Accenture: Then and now, and how it may signify things to come

Last September, Accenture was crowing about how AI was going to transform its business:

Today, as I write this, the stock has dropped around 18%, almost 23% for the week, well over 50% from the 52 week high, after a disappointing quarter.

Doesn’t look like their massive AI bet paid off. (Of course competition from AI might be eating into their business, but either way, Accenture’s rolling it out hasn’t produced the miracles they were hoping for.)

I really do think that Claude Code (which remember, is a special-purpose neurosymbolic system rather than a generic chatbot) will increase productivity for coders (if technical debt doesn’t swallow back those gains).

But on the whole, Generative AI has not been delivering great gains. We have seen that now in study after study, MIT, McKinsey, Bain, and many more.

Accenture’s mediocre quarter doesn’t seem like a blip; instead, it seems like one more example of corporate AI RoI not meeting expectations.

Small wonder tokenmaxxing is dying; if enough other big customers are similarly disappointed, the whole jig will be up.

Subscribe now

Tweet of the day:

Share