Accenture and Google Cloud Advance AI Adoption and Cybersecurity with Fortune 500 Companies

August 29, 2024

Accenture and Google Cloud Advance AI Adoption and Cybersecurity with Fortune 500 Companies

Companies helping clients across industries safely scale AI projects and reinvent business operations

45% of joint client projects have moved from gen AI proof-of-concepts to production

NEW YORK and SUNNYVALE, Calif; Aug. 29, 2024 - Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Google Cloud today announced that their strategic alliance is advancing solutions for enterprise clients and seeing strong momentum across industries in two critical and related areas: generative AI and cybersecurity.

As part of the announcement today, the two companies are increasing their investments in services that support businesses through every stage of their gen AI projects, including providing the expertise to determine optimal use cases, piloting projects for strategic innovation and deploying the engineering prowess needed to scale the technology and secure the enterprise. With cybersecurity as a core pillar of the partnership, Accenture and Google Cloud are also deepening their security work as clients adapt to new risks unique to gen AI, including securing model data, managing cyberattacks, and delivering remediation services that minimize breach impact and enable faster recovery.

As a result of the Accenture and Google Cloud generative AI Center of Excellence (CoE), which launched in December 2023, 45% of joint client projects have moved from gen AI proof-of-concepts to production. With today's announcement, the companies will further increase support for clients as they use AI to optimize critical business functions, address complex industry needs and protect against sophisticated cybersecurity threats.

"Accenture's decade-long partnership with Google Cloud is helping our clients across industries accelerate and scale their use of generative AI as a catalyst for reinvention, to strengthen cybersecurity, and create long-term value faster," said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. "The strategic, industry, and technical expertise of our joint gen AI Center of Excellence is enabling clients to solve not only complex business challenges right now, but also create a strong foundation for future innovation, resilience and growth."

"Accenture and Google Cloud have already helped multiple Fortune 500 companies move from experimentation with gen AI to production," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. "Through our expanded partnership today, we are rapidly accelerating gen AI adoption by providing customers with the technical expertise, engineering resources, and AI-optimized tools they need to scale and succeed."

Accelerating Enterprise Adoption of Gen AI
Through the joint gen AI CoE, Accenture and Google Cloud have quickly delivered new gen AI solutions, managed services, and more than 60 joint industry accelerators. These accelerators are based on Accenture's hundreds of gen AI use cases and help clients solve complex challenges across industries, such as optimizing supply chains to improve product distribution, enhancing retail experiences to increase purchase conversion rates, and automating document processing to increase efficiency.

As one of the largest financial institutions in Brazil, Banco BV called on Accenture and Google Cloud to reinvent their customer experience with gen AI.

Gabriel Ferreira, CEO, Banco BV, said, "The GenCore project, developed by Banco BV, Accenture, and Google Cloud, uses AI to create hyper-personalized interactions with customers, making communication 80% faster and 100 times more personalized. Fully anchored in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) using Google Cloud's Vertex AI, this advancement reflects our commitment to innovation and excellence in customer service."

Accenture and Google Cloud have also provided clients with cloud infrastructure and AI models to successfully build and scale multiple types of AI workloads. With access to Google's latest tensor processing units (TPUs) and NVIDIA's graphics processing units (GPUs), clients have been able to run their most demanding gen AI applications, while models like Gemini 1.5 Flash have delivered cost-effective performance completing high-volume, high-frequency tasks at global scale.

To achieve this, many clients have used Vertex AI as the unified platform providing a single surface to train, test, and tune both Gemini and third-party models, enabling clients to more efficiently bring gen AI applications to production, and to monitor the models powering them for input skew and drift.

For example, Radisson Hotel Group, a global leading hotel chain with a footprint in more than 95 countries, used Vertex AI and Gemini models to optimize its advertising workflows. By training AI models on extensive datasets stored in BigQuery, the company created personalized advertisements at scale, boosting the productivity of their ad teams by more than 50% while increasing revenue from AI-powered campaigns by more than 20%, enhancing the differential value they offer to the hotel owners.

Powering Security with Gen AI and Threat Intelligence
Accenture and Google Cloud have also deepened their work to help clients transform security operations, delivering solutions to hundreds of enterprise clients over the past year to strengthen their security posture and reduce costs.

Accenture's managed extended detection and response (MxDR) offering is integrated with Google Security Operations, which features security-specific gen AI platform capabilities from Google Cloud and gen AI operational capabilities from Accenture. Additionally, the joint service is now supplemented with frontline intelligence from Mandiant, combined with Accenture's crisis management and consulting teams, enabling customers to quickly identify and respond to advanced cyber threats.

As enterprises navigate the complexity of gen AI, it is essential that they embed strong cybersecurity practices at every level of their organizations for ongoing business reinvention, using tools like MxDR to stay ahead of sophisticated threats. For example, after a significant cyber breach, an international retailer successfully improved its security posture and strengthened its detection and response effectiveness by adopting the MxDR solution.

Accenture's Investments to Deliver Google Cloud AI
Accenture and Google Cloud are also investing in client services to support every stage of a gen AI project, including capabilities to rapidly prototype, assess AI readiness, and build the correct foundation for modernizing business applications and customer experiences with gen AI. In the past 12 months, Accenture has doubled its Google Cloud certifications to address the rising demand for Google Cloud technology, and its experts have been accredited with Google Cloud's new Gen AI Skills badge.

Accenture has also increased the adoption of Google Cloud's gen AI into its platforms, which has helped the company enhance its Google Cloud engineering capabilities. For example, Accenture has integrated Gemini Code Assist with its flagship AI based automation platform, GenWizard, enabling thousands of Accenture software engineers to bring AI-driven software delivery to Google customers. Gemini for Code Assist has had a significant impact-boosting application development cycles with its AI-powered code recommendations and providing a natural language chat interface for information retrieval, which has improved the speed and quality of software projects that Accenture engineers are delivering to Google customers.

About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world's leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services-creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 750,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world's leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. We are uniquely able to deliver tangible outcomes because of our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song. These capabilities, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

About Google Cloud
Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

# # #

Contacts:

Mylissa Tsai
Accenture
+1 617 488 7932
[email protected]

Hannah Unkefer
Accenture
+1 206 839 2172
[email protected]

Ryan Styrk
Google Cloud
[email protected]

Copyright © 2024 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture and its logo are registered trademarks of Accenture.