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Diving overview:
- Accenture on Tuesday announced a suite of agent tools aimed at midsize businesses looking to more easily adopt AI and integrate technology into their businesses through a partnership with Google Cloud.
- The partnership will provide pre-built agent capabilities through Accenture Edge, a new business launched last month that provides consulting services to companies with less than $3 billion in revenue. These tools address customer intelligence and growth, customer experience, cybersecurity, agent business operations, industry-specific tools, and agent employee enablement.
- Accenture Edge CEO Srini Subramanian said in an email to CIO Dive that Accenture brings industry intellectual property and forward-deployed engineers working with clients, while Google brings an AI stack that includes Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Agent Data Cloud, and AI Threat Defense. “These are pre-configured and pre-integrated with the platforms that midsize businesses are already running, so we can provide seamless integration,” he said of the partnership.
Dive Insight:
A May Kaufman Rossin report found that while nearly all midsize businesses are already leveraging some form of AI, adoption across the organization has been slow because infrastructure, governance, and organizational needs are different from most companies.
Subramanian said midsize companies face the same innovation pressures as large companies, but with fewer resources.
“Legacy systems, rising cyber risks, and the urgency to capture the value of AI before competitors apply to both the midmarket and enterprise worlds,” he said. “But you don’t have to work with the same budget, team, or the same schedule.”
Midsize companies also traditionally have less access to enterprise-grade platforms, talent, and ecosystem partners than larger companies. As a result, midsize companies are struggling to scale and integrate AI in a way that is beneficial to them, Subramanian added.
Accenture has been restructuring its services since 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Accenture’s profits were based on consulting and systems integration, but by 2026 half of its revenue will be based on managed services, an Omdia report in June revealed.
According to the Omdia report, Accenture’s focus on mid-market services has helped it carve out a space for Accenture in a crowded market of partners as companies look for post-modern IT services. According to Omdia research, service providers and system integrators have three times the market share by number in the United States compared to the rest of the world.
Google Cloud and Accenture’s partnership is an example of how vendor-consultancy partnerships aim to help midsize businesses overcome the challenges of AI adoption.
“Small businesses face many of the same technology, data, AI, cybersecurity and productivity challenges as large enterprises,” said Accenture Chairman and CEO Julie Sweet in announcing Accenture Edge. “But they need solutions that can be deployed faster, are more reproducible, and are right-sized for scale.”
