The idea of selling pickaxes during a gold rush is a business cliché, but what about selling slides on gold mining best practices?
That’s partly why Accenture landed $600 million in new bookings on the generative AI craze in the first few months of this year, despite a forecast reduced for the consultancy’s upcoming year, according to its recent quarterly earnings report. One of the executives at the center of this push is Lan Guan, who was elevated to Accenture’s chief AI officer last year after previously leading the company’s data and AI practices.
Accenture is far from the only company lumping burgeoning AI operations under this trendy new C-suite title. In a published investigation in last fall’s CIO Magazine, 11% of medium and large companies said they had hired a CAIO, and 21% were looking for one.
But what are these dedicated AI leaders actually doing? And is this a position that every company needs to fill? It is the second in a series of CAIO profiles in which Tech Brew looks at these questions.
In Accenture’s case, Guan said creating its perch was a recognition of how much the company could gain from enterprise clients’ appetite for generative AI. Around the same time she was promoted, the consulting firm committed to investing $3 billion in AI over the next three years and double its AI-trained workforce to 80,000 through hiring, acquisitions and training.
“We definitely saw a huge amount of opportunity ahead of us to use generative AI along with classical AI to drive a lot of business reinventions, especially post-pandemic,” Guan told Tech Brew. “So I think, simply put, that was the direct and key catalyst for creating this role.”
Continue reading here.-PK
|