AI

Accenture forms Nvidia Business Group to chase agentic AI

Consulting giant Accenture is forming an Nvidia Business Group in its own organization to help it drive and grow AI adoption in enterprises, a move that comes as part of a newly expanded partnership between the two firms, and more deeply entwines Accenture with the company that has become the poster boy of the AI boom.

In announcing the expanded partnership, Accenture said that generative AI demand helped generate $3 billion in bookings during its recently-closed fiscal year. The creation of the new group within Accenture, which the company said will be supported by more than 30,000 trained professionals, will help its clients scale enterprise AI and pursue “agentic AI” functionality.

Agentic AI is commonly described as more autonomous and less in need of human input than current AI programs. “Instead of a human typing in a prompt or automating pre-existing business steps, agentic AI systems can act on the intent of the user, create new workflows and take appropriate actions based on their environment that can reinvent entire processes or functions,” Accenture said in a statement.

While this implies a kind of bot automation that may not seem all that new, Leonard Lee, executive analyst and founder of neXt Curve, told Fierce Electronics via e-mail that “the promises of agentic GenAI are yet to be broadly proven beyond ‘beta’ or experimental, much less enterprise-reliable and safe.”

He added, “It’s important to understand Enterprise GenAI is nascent. Agentic GenAI would propose another layer of use cases for enterprises to contemplate beyond what many are already testing and validating in their POCs and pilots today… many enterprises and enterprise GenAI solution vendors (including SIs and consulting companies) are still on a learning curve for what it takes to infuse GenAI into an organization and its business in a way that provides enterprise-grade, industrial-grade, and consumer-safe capabilities and services.”

It is worth noting that even Accenture’s own hype-building research last year acknowledged some of the challenges of advancing generative AI deeper into enterprises.

Accenture said it will help enable agentic AI by leveraging its AI Refinery framework, which uses the full Nvidia AI stack, including Nvidia AI Foundry, AI Enterprise and Omniverse platforms, to advance areas such as process reinvention, AI-powered simulation, and sovereign AI. The company already has AI Refinery Engineering Hubs in Mountain View, California, and Bangalore, and intends to build additional hubs in Accenture Singapore, Tokyo, Malaga, and London. The partners already are working with some customers to support agentic AI, one prime example being Indosat Group in Indonesia, with whom Accenture and Nvidia are working on a sovereign AI project.

Accenture AI Refinery will be available on all public and private cloud platforms and will integrate seamlessly with other Accenture Business Groups to accelerate AI across the SaaS and cloud AI ecosystem, the company stated. Accenture also plans to debut a new Nvidia  NIM Agent Blueprint for virtual facility robot fleet simulation, which integrates Omniverse and Nvidia’s Isaac robotics software and Metropolis video analytics software to enable industrial companies to build autonomous, robot-operated software-defined factories and facilities. Accenture will use these new capabilities at Eclipse Automation, an Accenture-owned manufacturing automation company, to deliver as much as 50% faster designs and 30% reduction in cycle time on behalf of its clients, the company said.

Outside of its own proving ground at Eclipse Automation, Accenture’s new Nvidia Business Group group is likely to compete “with ISVs such as Salesforce and ServiceNow [also an Nvidia partner] that are already embedding GenAI features and capabilities into their software applications and integrating agentic frameworks on top of or into their software stack.”

Lee added, “Regardless, this is a very interesting move by Accenture that highlights how Nvidia continues to evolve itself, and the way its ecosystem builds into something that runs parallel to what hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS are doing in this era of accelerated computing.”