Why Julie Sweet Sees 'a Future of More' With AI Growth

Many business leaders have expressed that they believe AI is going to completely reinvent the way people and organisations operate. 

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, told the Financial Times that he thinks white collar roles will be automated in a year and a half, while Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi that he thinks AI will soon be able to do a better job than CEOs of major companies. 

Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, however, thinks AI will instead lead to significant growth. 

Speaking at the New Delhi AI impact summit, Julie said: “There are lots of headlines today that predict less. Less jobs, less opportunity, less human relevance. We are here because we see a future of more.”

Reinventing with AI

According to Julie: “Underneath the headlines of a failure of AI is mostly a failure to reinvent”.

The company has gone through an internal rebranding process, positioning its employees as ‘Reinventors’ as it looks to create growth with AI. 

With a US$1bn investment in AI upskilling, Accenture has trained 550,000 of its 780,000 employees in generative AI, and scaled to around 77,000 skilled AI and data professionals, who worked on more than 6,000 advanced AI projects in 2025. 

This includes a solution that allows developers to build and scale advanced AI agents and an AI orchestrator that can optimise supply chains and monitor operations.

Accenture’s investment in AI seems to be paying off, with the company reporting US$1.1bn in new bookings for its advanced AI capabilities in the first quarter of its fiscal year 2026 – a 120% increase year-over-year.

Julie says: “What the last decade has taught us is a critical lesson. When companies and countries embrace new technologies and then use them to drive growth and productivity, they prosper. Advanced AI should be the same”. 

AI skills for career progression

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Julie shared that Accenture has taken a top down approach to implementing AI. She told the audience: “When Accenture first started on our journey, the first thing we did was take our top 50 leaders.

“They got the most training in the first few months because if you don’t have the leaders understanding it, they can’t explain it to our people. They can’t drive the transformation.”

AI skills in the company’s senior leaders have only become more important. According to an internal staff email, which has been seen by the Financial Times, Accenture is now taking employees’ frequency of AI usage into account when making leadership decisions.

The email reportedly told senior managers that the company was collecting data on the amount employees were logging into its internal AI tools per week – with only those who were using the tools regularly being considered for promotion. 

Julie suggests at the AI Impact Summit that having leaders who thoroughly understand how to use AI is critical for long-term business success, saying: “Technology, no matter how powerful, is only a tool… It is leaders who decide how to use those tools.”