Accenture is forming an internal Nvidia Business Group staffed with 30,000 global employees trained to help clients “reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption with AI agents,” the consulting firm announced. Accenture will also use its AI Refinery platform to help companies customize AI models and agents using the full Nvidia AI stack including AI Foundry, AI Enterprise and Omniverse. “With generative AI demand driving $3 billion in Accenture bookings in its recently closed fiscal year, the new group will help clients lay the foundation for agentic AI functionality,” Accenture said.

Accenture describes agentic programming as “the next frontier in generative AI.” “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,” the company explained in an announcement.

“It’s no longer just about prompting the pre-built large language models and waiting for response; we can actually develop specialized capabilities that can independently and autonomously interact or actually make progress against goals or human’s intention,” Accenture Chief AI Officer Lan Guan said, as reported by SiliconANGLE.

“The new group amounts to an expanded partnership between Accenture and Nvidia,” writes VentureBeat, noting that the heightened alliance “will help Nvidia sell more of its AI processors” while helping Accenture better serve clients.

The consultancy plans to debut a new Nvidia NIM Agent Blueprint to help industrial companies build “autonomous, robot-operated software-defined factories and facilities.”

“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,” according to the firm.

Bloomberg writes that Wall Street analysts are fretting that the billions of dollars companies including Microsoft, Google and AWS have spent on AI data centers have yet to pay off. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC “he sees Accenture as the ‘connecting fabric’ between its technology and customers,” writes Bloomberg, noting Huang and Accenture CEO Julie Sweet “first imagined the partnership about four months ago.”

In spring 2023, PricewaterhouseCoopers announced it was investing $1 billion to train employees in helping clients leverage the OpenAI platforms. SAP and IBM Consulting have also made a big push into AI. Accounting-based consultancies KPMG and Ernst & Young are also among those who have invested substantially in the generative space.