Accenture is used to being laughed at for its linguistic gymnastics. Much merriment was caused by the company’s choice of name when it was spun out of Arthur Andersen in 2001. The word was the winner of a staff competition, apparently created by conflating the positive sounding “accent on the future”. The $100m branding campaign that introduced it was ridiculed but the bad publicity paid off and the name has actually stood the test of time – especially compared to disastrous name changes by rivals, such as PwC Consulting’s hastily abandoned 2002 rebrand as Monday.
Perhaps eventually the same will be true of the amused scepticism that last week greeted reports that Accenture now calls its consultants “reinventors”. Cue jokes about reinventing the wheel and references to economist Mariana Mazzucato’s recent book , with Rosie Collington, attacking management consultants, The Big Con. The new job description follows an internal reorganisation at Accenture, merging units including strategy, consulting, creative and tech into a single entity called “reinvention services”, which is being pitched to clients seeking help navigating the AI revolution.
Management consulting may be the industry AI reinvents more than any other, including by destroying entry-level jobs largely involving tasks such as making power points and writing reports that can be done at least as well by AI.
A potentially existential question is whether clients of Accenture and its peers will pay for help in adopting AI, or use AI instead of hiring consultants. This year, while the shares of companies driving the AI revolution have soared, Accenture’s stock prices have plunged from $389 to $269, reducing its market capitalisation by over 30% to $167bn. If this trend continues, there may soon be plenty of former consultants whose jobs have been terminally reinvented.
Photograph by Angus Mordant/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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