IT services sector can thrive in the AI age if they reinvent: Julie Sweet, Accenture

Artificial intelligence will expand the IT services industry, and create many more jobs by companies who are able to reinvent themselves and capture the technology’s full potential, said Julie Sweet, chairperson and chief executive, Accenture.

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit at New Delhi on Thursday, Sweet drew lessons from 2013, when an Oxford University study warned that 47% of US jobs were automatable and robotic process automation (RPA) was expected to damage IT services. However, the opposite happened.

“In fact, we used RPA to automate thousands of jobs. And we also, as an industry, embraced the new technologies of digital and classical AI, and we created many, many more jobs,” she said. Companies that adopted automation created investment capacity for new technologies and growth, she explained. At Accenture, headcount rose from roughly 275,000 employees and $29 billion in revenue in 2013 to over 750,000 people and $70 billion today.


“What the last decade has taught us is a critical lesson. When companies and countries embrace new technologies and then use them to drive growth and productivity, they prosper. Advanced AI should be the same,” she said In Accenture’s latest quarterly survey across 20 countries, “78% say AI’s greatest value is in growth.”

If CEOs cannot point to “new products and services, new levels of performance that were not possible before,” they have not captured AI’s potential.

Sweet acknowledged that advanced AI is much more powerful than prior technological waves and that its impact will be more profound, requiring urgency, reinvention and global collaboration. “Underneath the headlines of a failure of AI is mostly a failure to reinvent,” she warned. Companies must reinvent processes, reshape workforces and commit to sustained entry-level hiring. “We will hire more entry-level… this year than last year,” she said, though the skills required and onboarding approaches are fundamentally different.

She described LLMs as “about to become the new mall” in retail and commerce, and highlighted the possibility of bringing drugs to market much faster than the current nine-year average in pharma.

However, growth must be inclusive. Small and medium-sized enterprises account for 50% of global GDP and 70% of employment in the Global South, and “we must commit to providing access to the technology and the talent.” Public-private partnerships will be critical to ensure that access.

On the debate around human oversight, Sweet said, “It is humans in the lead, not humans in the loop, that will determine our future.” While responsible AI requires compliance frameworks that include humans and technology, she emphasized that “Technology, no matter how powerful, is only a tool… It is leaders who decide how to use those tools.”

Rejecting pessimistic narratives, Sweet concluded, “There are lots of headlines today that predict less. Less jobs, less opportunity, less human relevance. We are here because we see a future of more.”