Accenture recently announced the launch of its new AI Refinery for Industry. The program will begin with a collection of 12 solutions to assist enterprises with rapidly building and deploying a network of AI agents to enhance the workforce, address industry-specific challenges, and drive business value faster.
Channel Insider spoke with Sen Ramani, data and AI lead at Accenture, to discuss the refinery plans and how AI continues to shape significant plans for Accenture.
AI’s role in Accenture’s 2025 business goals
According to Ramani, the industry is entering into a new era of digitization and AI is continuously learning and driving new levels of autonomy for business.
“In this context, Accenture is developing AI solutions that address industry-specific business goals and use cases,” Ramani said. “For example, we have created agentic AI solutions that support revenue growth management for the consumer goods and services industry, improve personalization efforts for clinical trials in life sciences, assist with asset troubleshooting for industrial equipment, and improve workflow issues in the B2B marketing sector.”
Ramani stated that by the end of 2025, Accenture will introduce 100 industry-specific agentic AI tools to engage clients across many different sectors. Further, Accenture will be working to bring AI out of the virtual realm and into the physical world.
Recently, Accenture announced a collaboration with KION Group and NVIDIA to optimize supply chain performance.
“A major emphasis will be to reduce the time and costs associated with setting up and running warehouses,” said Ramani. “We will do this by creating digital twins of facilities and by taking advantage of advanced robotic solutions. In applying AI to warehouse operations, we can reduce planning time, operating costs, and manual labor each by 50 percent.”
Going forward, Accenture sees GenAI positioned to be a catalyst for reinvention across the enterprise, and it will continue to help clients build a data foundation necessary to capitalize on AI. Accenture’s economic analysis finds that advances in AI and the technology sector will create just as much value in the next five years as it did in the previous 10. This indicates a broad-scale transformation across other industries.
“As AI continuously evolves to continuously learn and act autonomously with and on behalf of people, the only limiting factor is trust. People’s trust in AI is a measure of head and heart,” said Ramani. “It is crucial that organizations bring employees along and empower people to shape how and where to use GenAI as part of continuous skills development. When done right, it ignites a virtuous learning loop: The more people use AI, the better it becomes, and the more they will want to use it. This positive reinforcement between people and AI is key to developing broader AI adoption across the enterprise.”
The role of cybersecurity in AI
AI needs a vast amount of of training data and requires trust across the inputs, systems, and employees involved. Cybersecurity’s role in AI adoption and development is critical to getting the most out of the burgeoning technology.
“Every enterprise has their own trust-building moments, technologies, AI strategies, and key relationships to focus on,” said Ramani. “But broadly, any path forward will center on addressing trust across systems and data, AI itself, and people. The best advice is to ensure you have guardrails around your autonomous systems: Data security has long been critical to customer interactions but with the anticipated rising use of autonomous personified AI agents getting to know customers even more deeply, that security will be especially vital.”
Ramani adds that before enterprises grant AI agents access to their information and permission to offer customer solutions, they must set detailed security rules with the technological infrastructure required to enforce them. They must define and continuously update AI explainability policies to customers and within their organization.
Other areas of focus for Accenture
Beyond AI, Accenture also has its sights set on other areas of the industry to ensure they’re developing the best technologies and services to deliver to customers and to help partners grow. This will include investing a whopping $1 billion dedicated to training initiatives and partnerships over three years.
“The pace of change in business will only continue to accelerate as new technologies embed themselves and expand across the marketplace,” Ramani said. “Employee training, upskilling, and reskilling will be tremendously important for Accenture and for our clients in order to maintain course. We are investing $1 billion in training initiatives and partnerships over a three-year period. Helping clients find the right alignment between talent management, the introduction of new technologies and continuous rethinking of processes will be a key focus.”
Accenture’s new AI Refinery for Industry will power industry agent solutions to reduce the time to build and derive value from agents more quickly. Read more about the new refinery and Accenture’s plans to expand by the end of the year.