Accenture forms new Nvidia business group focused on agentic AI adoption

Accenture and Nvidia announced an expanded partnership Wednesday with Accenture’s new Nvidia business group focused on helping customers rapidly scale AI adoption.

Accenture said the new group will use Accenture’s AI Refinery platform — built on the Nvidia AI stack, including Nvidia AI Foundry, Nvidia AI Enterprise, and Nvidia Omniverse — to help clients create a foundation for use of agentic AI.

Agentic AI, or AI systems that can autonomously perform tasks and make decisions on their own within set parameters, represent a more operational, business-specific way to leverage gen AI without human intervention as part of enterprise workflows.

“Many of you probably have heard from our recently closed fiscal year earnings that generative AI demand drove $3 billion in Accenture bookings,” Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture, said in a press conference Tuesday. “However, many of our clients, many business organizations, do not see the full benefits of gen AI yet.”

In fact, Guan said, Accenture estimates only 10% of companies have fully scaled gen AI. She cited cost, complexity, technical debt, data, and talent readiness as common hurdles enterprises face. But the new Accenture Nvidia business group is aimed at helping clients overcome those challenges and get the most out of gen AI.

“We believe the next wave of agentic AI will be a huge step forward, will be a game changer in how our clients reinvent their business,” Guan said. “To me, it’s no longer just about prompting the prebuilt large language models and waiting for a response — what we call zero-shot prompting. Now, with agentic AI, we can actually develop specialized capabilities that can independently and autonomously, or act, to make progress against goals or humans’ intentions.”

A full commitment

Accenture said the new business group will be supported by more than 30,000 Nvidia-trained AI practitioners to help clients reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption. Also, Accenture AI Foundry will be available on all public and private cloud platforms and will integrate with other Accenture business groups.

As part of the effort, Accenture will debut a new Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprint for virtual facility robot fleet simulation. That blueprint will integrate Nvidia Omniverse, Isaac, and Metropolis software to help industrial companies build autonomous, robot-operated software-defined factories and facilities. The firm then plans to leverage the new capabilities at Eclipse Automation, an Accenture-owned manufacturing automation company. Accenture said the blueprint will allow it to help its clients deliver as much as 50% faster designs, and a 30% reduction in cycle time.

Accenture’s marketing function is also integrating the AI Refinery platform with autonomous agents to help create and run campaigns faster. The firm said AI Refinery will assist its marketing function as well to reduce manual steps by up to 35% and costs by 6%, and increase speed-to-market by up to 55%.

In addition, Accenture plans to add AI Refinery Engineering Hubs in Singapore, Tokyo, Malaga, and London. Part of its Center for Advanced AI, these hubs will feature deep engineering skills and technical capacity for using agent AI systems, focusing on the selection, fine-tuning, and large-scale inferencing of foundation models.