Artificial intelligence the way businesses will stay one step ahead, says Accenture chief

Head of consultancy Accenture, Pete Burns in Sydney on Tuesday. Picture: Nikki Short

From machine-learning chatbots to the shake-up of end-to-end processing, Accenture’s Pete Burns believes data and artificial intelligence will be the secret to staying ahead in business.

Burns is just over a year into the top job running the Australian and New Zealand operations of the global Accenture with its 750,000-strong workforce.

In his first major interview, Burns says a new era of manufacturing with projects like Recharge Industries’ gigafactory in Geelong and Coles’ new smart distribution centres can make Australia globally competitive.

Competition will be on digital smarts and not labour costs.

The rise of data and AI is a tailor-made opportunity for the professional services firm.

“It’s about being on the pitch,” Burns says.

“There is incredible value in helping organisations consolidate their strategy, but ultimately, strategy only works if you can execute it and drive it to outcomes. To me, Accenture is about outcomes, being on the pitch doing the hard yards.”

Burns had a nomadic upbringing – which he says influenced his first job choice of Booz Allan, where he spent over two decades before moving to PwC when it took over Booz in 2015.

He started in Tasmania where his property developer father worked in government housing, before the family followed the gas boom to Gladstone. As a teenager, he lived in Tennant Creek where his father built caravan parks chasing grey nomads and then to Queensland where he worked on Lang Walker’s Sanctuary Cove.

“When I joined Booz and I said I don’t want to come to Sydney. Put me on any project anywhere in the world and give me an experience,” he says. Burns later worked in Melbourne, Perth, then London, Singapore and Boston.

Accenture’s clients are big corporates and governments. Among 7500 local staff there are strategists, operations people, security and cyber and data and AI experts. Accenture is also the largest digital marketing shop in the country.

“We have brands like the Monkeys. We do Telstra’s ads, we do Qantas’s ads so we have a massive creative agency,” says Burns.

On Monday, Bill Gates, told The Australian that the potency of AI to transform business would bring new challenges to the tech sector and jobs. Capturing the upside and managing risk in this shapeshifting period is where the consultants come in.

“The potential in AI is enormous and Bill obviously is well in front of it,” says Burns. “Just look at this ChatGPT that is starting to circulate and the practical essence of what it can do.”

The Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer burst onto the scene last November.

Ask any question of the superior chatbot and the answers are a leap forward in intelligence that is both exciting and disturbing enough to be banned from public schools – at least for now.

Burns is in the excited camp.

The public is warming to chatbots. “We were with a client and asked it to write a poem about this company,” he says. “Almost instantaneously it constructed a poem that showed that it understood the company’s purpose, ­vision and where it was successful. Put that into an engagement with consumer environment and we are starting to hit a frontier that is a real intelligence that has a human dimension to it.”

Burn’s favourite is New Zealand company Soul Machines, the brainchild of psychologists and ex-cinematographers for Lord of the Rings. “When you are looking at these avatars, they are amazingly human, they’ll stop if they think you are confused and ask ‘would you like me to go back over that’,” Burns says.

Less talked about is how AI will transform end-to-end processes. Burns believes change will be dramatic. “A mortgage process is done digitally but the underlying process is still what it was when you went into the branch 10 years ago. Data does not have a sequential flow to it so the whole contract of organisations built around sequential flows is starting to be challenged,” he says.

In December, Accenture bought brand research and customer analysis business FiftyFive5 for a reported $130m from private equity. Burns plans to connect it with the firm’s AI and analytics capabilities to turbocharge personalisation for clients.

Aside from analytics, Burns stresses delivery – the engineering expertise at Accenture to work with clients on the ground. He says Accenture’s work on projects like Coles’ distribution centres and the gigafactory in Geelong could be the making of Australian manufacturing. “We are bucking the trend in Australia and starting to rebuild that manufacturing backbone. We are changing the basis of competition away from labour and capital to real digital labour and innovative practices.”

On the talent market, Burns says the fizz has come out of the Covid-19-induced tight conditions in professional services. “Now it is about are we creating enough of the new skills as opposed to do we have enough in aggregate in the market,” he says.

His broader challenge is protecting clients from rising labour costs at Accenture.

“We have to transform ourselves to do what we tell our clients to do. So we are automating, driving productivity through to keep the competitiveness of the business at large,” he says.

The former PwC partner has a ready pitch to distinguish Accenture from its peers.

Firstly, the sheer scale of investment in assets in tech and data by the firm. Secondly, Accenture is a public company with a balance sheet that can absorb risk on behalf of their clients which Burns says cannot be done in an audit based environment. And without an audit unit, Accenture has no independence restrictions. There is room for improvement, however.

“Today, Accenture is highly respected. It brings capability, a commercial instinct, a never fail attitude to execution – but I wouldn’t say we were loved,” says Burns. “We have long-term relationships but is about being less transactional. That is the advisory end of the proposition. It’s about being genuinely proactive much earlier in conversations with our clients rather than at the point when they are ready to execute.”