Accenture CEO Julie Sweet shares ‘one thing’ that companies can’t ignore in the AI era

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet recently said that AI is no longer about experiments, but about showing measurable performance outcomes. Speaking during an episode of Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptions of Industry, Julie Sweet told Fortune's Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell: “One word, reinvention. This isn't about using AI on top of what you do today. If you're not significantly changing the way you operate, then you're not reinventing, and you're not going to capture the value.” She said that companies that fail to reinvent their operations around AI risk losing their place.


“As a CEO, you should not greenlight something that doesn't have a direct tie to your PnL or something measurable that you already measure,” Sweet said. She highlighted Accenture’s use of generative AI to cut idea-to-market timelines by 90%.



During the interview, Julie Sweet emphasized that humility is an essential leadership trait in the AI era. “Humility is what allows you to be a learner. It helps you build great teams, and it allows you to see what you've done and how you led the company,” she said.


She further rejected forecasts of large-scale Fortune 500 failures, such as Vinod Khosla’s prediction of mass corporate collapse in the 2030s. "CEOs today are focused on making AI the biggest growth opportunity and not the thing that causes their demise," Julie Sweet said.


Recently, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet shared advice that changed how she approached her career: when someone offers you a stretch role, never question it. The words, shared by former JPMorgan Chase CFO Dina Dublon, came back to Sweet at a pivotal moment in her journey. During an appearance at Fortune’s Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast with Alyson Shontell recently, Sweet shared when her then-boss suggested she could one day lead Accenture, Sweet chose not to doubt herself. Instead, she recalled Dublon’s wisdom that “the person offering you a stretch role is as nervous or more nervous than you are” and simply said yes. That decision, she said, set her path to the top job.


Sweet was then serving as Accenture’s general counsel and did not fit the traditional CEO mold. She was a lawyer, not a business leader, a woman in a company long led by men, and had not spent her entire career at Accenture. Still, her boss, then-CEO Pierre Nanterme, believed she had the potential to run the company.


“At the end of the meeting, he closes his notebook and he pushes it aside, and he says to me, completely out of the blue… ‘I think you could run this place someday,’” Sweet recalled during the podcast.