Latest news with #MauroMacchi
Business Wire
26-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Accenture Report: European Firms Must Accelerate AI Adoption to Close Productivity Gap
MILAN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--European companies must strengthen the capabilities needed to scale AI faster if they are to address the growing productivity gap and enhance the region's overall competitiveness, according to a new report released by Accenture (NYSE:ACN). The study highlights that the average European worker now produces only 76% as much as their US counterparts, a significant decline from being on par 30 years ago, with persistent underinvestment in technology identified as a major cause. Despite the recent Draghi report into European competitiveness pointing to AI as a potential solution to Europe's productivity problems, Accenture's research found that European companies are yet to take full advantage of the AI opportunity. Currently more than half (56%) of the 800 large European companies surveyed have yet to scale a major AI investment. Yet if all large (€1 billion+) European companies enhanced their AI capabilities to match those of leading industries, Accenture found that almost €200 billion could be added to annual business revenues. Mauro Macchi, CEO of Accenture in EMEA, said: 'At a time when geopolitical uncertainties are on the rise, finding a solution to Europe's productivity gap has never been more crucial. AI provides a unique opportunity for Europe to reinvent its economy and significantly boost its competitiveness. European firms are making progress but need to further leverage cloud, modernize data architecture and focus on skilling in order to scale AI faster and unleash its full potential. A coordinated industrial strategy, including shared AI infrastructure and investments will also avoid dispersion of initiatives and help businesses across all European countries access powerful computing, R&D, and training. Europe has all it needs to take advantage of the AI revolution. Now is the time to execute on it.' The study found that large European companies are adopting AI more quickly than smaller companies, which could further impact Europe's productivity and competitiveness. Whilst nearly half (48%) of Europe's largest companies have scaled at least one transformational generative AI initiative, less than a third (31%) of smaller companies have. Europe has a higher concentration of smaller companies compared to the US, making this size of company a significant opportunity. AI adoption also varies across industries. Some sectors such as automotive, aerospace and defense are leading the way, while others, including telecommunications and utilities, lag behind. The report emphasizes that since these sectors provide critical regional infrastructure such as energy systems and digital networks, their relatively low AI maturity poses a competitiveness and sovereignty concern for the region. The industrial sector, which accounts for more than a quarter of Europe's GDP is also yet to tap into the full potential of AI. These disparities underscore the need for a more uniform approach to AI adoption across all industries. The report also identifies key capabilities, from data to talent, that companies need to drive value from AI investments. These AI capabilities are well spread across countries, with Switzerland, Germany, the UK and France, on average, home to slightly more AI-ready companies, than Italy and Spain. To fully realize the benefits of AI, the report calls for the development of a robust, competitive AI ecosystem in Europe. This includes helping smaller companies level up on AI, nurturing a sovereign European AI ecosystem, and developing a coordinated industrial strategy. Additionally, AI literacy and workforce development are critical, as many European workers (60%) are concerned about job displacement, and a third (36%) do not feel suitably trained to use AI efficiently. The report identifies several key barriers to scaling AI, including setting up a robust data foundation, building and maintaining multi-disciplinary teams, managing security and privacy risks, and demonstrating business value. To overcome these challenges, the report recommends: Data Foundation: Invest in breaking down data silos and building an end-to-end data foundation with quality data. Multi-Disciplinary Teams: Focus on talent development, including training and continuous learning opportunities, to build and maintain the necessary expertise. Security Risks: Adopt a secure digital core to reduce vulnerabilities, redundancy, and technical debt. Business Value: Identify and implement concrete use cases with proven ROI. AI Literacy: Provide more training and support to employees and ensure that AI tools are accessible and user-friendly. 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 791,000 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. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, 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
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Accenture Teams with NVIDIA to Advance AI Agenda for Europe with AI Refinery for Sovereign and Agentic AI
First-of-its-kind platform champions data sovereignty and operational resilience with physical AI and supports competitiveness in the path to agentic AI Accenture and NVIDIA achieve momentum with European organizations such as KION AG, L'Oreal-backed Noli, and Nestlé PARIS, June 11, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GTC EMEA 2025 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has expanded its AI Refinery™ platform for Europe with new sovereign and agentic capabilities to help European organizations maintain control over critical data and apply innovative AI solutions. "AI provides a unique opportunity for Europe to reinvent its economy, drive productivity, resilience and competitiveness, and support its future growth," said Mauro Macchi, Accenture's CEO for Europe, Middle East and Africa. "The expansion of our AI Refinery platform enables European organizations to accelerate the deployment of AI agents, while addressing their sovereignty concerns. This is particularly crucial for the public sector and critical infrastructure industries, such as energy, telecommunications and defense." "Sovereign AI is unlocking extraordinary new possibilities while preserving the integrity of national data, infrastructure, and cultural identity across Europe," said Justin Boitano, vice president, Enterprise Software Products at NVIDIA. "Together, NVIDIA and Accenture are working with leaders across the public sector, energy, telecom and the continent's industrial core—from manufacturing to retail—to build a resilient, innovative future powered by AI." New sovereign AI architecture capabilities "As AI adoption accelerates across industry and society, there is a growing need for management and operations across various elements of the AI stack, from infrastructure to models and applications, including data management," said Karthik Narain, group chief executive – Technology and CTO, Accenture. "To address this, we're providing a platform-based approach with AI Refinery for sovereignty, enabling organizations to develop and deploy AI capabilities – leveraging their own cloud infrastructure and adhering to data residency and security requirements with management and observability capabilities baked in – to drive new value and growth while maintaining control in a fast-moving market." Accenture estimates Europe will account for up to 30% of the global sovereign AI market by 2030. To address this demand, Accenture's new sovereign AI architecture builds on the success of Accenture and NVIDIA in deploying one of the world's first comprehensive AI stacks for Indosat. Part of AI Refinery, which is built on NVIDIA Enterprise AI, the sovereign AI architecture has solutions that cater to different market needs and priorities, offered as-a-service. This includes configurable AI models tailored to national languages and contexts; a development and deployment platform that is hosted and managed within a nation's jurisdiction; and secure, easy-to-customize solutions to meet the unique needs of the public sector and critical infrastructure industries. Digital sovereignty often calls for organizations to adopt controls and provisions aligned to sector-specific needs. For example, Accenture is working with a public utility in Europe to deploy sovereign GPUs as-a-service to ensure dedicated AI compute resources remain secured within its national borders. Physical AI enhances operational resilience in manufacturing Manufacturers across Europe are pushing to optimize their production, warehouse, and supply chain operations. The industrial sector is particularly strategic for Europe as it accounts for roughly a quarter of Europe's GDP. With its AI Refinery, Accenture is helping clients implement AI-powered robotics, simulation and digital twins and adapt ways of working with human workers to effectively reinvent warehouse, logistics and manufacturing to drive efficiencies and lower costs. Today, Accenture also introduced a physical AI software development kit (SDK) that can understand video and image segmentation based on predefined parameters or natural language queries by leveraging NVIDIA Metropolis and the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for Video Search and Summarization (VSS).KION has partnered with Accenture and NVIDIA to explore these capabilities to enhance safety, productivity, and quality control in manufacturing and warehouse automation. AI fueling competitiveness and growth Accenture and NVIDIA have continued to demonstrate how AI can help European organizations create a competitive edge by building a foundation for continuous reinvention and future growth. Noli (No One Like I) the first, AI-powered multi-brand marketplace startup founded and backed by L'Oréal Groupe, has teamed with Accenture and NVIDIA to reinvent how people discover and shop beauty products by addressing the number one pain point for beauty shoppers - the overwhelming volume of products and lack of unbiased, often conflicting advice in the market. With AI Refinery, Noli acts as a Beauty Advisor, cutting through the noise, using powerful AI diagnostics and tools built from over one million face scans and analysis of thousands of product formulations, to decode each user's beauty profile and to provide product recommendations to help them make confident, right-for-them choices, which are then delivered to their doorstep. Nestlé is launching a new AI-powered in-house service that will create high-quality product content at scale for eCommerce and digital media channels. Developed in partnership with Accenture, this new content service is based on digital twins and powered by NVIDIA Omniverse platform, providing exact 3D virtual replicas of physical products. Product packaging can be adjusted or localized digitally, enabling seamless integration into various environments, such as seasonal campaigns or channel-specific formats. This means that new creative content can be generated without having to constantly reshoot from scratch. AI Refinery momentum Accenture unveiled its AI Refinery platform in October 2024. It has since filed 55 patent applications across 10 countries, and the technical achievements of its AI Refinery platform have been presented and explored in 12 technical whitepapers. Accelerating the path to agentic AI for organizations, Accenture is on track to deliver its goal of 100 industry agent solutions by the end of the year. In March 2025, it debuted agent builder, which can easily customize agents in a no code environment. The following month, it announced the Trusted Agent Huddle to bring first-of-its-kind multi-system AI agent collaboration capabilities to organizations that need solutions that can span the enterprise. Accenture AI Refinery is available on all public and private cloud platforms and integrates with other Accenture Business Groups to accelerate AI across the SaaS and Cloud AI ecosystem. 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 801,000 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. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, 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 Forward-Looking Statements Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "may," "will," "should," "likely," "anticipates," "aspires," "expects," "intends," "plans," "projects," "believes," "estimates," "positioned," "outlook," "goal," "target" and similar expressions are used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance nor promises that goals or targets will be met, and involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that are difficult to predict and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. These risks include, without limitation, that the use of AI could harm our business, damage our reputation or give rise to legal or regulatory action, as well as the risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed under the "Risk Factors" heading in Accenture plc's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this news release speak only as of the date they were made, and Accenture undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements made in this news release or to conform such statements to actual results or changes in Accenture's expectations. View source version on Contacts Hannah UnkeferAccenture+1 206 839 Jenn FrancisAccenture+1 312 693
Business Wire
11-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Accenture Teams with NVIDIA to Advance AI Agenda for Europe with AI Refinery for Sovereign and Agentic AI
PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GTC EMEA 2025 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has expanded its AI Refinery ™ platform for Europe with new sovereign and agentic capabilities to help European organizations maintain control over critical data and apply innovative AI solutions. 'AI provides a unique opportunity for Europe to reinvent its economy, drive productivity, resilience and competitiveness, and support its future growth,' said Mauro Macchi, Accenture's CEO for Europe, Middle East and Africa. 'The expansion of our AI Refinery platform enables European organizations to accelerate the deployment of AI agents, while addressing their sovereignty concerns. This is particularly crucial for the public sector and critical infrastructure industries, such as energy, telecommunications and defense.' 'Sovereign AI is unlocking extraordinary new possibilities while preserving the integrity of national data, infrastructure, and cultural identity across Europe,' said Justin Boitano, vice president, Enterprise Software Products at NVIDIA. "Together, NVIDIA and Accenture are working with leaders across the public sector, energy, telecom and the continent's industrial core—from manufacturing to retail—to build a resilient, innovative future powered by AI.' New sovereign AI architecture capabilities 'As AI adoption accelerates across industry and society, there is a growing need for management and operations across various elements of the AI stack, from infrastructure to models and applications, including data management,' said Karthik Narain, group chief executive – Technology and CTO, Accenture. 'To address this, we're providing a platform-based approach with AI Refinery for sovereignty, enabling organizations to develop and deploy AI capabilities – leveraging their own cloud infrastructure and adhering to data residency and security requirements with management and observability capabilities baked in – to drive new value and growth while maintaining control in a fast-moving market.' Accenture estimates Europe will account for up to 30% of the global sovereign AI market by 2030. To address this demand, Accenture's new sovereign AI architecture builds on the success of Accenture and NVIDIA in deploying one of the world's first comprehensive AI stacks for Indosat. Part of AI Refinery, which is built on NVIDIA Enterprise AI, the sovereign AI architecture has solutions that cater to different market needs and priorities, offered as-a-service. This includes configurable AI models tailored to national languages and contexts; a development and deployment platform that is hosted and managed within a nation's jurisdiction; and secure, easy-to-customize solutions to meet the unique needs of the public sector and critical infrastructure industries. Digital sovereignty often calls for organizations to adopt controls and provisions aligned to sector-specific needs. For example, Accenture is working with a public utility in Europe to deploy sovereign GPUs as-a-service to ensure dedicated AI compute resources remain secured within its national borders. Physical AI enhances operational resilience in manufacturing Manufacturers across Europe are pushing to optimize their production, warehouse, and supply chain operations. The industrial sector is particularly strategic for Europe as it accounts for roughly a quarter of Europe's GDP. With its AI Refinery, Accenture is helping clients implement AI-powered robotics, simulation and digital twins and adapt ways of working with human workers to effectively reinvent warehouse, logistics and manufacturing to drive efficiencies and lower costs. Today, Accenture also introduced a physical AI software development kit (SDK) that can understand video and image segmentation based on predefined parameters or natural language queries by leveraging NVIDIA Metropolis and the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for Video Search and Summarization (VSS).KION has partnered with Accenture and NVIDIA to explore these capabilities to enhance safety, productivity, and quality control in manufacturing and warehouse automation. AI fueling competitiveness and growth Accenture and NVIDIA have continued to demonstrate how AI can help European organizations create a competitive edge by building a foundation for continuous reinvention and future growth. Noli (No One Like I) the first, AI-powered multi-brand marketplace startup founded and backed by L'Oréal Groupe, has teamed with Accenture and NVIDIA to reinvent how people discover and shop beauty products by addressing the number one pain point for beauty shoppers - the overwhelming volume of products and lack of unbiased, often conflicting advice in the market. With AI Refinery, Noli acts as a Beauty Advisor, cutting through the noise, using powerful AI diagnostics and tools built from over one million face scans and analysis of thousands of product formulations, to decode each user's beauty profile and to provide product recommendations to help them make confident, right-for-them choices, which are then delivered to their doorstep. Nestlé is launching a new AI-powered in-house service that will create high-quality product content at scale for eCommerce and digital media channels. Developed in partnership with Accenture, this new content service is based on digital twins and powered by NVIDIA Omniverse platform, providing exact 3D virtual replicas of physical products. Product packaging can be adjusted or localized digitally, enabling seamless integration into various environments, such as seasonal campaigns or channel-specific formats. This means that new creative content can be generated without having to constantly reshoot from scratch. AI Refinery momentum Accenture unveiled its AI Refinery platform in October 2024. It has since filed 55 patent applications across 10 countries, and the technical achievements of its AI Refinery platform have been presented and explored in 12 technical whitepapers. Accelerating the path to agentic AI for organizations, Accenture is on track to deliver its goal of 100 industry agent solutions by the end of the year. In March 2025, it debuted agent builder, which can easily customize agents in a no code environment. The following month, it announced the Trusted Agent Huddle to bring first-of-its-kind multi-system AI agent collaboration capabilities to organizations that need solutions that can span the enterprise. Accenture AI Refinery is available on all public and private cloud platforms and integrates with other Accenture Business Groups to accelerate AI across the SaaS and Cloud AI ecosystem. 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 801,000 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. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, 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 Forward-Looking Statements Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as 'may,' 'will,' 'should,' 'likely,' 'anticipates,' 'aspires,' 'expects,' 'intends,' 'plans,' 'projects,' 'believes,' 'estimates,' 'positioned,' 'outlook,' 'goal,' 'target' and similar expressions are used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance nor promises that goals or targets will be met, and involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that are difficult to predict and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. These risks include, without limitation, that the use of AI could harm our business, damage our reputation or give rise to legal or regulatory action, as well as the risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed under the 'Risk Factors' heading in Accenture plc's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this news release speak only as of the date they were made, and Accenture undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements made in this news release or to conform such statements to actual results or changes in Accenture's expectations.
