Expanding their decades-long collaboration, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Microsoft are collaborating to help organizations adopt the disruptive power of generative AI, accelerated by the cloud, to fundamentally transform their businesses. Together with their joint venture Avanade, the companies are co-developing new AI-powered industry and functional solutions to help clients harness generative AI across the enterprise.

“Generative AI is driving innovation and reinvention, transforming work across industries, and changing the ways we access information,” said Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture. “Our expanded partnership with Microsoft will help our clients find the right ways to responsibly build and scale this exciting technology across their enterprises and realize the value it can create.”

“Expanding our collaboration with Accenture will accelerate adoption of the world’s most advanced AI models, backed by Azure, and enable Accenture to deliver innovative AI-powered industry solutions that will help customers take advantage of the newest innovations,” said Eric Boyd, corporate vice president, AI Platform at Microsoft. “Through this initiative, we will work with Accenture to harness the power of Microsoft Azure, Azure OpenAI Service, and Microsoft 365 Copilot to deliver AI-empowered solutions, within our trusted cloud, that will help companies achieve more.”

The companies have already engaged with numerous clients across industries around generative AI. For example, they worked with Radisson Hotel Group, using a combination of Microsoft Cloud technologies and Azure OpenAI to create an intelligent, automated system that manages guest cancellations, and creates draft responses to guests’ reviews, addressing feedback with a full understanding of specific positive and negative elements. The system learns from each interaction, making every response more intelligent than the last.

For the Ministry of Justice of Spain, Accenture created an AI-generated search engine built on the Microsoft cloud to find and simplify judicial process information hidden in hundreds of thousands of complex documents. Microsoft and Accenture are also collaborating with global travel technology company, Amadeus, which is developing a generative AI-powered interactive travel assistant for its travel and expense platform, Cytric Easy. Leveraging Microsoft technologies, including Teams and Azure OpenAI, the digital tool will assist corporate travelers with elements of their journey – from planning, booking and pre-departure, through to the trip and post-trip – while aligning with the travelers’ preferences and employers’ policies for a more efficient, intuitive and cost-effective experience.

Building on Accenture’s recently announced $3 billion investment in AI, Accenture and Microsoft are co-developing new industry and functional solutions and exploring new use cases, such as:

• Financial services – Teaming with banks, insurers and others, the companies are evaluating low-risk, high-value use cases. One area of focus is creating solutions for content aggregation, summarization and transcription analysis, powered by Azure OpenAI Service, to help business analysts streamline processes, improve efficiency and gain valuable insights.
• Healthcare – The companies are using Microsoft Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Service to enable patient care, contact center transformation, medical image analysis and patient data synthesis. These use cases can enhance clinical decision-making, automate administrative tasks and improve patient outcomes.
• Supply chain – Accenture is extending the capabilities of its more than 50 intelligent supply chain solutions with Microsoft Copilot and Supply Chain Center. For instance, Accenture’s logistics control tower solution can now recognize unstructured data in news alerts to predict delays and offer recommendations to supply chain operators to reallocate inventory quickly, helping to mitigate disruption.
• Contact center – By incorporating Azure Open AI Service into clients’ contact center operations, the companies are helping to enhance agent productivity and improve customer satisfaction with real-time insights and suggestions. Agents can better navigate complex customer interactions, understand sentiment, and deliver more personalized experiences.
• Security – Following a successful track record in offering Accenture Adaptive Detection and Response with Microsoft Sentinel at its core, the companies are working to provide end-to-end security solutions that reimagine cyber protection and cyber resilience solutions with generative AI. By collaborating with Microsoft engineering teams for Security CoPilot and developing contextual extensions of LLM models, automation and prompt engineering, the companies are taking an innovative approach to cyber response.

By tapping into the new Accenture Center for Advanced AI, with its deep focus on generative AI and large language models, as well as Avanade’s new AI Organizational Readiness Framework, the companies will help clients explore and experiment with generative AI for safe and responsible innovation at scale. A new Accenture and Avanade Generative AI Lab will leverage the Microsoft Technology Center in Canada to help clients around the world innovate with Azure OpenAI Service to drive operational excellence with AI.

Working with the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Engineering team, Accenture and Avanade are training and equipping their people with advanced generative AI skills. For example, Accenture is training human performance specialists to provide more comprehensive talent management and improve employee experiences throughout their career journey. Additionally, Microsoft selected Accenture as its partner of choice to train thousands of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service MVPs across industries to help clients architect generative AI solutions.

As one of the first companies to have access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Security Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Semantic Kernel and Azure OpenAI Service, Accenture is piloting the technology with select groups across the company. Drawing on its own experience, Accenture can apply its learnings and best practices to client engagements.

The expanded collaboration harnesses a combination of Accenture’s AI transformation, strategy and industry experience, with Azure OpenAI Service and cloud infrastructure, and Avanade’s technical and delivery experience.