unless you're in the cloud. 40% of workloads are in the cloud today. That's a lot left. That's not many parts of businesses have to be enabled by other kinds of technology like modern er P or finance systems. And only about less than 50% of companies have put those systems in place and then you go to different parts of the business like manufacturing and supply chain and we call it the next digital frontier, which is a nice way of saying they're really behind, right? So you have three camps of CEO S, those who have, who are ahead are pretty digitally mature and they want to leapfrog and, and really take a leadership. You've got those who are kind of in between. So they wanna make some, you know, take some bets, but they've got a lot to do and then you have those who are very early who are saying, look, I can't spend a lot of time on that. Uh Even though I know it's coming. So you sound like this is going to be much slower than some people are saying it's going to take longer for it to make its way into the enterprise. I think the technology is going to move very fast in getting better, right? And you're gonna have enough companies that are using the technology to make that worthwhile. Uh I think that the excitement has gone ahead of the maturity of the technology and ahead of the maturity of a lot of enterprises, will this go faster than cloud? Absolutely. With one reason, I think why we spent a lot of years just trying to convince companies the cloud was safe. Do you remember those days? We had those conversations, Julie is the security in the cloud. OK. That took years of getting companies CEO S ready. This is very different, right? Yes, there's concern about responsibility and how to do it, but it is not a if it is a when and so a lot of the speed in the cloud wasn't about the technical maturity, it was about the culture, it was about, you know, really embracing and I think that's why this will go faster than prior waves, but you cannot skip over moving to the cloud and having your data before you can have A I of any kind be ubiquitous. You made a really interesting point when we were sitting at the table earlier about all there are concerns about data privacy, there are concerns about intellectual property concerns about hallucinations. But you said that for companies, if you clearly identify the use cases, it's pretty, pretty easy to figure out or not easy. But it's possible to figure out where the problems are and where they aren't and there's still tons of stuff you can do. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure. And what, what Alan isn't telling you is that I got a little frustrated because I think sometimes we get so focused on the problem areas which are really important and we need to have that discourse that we're forgetting that A I solves a lot of problems that are are not problematic in terms of data. So for example, safety, we're working with an oil and gas company. Safety is a big, big problem, an area of focus in any energy company and they're using gen A I on top of knowledge management to get safety concerns and actions to the hands of their field faster. That is not an issue of is the data bias, right? It is not an issue of um is there some you know, inappropriate use and there's not even a disruption issue in terms of jobs, right? That's just a classic use case of better use of data to get better actions. So I can go on and on on in the industrial sector, how much I can improve efficiency that will affect workers? So that's something we need to address. Um And so I think as a, as a company, this is why responsible A I matters because you wanna look at, you wanna have policies and you wanna say, what are the risks, things that touch human beings like hiring um uh any kind of assessment of performance, uh things that you're doing to, you know, with consumers that has a higher risk because you do need to make sure the data is inclusive and correct in other, you're not gonna have that set of issues. It's gonna be a lower risk and a different kind of monitoring. So I I'd love to open it up in just a minute because I know you all have lots of questions and this is an opportunity to ask Julie uh a a question without, without the meter ticking. You know, this is like free advice time. But, but before we get started, give me the general advice. What do you say to CEO S about how to begin this journey first education? Right? So I'm spending a lot of time with boards and leadership teams explaining A I and what it is and what it's not like. So we had the earlier conversation where people are saying, you know, doesn't give very good advice. It's not good at certain things. It you don't, you don't go to it for long term planning. Uh you know, have fun looking at what they say your strategy is, but they're just taking uh if you, especially if you're going out to the internet, it's just taking a bunch of things. It's not a strategic thinker for you. Um Common sense, not good. That is not a skill for it. Um Quantitative reasoning and once you first begin the, understand what it is, what it is not. And then how does it fit into the world of A I? There's lots of A II, I often will say use what you have, right? Because many of the organizations we work with are not using the A I they're already paying for. And there's a lot there that being said also understand where is the opportunity and make intentional bets. The one thing we don't want to do is remember the early days of digital and you woke up and there were 100 different proofs of concept in your organization. None of which scaled and they sometimes turn to companies like accenture like how did you let that happen? Well, we're not gonna let that happen. And so we're really clear this is about business outcomes. And when you do A I, you need to know what's the business outcome, what does it cost? Are there alternatives and be super intentional? One other thing before I open it up, you've, you've been a part of this organization, the A CEO initiative from the beginning and you particularly focused on the issue of training, like how do we make sure these waves of technology come through that we create training opportunities. So more people can equitably access the opportunities that are being created with the, with, with A I on the table. How do you think about that? How has that changed? What do you recommend? Um And what would you tell members of this group to do to accelerate uh training? Well, gen A I is a part of what, you know, we say every strategy leads to technology. And because that's true, it means that every person in your organization has to have a certain fluency around technology. So when I became the global ceo of accenture on September 1st 2019, literally, the first thing I did was I announced that something called TQ think that technology quo like IQ because even though we were a technology powerhouse, I said, are people in finance, are people in hr and all of our strategists need to understand basic technology. And so we started training everyone. It started with six, we now have 11 modules that we require. And I hold my top leaders accountable for getting at least 75% of our people through each year. So today we have 600,000 people trained in just the basic fundamentals of A I course. We started that in 2019. So gen A I is the most recent, but we've been talking about the importance of A I for transformation. For years. This year, we'll train 250,000 in the fundamentals of gen A I and use of it responsibly and how to use these tools. And over the course of three years, we'll go from 40,000 to 80,000 of deeply technical people around A I including gen A I. So as all organizations thinking about how you become a talent creator, so there's three basic things in talent. Can you access it? You have to be at your own talent creator doesn't mean you're gonna spend a billion dollars a year like we do. But that, you know, you have the ability to train your people and create talent because of so much change. And then finally, you're able to unlock that talent, talent so that they're working in an environment that thrives. So access being accessing talent, creating talent and unlocking that talent are the three plays you're gonna compete over the next decade. Uh Anyone have questions, comments, observations. Yes, right here, please. Oh, hi, I'm Joy, insight. Nice to see you both. Um Julie, how are you using it internally and what kind of productivity or customer outcome metrics or customer success metrics? Are you driving internally? And how are you doing that? And are you allocating budgets differently than you did last year or not? Sure. So big picture, we're investing $3 billion over three years in A I. So we announced that a while back. So a lot of our investment is gonna be going toward A I, we think of A I in three ways and it's actually pretty analogous to a lot of our clients. So for us, um it's around uh what our clients need. So we're investing to create solutions to help our clients use A I and gen A I in particular, then there's how we deliver our own services. So we're using it and experimenting right on how to do software development. Uh you know, how do you use it uh to make our manage services more effective. It's still early days. Remember, lots of this technology is not even generally available. And what we do is really complex. And so it's really different using um A I to build a website, we don't build a lot of websites. You don't pay me to build a website but to do like complex software development and integration. So we're doing it there and then we use it to run accenture and our priorities there are using it in ways that can help our clients. So for example, we have 730,000 people, we're using it right now in hr to answer questions and to sort of check, check out things at scale. The most important thing is that in each of these three areas, we have very tight governance on what is the ro I you know, how much does it cost? Do you know, do we have the right leadership and bandwidth? And so my chief strategy officer and my coo oversee the um the where we use it in our services and how we use it ourselves. And then in the business, our head of strategy and our head of technology oversee those bets. So very clear accountability so that we at accenture also don't end up with a lot of experimentation that doesn't have a return uh this question right here and then up here. So the last question really related to what I was going to ask, but I'll just rip on it a little bit in the bio pharmaceutical industry. You can see lots of great examples of how we can use this. For example, we've invested decades in developing chemical libraries of compounds that may have failed for toxicology. Now, we have an opportunity to look at those things, find out what's in common and maybe design around those things that cause negative side effects of compounds that otherwise look like they would have worked. The challenge of course is that data, we're very data rich, but it's in a bunch of systems that don't even talk to one another. So the question I was going to ask is, are you able to convince ceos that the cost of going and putting those systems and processes and data in place in order for A I to work, are people buying that? That's going to give them an roi fast enough to deal with the fact that we have constrained P Ken? It's a great point. And it's one of the biggest shifts. So if you wonder why most people don't have good data foundations today, it's because of the problem with RO I putting in a good data foundation is not inexpensive and it doesn't, you cannot pay as you go. So moving to the cloud was a pay as you go because you got an infrastructure cost reduction just by moving to the cloud. The clients we have today who are actually able to use A I were the ones that really said early on. We understand it's not pay as you go. But we know we've got to get the right data foundation. The big shift now is clients recognizing, OK, we're just gonna have to invest. And one of the things that we're doing is like I was just talking to a bank CEO recently and um they were saying, we, you know, we're constrained on budget and they said the one place you cannot stop is your data foundation because there are banks who are ahead and they're already moving to use A I and things like, you know, your customer and fraud. Uh And so that is a big shift that clients are understanding, they've got to spend the money. Uh We still are saying, but know where you're going, right? It's not all data is created equal in your organization, but it's a great point, Ken. And also, you know, one of the frustrations that I have when people are only talking about the negatives and they're being worries is that there's going to be a ton of productivity. We're going to do great things in businesses. Ultimately, gen A I is also going to be together with some other technologies like quantum create breakthroughs in medicine in material science. And it's important that those are not the near term, but they are in the medium and long term and they're going to be super important. So we as companies better act responsibly so that we don't have the backlash against the technology that's going to save lives and be important. You, you said earlier, shockingly, I thought that 90% of the people you asked, can you identify the person who is in charge of responsible A I? 90% of the of the ceos you talked to cannot answer that question. That is true today. And it is changing fast because boards are asking the questions and frankly, people just didn't know. I mean, in 2021 you know, we announced that we thought over the next decade, companies who would embrace total enterprise reinvention, which is using tech data and A I to continuously reinvent every part of the enterprise, we call them re inventors that that was the future. Well, two years in with A I, we're now starting to get more take up on that, right? Because people just didn't really understand the importance of A I and they were so focused on other parts of it. So I think it's going to change fast, but it is the starting point. Marjorie. Can you do it very, very quickly. We have one minute to do this very quickly. Thank you. Um I know that, um, you know, I'm a big believer in this. So my question more is on the human side and with all that you're seeing uh with companies and for yourself, how some people will have new jobs and they need to be trained for that, but some people will not be able to make it. And um I worry a lot about what we do to make this. Um, not a painful, I mean, it will be painful. But what do we do on the two things? First, we have to embrace change because change is coming. And second, we need to embrace that, that change is gonna have downsides face the downsides and then take responsibility as both the public and private sector to address it. There's no perfect answer. But if we do both embrace the change and embrace the downside and then work together, I think we'll be really successful. Julie Sweet. Thank you so much. Great to have you here.