Hospitality giant Accenture has announced a €2.7 billion investment in artificial intelligence, doubling its talent pool from 40,000 to 80,000.
Accenture to invest $3 billion (€2.7 billion) in artificial intelligence (AI) over the next three years to help clients “unleash AI’s full potential to reshape strategy, technology and ways of working” plans to support
The investment is expected to impact 19 industries, doubling Accenture’s AI talent pool through recruitment, acquisitions and training, the company told Euronews Next at Cannes Lions.
The multi-billion venture also plans to launch a new AI Navigator for Enterprise. It describes itself as a “generative AI-based platform” that helps its customers “define business cases, make decisions, navigate AI journeys, choose architectures, and understand algorithms.” It is A model that responsibly drives value. “
Accenture has been researching and building AI for over a decade, and our expertise spans over 1,450 patents worldwide.
The company is already using the technology to help hotel groups manage customer inquiries and consolidate legal process information across hundreds of thousands of complex documents.
Six years ago, this professional services firm pioneered the Responsible AI Framework, a code of ethics that underpins a rigorous responsible AI compliance program.
AI as a “co-pilot”
“Obviously, AI will profoundly change how we work, what we make, and everything in between,” Accenture Song CEO David Droga told Euronews Next.
But “the democratization of technology, which offers more shortcuts, more access, more unlimited options, can also become mediocre at greater volume and pace.
“This means we all have a responsibility to not outsource empathy, technology and humanity in our collective pursuit of efficiency and the new.”
Jatinder Singh, head of global intelligence at Accenture Song, the world’s largest digital agency, said the company has “assured a lot of lawyers as you can imagine” to ensure a swift and responsible transition. I have it,” he said.
But at an “equally important” level, they recognize the need to include “philosophers and historians looking at prejudice” and ask, “How will this technology be used? How is the algorithm to be used guaranteed?” Is development fair? ”
“From a data science perspective, we also need to check the incoming data to ensure that those algorithms are fair,” Singh said.
Accenture sees AI as a human co-pilot, says Singh.
When it comes to creativity, AI is expected to alleviate some of the “roadblocks and efforts” to finding insights, for example.
Not only that, but it “frees up the strategist’s time, the ethnologist’s time, the anthropologist’s time so that they can actually take a stand and what they do with this insight, i.e. let the AI do some of the heavy lifting. “- this is why we call it co-pilot and alternate,” Singh said, adding that many new careers will also emerge.
“I think the easier place for people to go is where they need a lot of STEM talent—science, technology, engineering, math talent—to build these technologies and algorithms,” he said.
Accenture uses AI to diagnose problems, inform how to fix them, “that’s the North Star that we’re really working on,” Singh explains, and ultimately what the technology can create. understand what you can do.
Cooperation with generation AI
During this year’s Cannes Lions Festival, Euronewsnext gave an exclusive preview of the Accenture Song demo, showcasing how AI can partner with humans in the creative process.
Among the groundbreaking products on display was an “evolving picture book”. This is a unique digital children’s book where a generative AI continuously reimagines the illustrations each time it is read, giving you the option to choose between different art movements such as Magician Realism and Pointillism.
Another example included the arcade game Eureka, which uses powerful generative AI algorithms trained on previous award-winning campaigns to generate marketing campaign ideas.
Meanwhile, the ‘Sustainable Design Assistant’ demonstrated tools that enable designers to make sustainable decisions early in the design process.
In March, tech leaders including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on AI development due to potential risks.
The letter, published on The Future of Life Institute’s website, describes the AI Institute as “an uncontrollable race to develop and deploy a more powerful digital mind that no one, even its creators, can comprehend or predict. is involved in,” he claimed. , or reliably control. “
Singh said he “understands” the call for a moratorium, but that Accenture “also understands how to take this pragmatically and scale it in a responsible way.”
“The dystopian-utopian debate” has been around since “the genesis of technology,” and AI concerns are just “the next iteration,” he said.
For more on this interview at the 2023 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, see the media player video above.
