Accenture PLC CMD 2026

Hello, everyone. Hello and welcome. We have many of you in the room and online, so thank you for joining us. Thank you to the people who actually make today possible. That is our reinventors and our clients around the world, the incredible technology companies that make up our ecosystem, and of course, our production team who is with us today. We are also joined by some of our board and many of our senior leaders. For those of you here today in person, you are going to be able to meet some of those senior leaders. We are really excited because you are investing time, and we have the opportunity to tell our full story. Our goal for today is that you leave with a deeper understanding of how we have become a business reinvention and technology company, and why we have significant growth ahead. Today, we are going to cover three things.

First, why is AI making Accenture more essential than ever? Second, our new foundation for growth that we have been building for the last four years. Finally, third, our growth trajectory. How we are going to use that foundation to drive significant, durable growth and shareholder value creation. Let me start with some context. Twice in the last 20 years, there has been an economic reset in our industry. First, there was offshoring. Made possible by the internet and automation, offshoring drove down the cost of building software and routine IT services. In fact, at one point, there was a fear that automation would wipe out huge portions of the IT services industry. Then came cloud and digital. Cloud and digital drove down the cost of technology itself. You saw for the first time, software starting to replace some services. Over both eras, an important thing happened.

Offshoring, cloud, and digital did drive down the cost of some of our services and eliminated some of our services. At the same time, the underlying technology allowed enterprises to do so much more that the new demand that was created far exceeded, over time, the demand that it replaced. In both cases, Accenture had significant growth and took significant market share. How did we do that? First of all, we embraced these developments quickly. We invested in innovation, and we were willing to reinvent ourselves from how we worked, to where we worked, to how we organized, to what we sold, and we invested each time in new sources of revenue that were being created by the technology wave. We are now four years into the next economic reset of our industry, the age of AI. We think the opportunity is bigger than ever before.

While AI does have the potential with AI efficiencies to impact our business more than ever before, we again believe that ultimately, the new demand that will be created will far exceed the demand that is being replaced. Across both of these eras, clients, the ecosystem, and trust have been at the center of our strategy, and they remain so. We have confidence in our future because we have had a great track record in prior technology waves. We are running a playbook that is informed by the past, but accelerated. Now we can see it in the opportunities that we have created already and the new foundation. I am with clients almost daily. It is the best part of my job because it is so inspiring to be with CEOs with bold ambitions, and those ambitions are being driven by the twin catalysts of AI and the macro environment.

Now, when I look at where we are across our client base, there is wide varieties of AI readiness. We have some clients who are moving from using AI to running on AI with enterprise-wide programs. Most are still quite early, starting to scale some things across the enterprise, and many more are just getting started. Wherever they are starting, there is one thing, though, that is very clear. Incremental change is not enough. We see it this way. AI is the breakthrough innovation. Only reinvention can unlock the value. This is what matters to Accenture. Our clients turn to us in times of change. The bigger the change, the more they need us. Reinvention is fundamental change. Our clients over the years have turned to us over and over again because we have delivered reinvention.

That is why 85% of our top 200 commercial clients and all of the G7 governments have been clients for 20 years or more. They turn to us because we have a unique set of strengths that no other company can fully replicate. You are going to hear a lot about our strengths over the course of the day. I want to highlight a few that we have built over decades. Who we serve, who we build with, what we know, and what we have done. When you think about who we serve, we operate in every major market. 75% of the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 are in our client base. We serve every G7 government. Half the world's economy run through our client relationships.

We have an incredible ability to build trusted relationships, sometimes built over decades because we have a cadre of client account leads who wake up every day thinking about how to help their client be successful and what we can do to be a part of that. This means that we have unmatched insight and experience. Then there is who we build with. We have by far the largest and most strategic ecosystem of technology companies in our industry. We have over 200 in our network, but 18 of them make up about 65% of our revenue. They are the largest technology companies. They are the emerging technology companies. They are all at the center of the AI wave. Because of these relationships and our ability to invest, we use the latest technologies early and we build the skills our clients need. We understand technology, we understand the enterprise.

We help our clients decide what is fit for purpose, and then we help them create value. We work with each of our technology companies in the ecosystem to create joint solutions that we take to our clients to help them accelerate value and lower risk. We have the largest distribution channel in the industry with over 9,000 clients, which means our technology partners know that we can help them scale. They also know that we will have the people, our Reinventors, that they need to scale because we have the best ability to attract, retain, and grow talent in the industry. That is why we are number four on the Great Place to Work global ranking. This is cross-industry, and that ranking is by far the highest in our industry.

When you take all of these factors together, that is why decade after decade, we have been the number one partner to the ecosystem that matters to our clients. That brings me to what we know. We have over 800,000 people, and last quarter they were 93% utilized. Our clients value our Reinventors. Our people have deep experience across 13 industries in all major functions. That spans from corporate functions like HR and finance to core operations, manufacturing, R&D, the network, to everything customer, sales, marketing, service, product development. Our capabilities span from strategy, operating model, change management, process, data, AI, technology.

These are all of the things that we talk about are so critical to reinvention, and we are able to deliver them in the way the client needs it through consulting, through managed services, with proprietary assets and platforms, and increasingly through software that we are either buying or building. That brings me to what we have done. Our purpose is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. We use the word deliver very deliberately. This is our point of pride. People at Accenture get up every day proud because we deliver results. We have built our reputation, our brand on being at the center of every technology wave and delivering complex, hard programs. When you think about it, every year the number of clients who are doing $100 million quarters of bookings a quarter with us has increased.

You do not have that level of relationship unless you trust your partner to deliver. When you think of each of these strengths, who we serve, who we build with, what we know, and what we have done, they are the reason why Accenture is a force multiplier for our clients. We help them do more than they can do alone. All of this adds up to our ultimate strength: trust. Our clients trust us. They trust our expertise, they trust our ability to deliver, and they trust our commitment to their success. Underpinning that trust is our commitment to live every day our core values and our leadership essentials.

Whenever I am talking to a new, young managing director, I tell them that everything they need to know about how to be successful personally and how to help Accenture be successful is there in our core values and our leadership essentials. They matter. Before I take you to where we are going, I want to spend a few minutes on our starting position. Over the last four years, we have invested organically and inorganically to build a new foundation for growth. It is not just a new foundation. It is the strongest foundation we have ever built. Over the last four years, we have increased our addressable market from $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion. In the age of AI, we have built the largest AI and data workforce in our industry. While we have done that, we have added $12.6 billion in revenue.

We've taken significant market share, growing more than 2x our investable basket, and we've returned $35 billion in cash to shareholders. We've made three big strategic moves over the last four years. The first I will call accelerating large-scale reinventions. Once generative AI emerged in November 2022, we knew that it was going to take a while for the AI to mature, to be able to have an impact. We made the deliberate decision to go after more large transformations. These transformations put us at the center of our clients' agenda, and we knew that not only would they deepen our relationships, but they would position us to do the next waves as AI matures, which is exactly what we're seeing now. We've been incredibly successful. We use our $100 million bookings a quarter as a proxy for reinventions. In FY22, that was 100.

Today, it's 141 in the year that we just completed, which means over 500, 501 to be precise, that we have done over the last four years. Not only is that driving our growth, but it positions us for the next rounds of growth. The way that works is well illustrated by a meeting I had this week. Just a couple of days ago, I met with the CEO of a new client, a $20 billion annual revenue client, and they had come to us after looking at all of our competitors and we're signing our first reinvention with them. It'll be over $100 million. Our teams have already shaped wave 2 and wave 3, and by the end of breakfast, we had shaped wave 4.