Upskilling key to reinventing work through AI: Accenture CEO

Yahoo Finance is reporting live at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where global and corporate leaders weigh the long-term impacts of artificial intelligence. What do these workplace use cases for AI mean for the future of job security?

Accenture (ACN) CEO Julie Sweet joins Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi to discuss key takeaways from discussions happening at the World Economic Forum.

Sweet believes one challenge of scaling AI in the workplace is “actually going from ‘cool’ demos to operationalizing it," where human talent is a key essential. Sweet notes a need to focus on cultivating skills or "upskilling" workers to fit into these new roles.

Sweet sees many companies in the “very early days” of addressing the potential AI risks, which both companies and federal regulators need to be more proactive in confronting.

"Just remember, reinvention is real, buy you only get all these great outcomes if you can actually reinvent every part of what you do," Sweet says on unlocking new profit streams through AI.

It's all part of Yahoo Finance's exclusive coverage from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where our team will speak to top decision-makers as well as preeminent leaders in business, finance, and politics about the world’s most pressing issues and priorities for the coming year.

Watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live here.

Editor's note: This article was written by Eyek Ntekim.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance's coverage of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. That's Brian Sozzi next to me. I'm Julie Hyman. As we've been telling you, there is a lot of conversation about AI on the ground here. And one of the subtopics is the intersection of AI and jobs and the worries that people globally have that AI is going to eliminate their jobs.

One of the folks who is talking about that is Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture. She's sitting right next to us right now, so let's bring her into the conversation. This is something you talked about at the World Economic Forum today on the stage. So what are the takeaways for people who are concerned? And I should mention, you have a lot of employees at Accenture. 740,000, as you just told me. So obviously, this is something very much on your mind right now.

JULIE SWEET: Right. Well, let's just start with we have 12 jobs in our technology department that didn't exist a year ago. One of them, for example, a prompt engineer. And why does that matter? So the big challenge today about being successful in the use of AI is actually going from the cool demos to operationalizing it, and talent is front and center.

And in almost every way that you're going to use it, whether it's to reimagine marketing or digital manufacturing, there's some jobs that are going to go away, but there are going to be some brand new jobs. For example, in sales, there's something called a sales bot manager. Didn't exist before. It's managing all of the bots that are being used to feed new information.

So what's really important is to understand how is the Gen AI going to change your talent? What are the new skills? And then, and that's why it's about Davos, right? Is how do you make sure that we can bring people along the journey to get those new jobs.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, that's my question. I mean, are these considered to be highly skilled jobs, what kind of training? And in some ways, does it make some of these jobs more accessible?

JULIE SWEET: Well, the job impact is a couple of things. So lots of jobs are going to get better. So like in sales, for example, where you spend a lot of time sifting through information. Those are more interesting jobs. So that is an important impact because actually, what we find, our research says a lot of people want Gen AI because they see that. Like hey, I don't want to read all this stuff. I want to go spend more time with customers.

Many of the jobs that are being created are definitely highly skilled jobs, and we see that at Accenture. I think what's the most important takeaway that we actually have 150 clients who've signed up to do workshops here. So not attend a panel but actually roll up their sleeves.

And the focus there and in every one of them is what do you have to do to actually be able to create or actually have the people here be upskilled? And what you have to have is a very different kind of HR capacity. You have to be able to look at skills. And we have 740,000 people. We have a database of our skills. When the pandemic hit, I could run an algorithm and identify who could be upskilled in 20 hours to do more cloud. That's the future. And by the way, Gen AI enables that future.

BRIAN SOZZI: How prepared are companies for downside risks from AI?

JULIE SWEET: Very early days. So you know, I ask a simple question to CEOs. Can you call someone in your organization and ask them where AI is being used, what are the risks, and how they're being managed? Most CEOs today cannot do that. Less than 2%.

So what we're doing and is helping CEOs know how do you move from lots of principles? There's a stack of information about what principles should be, to how do you operationalize it. So when you're going to do something in sales, you need to know, well, I have risks around bias. So what is that risk?

So you have to get to operationalizing it. Very early days. What we're doing, we're working in over 700 projects, is we're doing it project by project while we help our clients build out the capability. So Gen AI is a very important technology. Reinvention is real. And what that means is there are things that don't exist today, like responsible AI capabilities, that need to be built.

JULIE HYMAN: And so how do we do that?

JULIE SWEET: Well, you can hire Accenture. So that's one way.

JULIE HYMAN: But things will also need to happen on the government level, on the policy level. I mean, I know there's been a lot of discussion around that as well.

JULIE SWEET: The answer is yes and yes, right? So it first starts with because you can't wait for policy. So what we first say to clients is that you have to understand-- you set aside principles, but then you understand, so what are what do you have to do?

So it's very simple. At Accenture, if someone wants to use AI, it automatically gets routed to a capability that assesses the risk. That is something every company needs to have. That is not a mystery. It's not a capability they have now, but they have to do it.

And what I think is important is that in every workshop that we have, all of the CEOs, all of the c-suite are super focused on this point. They said, we want to understand what it looks like. Not the principles, but that's practical. That means my CIO needs to have that capability.

I think you're going to see-- we'll come back in a year, and we're going to have a very different conversation. It's not going to be less than 2% of companies. Companies are really focused on that. And on the flip side, now governments got to have to think about what do they need to do in terms of regulation, which will be mostly around the use cases. But it starts now, and you can't wait till the regulation.

BRIAN SOZZI: This sounds like a major profit unlock for a company like Accenture. Do you think investors are underestimating your earnings power in a world where you're advising companies around the world on how to take advantage of AI?

JULIE SWEET: Well, we have very long term investors who've been with us for a long time. And I think they see the power of Accenture. We succeed by embracing and actually leading every technology change. And we did that with software as a service. We did that in private and public cloud. And we're moving very fast here, and we were super proud.

Just think about how fast this is moving. It's small on the one hand. Last year, $72 billion in sales. 300 million in Gen AI in the last six months. But in my first quarter of this year, 350 million. So just think about that. It went from 100 million, to 200 million, to 350 million. So it's moving very, very fast.

At the same time, I did $72 billion of sales last year. So it is big and small. It's happening fast. And just remember. Reinvention is real, but you only get to reinvent and you only get all these great outcomes if you can actually reinvent every part of what you do.

And that's what the workshops are about. What is the process change? What is the talent? What are the new skills? What is responsible AI? What do I have to change about my technology? We are working on 700 projects. And the biggest issue that we see is that people are once again doing proofs of concept, and they're not sure how to go from a cool demo to actually making that material impact.

And of course, that's our opportunity. And we're really focused. That's why we did something totally different here this year at Davos. As you know, usually, it's a lot of one on ones and a lot of panels. And we said people don't need panels right now. They need to understand the biggest difference in success will be leaders. Do leaders truly understand the technology, so they can make the right decisions?

BRIAN SOZZI: These are some very big order numbers, large amount of projects. How many people will hire this year at Accenture to support these goals?

JULIE SWEET: Well, I look at it a different way. We started with 40,000 people who were deeply steeped in data and AI, and we're going to double that in three years. And we're well on our way to doing that, and that's just the beginning.