How organizations are using it for continuous reinvention, real-time intelligence, and synthesizing multiple modes of data.
January 27, 2025
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Built on the foundation of IT and digitization, the AI revolution is transcending limitations in at least three highly consequential areas for business: 1) enabling continuous enterprise reinvention instead of periodic transformation, 2) using real-time intelligence instead of depending on episodically-updated software, and 3) synthesizing multiple modes of data instead of being restricted to a single type of input like text only or visual only. Today, leading companies are leveraging these game-changing attributes of AI into strategies that separate them from their competitors and, along the way, redefine how humans and machines work together.
Legendary computer science pioneer Douglas Engelbart is said to have observed that “the digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.” Such revolutions occur when a new technology transcends the limits of previous technologies, as the printing press did the tedious copying of manuscripts by hand. Digitization smashed through limits on the gathering, analysis, and communication of vast amounts of information and resulted in greatly accelerated business processes, innovative business models, and the globally wired world of the internet. Now the digital revolution is being overtaken by the AI revolution. And this time the speed, scale, and scope of industrial transformation will dwarf previous upheavals. According to our economic analysis, advances in AI and the tech/IT sector will create as much value in the next five years as it did during the previous 10, signaling broad-scale transformations across other industries.
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Karthik Narain is group chief executive of Technology at Accenture. He oversees cloud, data & AI, enterprise & industry technologies, security and ecosystem partnerships.
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