The global IT giant, Accenture has successfully bagged multiple generative AI (GenAI) projects worth $600 million in the last quarter, building upon the $450 million projects secured in the preceding quarter.

“We had over $600 million in new GenAI bookings taking us to $1.1 billion in GenAI sales in the first-half of the fiscal year, expanding our early lead in GenAI, which is core to our clients’ reinvention,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture, during the earnings call. 

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Meanwhile, Cohere, one of the best-known startup competitors to OpenAI, which raised $445 million from investors, was generating about $13 million in annualised revenue at the end of last year. 

In contrast, Anthropic has forecasted to exceed $850 million in annualised revenue by the end of 2024. Just recently, Stability AI’s chief, Emad Mostaque, stepped down as CEO due to the company’s inability to generate adequate financial returns. In 2023, the company behind Stable Diffusion recorded revenue of $44.2 million. 

The hottest AI startup, OpenAI, is the only firm currently generating revenue at a pace of $1.3 billion annually. 

Hits Record-Breaking GenAI Confidence

Accenture’s early triumphs in GenAI contrast starkly with leading domestic technology service providers like Tata Consultancy Service, Wipro, Infosys, and HCL Technologies. These companies are showing low confidence in generative AI and have not shared their earnings specifically related to generative AI, which is seen as a significant risk within the outsourcing industry.

Shares of Indian IT giants fell between 3-5% each on Friday morning following Accenture’s earnings announcement. Though the Indian IT companies haven’t made any big announcements about the impact of generative AI on the revenue growth, they are quite vocal about training their own employees in the field of GenAI.  

Notably, Accenture has been aggressively expanding its talent pool. “We now have over 53,000 skilled data and AI practitioners against our goal of doubling our data and AI workforce from 40,000 to 80,000 by the end of fiscal year 2026,” said Sweet.

Further, she said it has about 39 customers with quarterly bookings of over $100 million despite the uncertain macroeconomic conditions. “We remain the trusted partner to our clients for reinvention with a record 39 clients with quarterly bookings of over $100 million,” added Sweet. 

Accenture is working with Merck, a global biopharmaceutical leader, to launch a Generative AI training program. The IT consulting giant is also partnering with Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, on a significant project involving AI and data modernisation. “We are modernising and consulting over 50 disparate enterprise data sources into a small integrated set forming Telstra’s governed and secure data and AI core, allowing Telstra to rapidly scale bespoke Generative AI capabilities in the future,” said Sweet.

Furthermore, Accenture is strengthening its partnership with Best Buy, a leading consumer electronics retailer across multiple fronts to reimagine the customer experience, optimise costs and drive growth. “By leveraging data and Generative AI, we are helping to transform their contact center operations and improve customer and employee experience,” said Sweet. 

Accenture is also working with Mondelez International known for brands like Oreo, belVita and Cadbury to satisfy customer requirements with the help of  generative AI.  Another key project with McDonald’s focuses on integrating cloud technology and GenAI to revolutionise customer and employee experiences.

Unrivalled Leader in GenAI Investment

Last year, Accenture announced a $3 billion investment in its data and AI practice. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Sweet reiterated Accenture’s commitment, allocating $1 billion annually to train its workforce in generative AI. 

Furthermore, Accenture recently collaborated with Anthropic and AWS to train over 1,400 Accenture engineers as specialists in utilising Anthropic’s models on AWS.

It also partnered with Cohere to accelerate the adoption of generative AI across enterprises. The IT giant will utilise Cohere’s Command and Embed models, along with its Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities, to help organisations scale the use of generative AI.

Unlike Accenture, Indian IT companies have not invested in or directly partnered with notable generative AI startups. Instead, they have focused on partnerships with tech giants such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, and NVIDIA to train their employees and offer their solutions to its customers.