Accenture has made artificial intelligence its growth engine — and a survival test for its workforce. In its full-year results for fiscal 2025, the global consultancy stated that AI had become a gold mine, but with a catch: employees unable to adapt to the technology would be shown the door.
Chief Executive Julie Sweet told analysts the firm is reorienting its workforce under what she described as a “compressed timeline.” The company is absorbing one-time charges of $865 million across two quarters as part of a sweeping “business reoptimization strategy” that prioritizes upskilling and exits for employees whose roles cannot be augmented by AI.
“We are investing in upskilling our reinventors, which is our primary strategy,” Sweet said. “But where reskilling is not viable, we are exiting people so we can get more of the skills in we need.”
Accenture is ramping up global hiring to fill those gaps. It now boasts 77,000 trained AI professionals, nearly doubling from 40,000 in 2023, alongside 550,000 employees who hold a baseline knowledge of AI. The strategy underscores a broader shift in professional services where consultancies — once seen as people-heavy operations — are racing to become AI-first organizations.
The results highlight why. Accenture’s revenue from generative AI and agentic AI tripled year-on-year to $2.7 billion in fiscal 2025, while bookings nearly doubled to $5.9 billion. Those figures are central to its growth story, driving overall revenue up 7% to $69.7 billion and lifting net income by more than 5% to $7.8 billion.
Yet the transformation isn’t without pain. U.S. government contracts, a lucrative area for Accenture, have slumped under cost-cutting measures by the Trump administration. Sweet admitted the pullback is weighing on growth but pointed to signs of recovery, including a new partnership with Palantir aimed at securing larger federal digital transformation projects.
Accenture is also keeping a close eye on upcoming changes to the H-1B visa program. Roughly 5% of its U.S. workforce is on H-1B visas, but Sweet said the company expects no major disruptions under current proposals.
The real disruption, however, is internal. Accenture’s pivot makes clear that AI is not simply a tool to be adopted but a dividing line in the workforce. For employees who can reskill, the opportunities are growing; for those who cannot, the exit door is closer than ever.
An Industry in Transition
Accenture is only joining a growing number of consulting firms in reshaping its business around AI. The broader consulting industry is undergoing a parallel transformation as clients demand AI integration across finance, healthcare, retail, and government services. Deloitte has committed more than $2 billion to AI initiatives, including new alliances with cloud providers, while PwC has launched its largest-ever hiring program centered on AI talent. EY, for its part, is retraining tens of thousands of employees through its “EY.ai” initiative and rolling out proprietary AI platforms for tax and audit services.
This growing adoption is not confined to consulting. Across industries, companies are investing heavily in AI to automate repetitive tasks, improve customer service, and generate new revenue streams. From Wall Street banks deploying AI in trading algorithms to healthcare providers using it for diagnostics, the shift is reshaping business operations at scale.
But with opportunity comes dislocation. Studies from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey project that millions of traditional jobs will be displaced globally over the next decade, even as new AI-enabled roles emerge. The challenge for firms is balancing growth against the social and political costs of workforce churn. Accenture’s “reskill or exit” model is one of the starkest examples of how that balance is being tested.
With AI revenues already reshaping its balance sheet, Accenture’s experiment is expected to serve as a test of whether massive investments in AI can be matched with equally ambitious workforce transitions – while it supports the notion that in an AI-driven economy, adaptability is no longer optional.
