My analyst colleague Saurabh Gupta has shared our viewpoint about what’s going on with Accenture in 2025 and it’s big re-org around Reinvention Services under the leadership of Manish Sharma.
Saurabh lays down the challenges ahead for our 800,000 services King Kong, namely several recent leadership changes, its sheer size, its huge plethora of acquisitions, its client culture, and the simple fact that AI is levelling the playing field. He also calls out the company’s huge breadth of capabilities to reinvent its clients with the subtle nuance that it now needs to prevail with its largest reinvention challenge: itself.
I am personally excited for my good friend Manish Sharma taking on the challenge of bringing together Accenture’s crown jewels of Strategy, Consulting, Song, Technology, and Operations to spearhead its Reinvention Services capability. Manish has been one of the bastions of global services ever since I can remember (which is a long time), and I can’t think of too many people who generally “get” the need to simply offer services to enterprises and bring together business needs scaled by technology. And in today’s era of AI fluff, the need to bring together front and back offices to exploit the blurring of lines between software and services, between people and machines, has never been more prominent.
Accenture’s been a step ahead reinventing the services market for many years
This is a significant rejigging of the services world from the global leader, which has clearly reached its own reinvention moment. The firm invented the term digital with its practice launch in 2013 and proceeded to acquire ~50 media/ad firms to become the global powerhouse in martech and digital advertising. The following year, it brought its BPO and managed IT services together under the Accenture Operations banner to transform “multi-tower” outsourcing. It then went full throttle Cloud First as we hit the pandemic, as the enterprise world desperately groped around to become genuinely virtual, organized, and scaled in the cloud. And as GenAI hit the big streets in late 2022, Accenture made sure it was at the forefront of building a billion-dollar pipeline. Then, when GCCs started competing directly with service providers for the offshore outsourcing work, Accenture smartly acquired a major stake in the GCC consulting leader ANSR to ensure it could balance its consulting and outsourcing portfolios to stay ahead of the disruption to global services. At the heart of this acquisition was Manish Sharma, the king of services reinvention himself, who sits on the ANSR board.
But can it keep reinventing with reinvented services in this volatile climate?
One of the secrets of growing, growing, and growing is having well-designed business units that can compete aggressively in the market, feeding off a common brand and pool of resources. However, with the unbelievable speed of development of agentic AI, generative AI, and machine learning, we have reached a greater need than ever to fix the same quagmire of issues plaguing enterprises for decades: processes, people, data, and tech.
However, what people don’t often realize is that the tech isn’t really the problem with AI. It’s fixing all the process mess, bad data, and skills deficiencies that are holding back enterprises. As our Pulse data across the Global 2000 dramatically illustrates, processes are the biggest, hairiest mess, and we need open-heart surgery to even consider sampling the forbidden fruits of AI:
Coupled with our legacy debts, we also need to get ahead of all the instability posed by geopolitics, economics, and cybersecurity, as these dominate the minds of troubled ambitious enterprise leaders looking to invest in the core infrastructure of the businesses to insulate themselves from macro-instability and exposure to debilitating cyberattacks:
Net-net, the need for businesses to reinvent themselves to define such an array of problems and somehow fashion a way forward in this world has never been so poignant.
Bottom Line: Accenture has always stayed ahead of the game, but this time presents their biggest challenge
As we’ve discussed, Accenture has done a brilliant job over the last two decades reinventing itself and forcing the rest of the industry to follow its lead. However, they were able to do this with several business lines working fairly independently of each other. Their corporate branding, their deep relationships across the C-Suite (and not just IT) have enabled the firm to grow with a lot of smart acquisitions, incredible marketing, and an aggressive culture of “high performance” that was very distinct to the Accenture brand and culture.
However, today’s services playbook is changing radically and all the leading providers have no choice but to practice what they preach and take themselves through painful bottom-up change, where they need to focus on repaying their legacy debts of the last two decades to reinvent their own cultures, break down their silos and create distinct value for their clients. Being a true services-as-software provider necessitates a completely integrated company operating under one mission, one culture, one brand and one united leadership team energized by working together. But if anyone can pull this off, Manish can…
Posted in : Agentic AI, Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Change Management, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, GenAI, IT Outsourcing / IT Services, Marketing, OneOffice
