Full Report

The numbers behind Accenture plc: as-reported financial statements and company metrics for FY2021–FY2025, traced to the source filings, opened with the share-price history those statements have to justify. Every linked figure opens the exact page of the filing it was printed on, with the statement row highlighted. Amounts in US$ thousands unless noted.

Reading notes: All figures are in the display scale Accenture's statements print: (In thousands of U.S. dollars, except share and per share amounts). FY2025 revenues of $69.7 billion appear as 69,672,977. FY2021 statement figures are cited to the fiscal 2021 comparative column of the FY2022 Form 10-K. Accenture's own FY2021 filing in this corpus is its Irish statutory Directors' Report, which carries the same numbers under Companies Act captions (Turnover, Operating profit, Profit for the financial year); the 10-K comparative keeps labels consistent across the table. Business optimization costs were not a separate income-statement line in the FY2022 Form 10-K, so FY2021 and FY2022 are left blank rather than shown as zero. Intangibles were first presented separately on the balance sheet in the FY2024 Form 10-K, which also recast the August 31, 2023 comparative; FY2021 and FY2022 are blank for that row.

Share Price — Available History Since April 2026

The stock closed at $165.92 on Jul 31, 2026 — down 16% over the window shown, trading between $124.44 and $201.33. At that close the stock trades at 14× FY2025 diluted EPS as reported below.

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Source: market price feed, daily closes, Apr 2026–Jul 2026 — the feed marks this available history as partial. Price return only, excludes dividends.

Market capitalization $104.9bn.

Market cap = 632.4M shares outstanding × the Jul 31, 2026 close of $165.92. Market-derived, shown without filing links.

FY2025 at a Glance

Revenue (US$ thousands)

69,672,977

Operating income (US$ thousands)

10,225,664

Net income (US$ thousands)

7,832,400

Diluted EPS

12.15

Source: FY2025 consolidated statements [1] [2] [3] [4]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Revenues by Industry Group

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Revenues by Industry Group FY2021 FY2022 FY2023 FY2024 FY2025
  Communications, Media and Technology 9,801,349 12,199,797 11,452,914 10,837,174 11,453,982
  Financial Services 9,932,523 11,810,582 12,131,531 11,610,225 12,773,856
  Health and Public Service 9,498,234 11,226,464 12,560,458 13,840,634 14,762,837
  Products 14,438,537 18,275,419 19,103,892 19,554,154 21,197,397
  Resources 6,862,746 8,082,043 8,862,950 9,054,277 9,484,905
Total revenues 50,533,389 61,594,305 64,111,745 64,896,464 69,672,977
Total revenues growth, derived +21.9% +4.1% +1.2% +7.4%

Source: Form 10-K Note 16 (Segment Reporting) — revenues by industry group [5] [6] [7] [8]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Revenues and Operating Income by Geographic Market

Revenues and Operating Income by Geographic Market FY2021 FY2022 FY2023 FY2024 FY2025
  Americas revenues 32,193,134 32,552,489 35,056,715
  EMEA revenues 22,292,584 22,817,879 24,643,957
  Asia Pacific revenues 9,626,027 9,526,096 9,972,305
Total revenues 64,111,745 64,896,464 69,672,977
  Americas operating income 4,644,431 5,079,651 5,324,339
  EMEA operating income 2,483,483 2,803,610 3,090,993
  Asia Pacific operating income 1,681,975 1,712,586 1,810,332
Total operating income 8,809,889 9,595,847 10,225,664

Source: FY2025 Form 10-K Note 16 (Segment Reporting). FY2023 and FY2024 are shown on the current Americas / EMEA / Asia Pacific basis as recast in the FY2025 10-K; the corpus does not report FY2021 or FY2022 on this basis. [9]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Income Statement

Source: Consolidated Income Statements [1] [2] [3] [4]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Columns marked E are consensus analyst estimates from S&P Capital IQ (CapIQ), shown alongside reported results for direct comparison; they are not company guidance.

Estimate source: S&P Capital IQ (CapIQ) consensus, as of 2026-08-01. Estimate figures are S&P Capital IQ consensus (vendor data — no filing page links). EPS and net income use the normalized (adjusted) consensus where the street reports it. Line-item analyst models (segments, drivers, KPIs) are in the Visible Alpha tab.

Balance Sheet

Source: Consolidated Balance Sheets [10] [11] [12] [13]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Cash Flow

Source: Consolidated Cash Flows Statements [14] [15] [16] [17]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Revenues by Type of Work

Revenues by Type of Work FY2021 FY2022 FY2023 FY2024 FY2025
  Consulting 27,337,699 34,075,856 33,613,008 33,195,104 35,106,786
  Managed Services 23,195,690 27,518,449 30,498,737 31,701,360 34,566,191
Total revenues 50,533,389 61,594,305 64,111,745 64,896,464 69,672,977

Source: Form 10-K Note 16 (Segment Reporting) — revenues by type of work [5] [6] [7]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Long-Term Record

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Fiscal year Total revenues Operating income Net income attributable to Accenture plc Diluted earnings per Class A ordinary share Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities Purchases of property and equipment Total shareholders' equity
FY2016 34,797,661 4,810,445 4,111,892 6.45 4,667,400 (496,566) 8,189,376
FY2017 36,176,841 5,191,402 3,445,149 5.44 4,973,039 (515,919) 9,710,200
FY2018 40,992,534 5,898,779 4,059,907 6.34 6,026,691 (619,187) 10,724,588
FY2019 43,215,013 6,305,074 4,779,112 7.36 6,626,953 (599,009) 14,827,691
FY2020 44,327,039 6,513,644 5,107,839 7.89 8,215,152 (599,132) 17,499,173
FY2021 50,533,389 7,621,529 5,906,809 9.16 8,975,148 (580,132) 20,097,114
FY2022 61,594,305 9,367,181 6,877,169 10.71 9,541,129 (717,998) 22,747,088
FY2023 64,111,745 8,809,889 6,871,557 10.77 9,524,268 (528,172) 26,458,593
FY2024 64,896,464 9,595,847 7,264,787 11.44 9,131,027 (516,509) 29,168,248
FY2025 69,672,977 10,225,664 7,678,433 12.15 11,474,399 (600,039) 32,240,967

Source: consolidated statements across filings; older years from the standardized feed [14] [1] [10] [15]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Operating KPIs

KPI FY2021 FY2022 FY2023 FY2024 FY2025
New bookings, US$ billions 59.3 71.7 72.2 81.2 80.6
Workforce at fiscal year end 624,000 721,000 733,000 774,000 779,000
Utilization 93% 91% 91% 92% 92%
Voluntary attrition 14% 19% 13% 13% 14%

Source: company-reported operating metrics [18] [19] [20] [21]. Click any linked figure to open the filing page with the row highlighted.

Analyst Consensus

Mean target

178.89

Median target

179.00

High target

275.00

Low target

130.00

Street ratings: 11 strong buy, 3 buy, 13 hold. Consensus: Buy.

Estimate source: S&P Capital IQ (CapIQ) consensus, as of 2026-08-01. Estimate figures are S&P Capital IQ consensus (vendor data — no filing page links). EPS and net income use the normalized (adjusted) consensus where the street reports it. Line-item analyst models (segments, drivers, KPIs) are in the Visible Alpha tab.

Traceability

567 of 589 figures on this page (96%) link to the filing page where they are printed — click a linked figure to open the source PDF at that page with the row highlighted. Unlinked figures come from standardized data feeds or pre-filing years.

  • All figures are in the display scale Accenture's statements print: (In thousands of U.S. dollars, except share and per share amounts). FY2025 revenues of $69.7 billion appear as 69,672,977.

  • FY2021 statement figures are cited to the fiscal 2021 comparative column of the FY2022 Form 10-K. Accenture's own FY2021 filing in this corpus is its Irish statutory Directors' Report, which carries the same numbers under Companies Act captions (Turnover, Operating profit, Profit for the financial year); the 10-K comparative keeps labels consistent across the table.

  • Business optimization costs were not a separate income-statement line in the FY2022 Form 10-K, so FY2021 and FY2022 are left blank rather than shown as zero.

  • Intangibles were first presented separately on the balance sheet in the FY2024 Form 10-K, which also recast the August 31, 2023 comparative; FY2021 and FY2022 are blank for that row.

  • Accenture redefined its geographic segments twice inside this window: Middle East and Africa moved from Growth Markets to Europe in Q1 FY2024 (creating EMEA), and Latin America moved from Growth Markets to North America in Q1 FY2025 (creating the Americas and Asia Pacific). The geographic segment table therefore runs FY2023-FY2025 only, on the current basis as recast in the FY2025 10-K. Revenues by industry group and by type of work are comparable across all five years.

  • FY2016-FY2018 long-term figures come from the standardized data feed and are shown without page links. Those 10-Ks headlined Net revenues excluding reimbursements (FY2016: 32,882,723); the feed figures are total revenues including reimbursements, the basis used from FY2019 onward under Topic 606.

  • New bookings are disclosed only in billions rounded to one decimal, so that KPI is stated in US$ billions rather than the tab's thousands scale; its label says so.

  • Quarterly figures come from Accenture's quarterly results releases, which print a three-months-ended column for both the income statement and the cash-flow statement. No single quarter is derived from year-to-date data.

  • The FY2023 Form 10-K PDF's text layer uses a scrambled custom font encoding. Those citations were verified against the PageIndex page content, and page identity was confirmed by decoding the font offset; text highlighting on that document may fall back to a plain page jump.

  • 4 figure(s) differed between the data feed and the filing; the filing value is shown (see the run's metrics/metrics_tab.json for the audit trail).


Accenture plc's management explains the business in its own materials. The slides below do the most of that work, pulled from the documents preserved in Sources. Each source link opens the complete presentation at that slide in a new tab.

Q3 FY2026 Earnings Presentation — Q3 FY2026

The most recent deck, and the one where management lays out the cybersecurity platform build and the new mid-market business. · Open the full document →

One page showing how the $18.7B quarter splits across geographies, five industry groups, and consulting vs. managed services.
p. 2 — One page showing how the $18.7B quarter splits across geographies, five industry groups, and consulting vs. managed services. · Open the full presentation →
The same cut for the nine months: $55.5B of revenue, $62.4B of bookings, and where growth is and isn't.
p. 3 — The same cut for the nine months: $55.5B of revenue, $62.4B of bookings, and where growth is and isn't. · Open the full presentation →
Management's own summary of the quarter — client concentration at the top, cybersecurity M&A, guidance, and cash returned.
p. 4 — Management's own summary of the quarter — client concentration at the top, cybersecurity M&A, guidance, and cash returned. · Open the full presentation →
The FY26 guidance table, with the original September outlook next to the June revision — how the year has actually tracked.
p. 5 — The FY26 guidance table, with the original September outlook next to the June revision — how the year has actually tracked. · Open the full presentation →
Over 60% of revenue is tied to ten software partners, all named here — the dependency that defines the business model.
p. 6 — Over 60% of revenue is tied to ten software partners, all named here — the dependency that defines the business model. · Open the full presentation →
The eight newer AI and data partners Accenture is attaching itself to, and the bookings claim made for them.
p. 7 — The eight newer AI and data partners Accenture is attaching itself to, and the bookings claim made for them. · Open the full presentation →
Cybersecurity from $0.7B in FY16 to $10B in FY25, with the acquisitions behind it — the template for how Accenture enters a market.
p. 8 — Cybersecurity from $0.7B in FY16 to $10B in FY25, with the acquisitions behind it — the template for how Accenture enters a market. · Open the full presentation →
The ~$4.175B Dragos, runZero and NetRise deal, the OT security TAM it buys into, and the recurring revenue actually acquired.
p. 9 — The ~$4.175B Dragos, runZero and NetRise deal, the OT security TAM it buys into, and the recurring revenue actually acquired. · Open the full presentation →
Accenture Edge: the new mid-market business, its claimed $240B TAM, and what the offering consists of.
p. 10 — Accenture Edge: the new mid-market business, its claimed $240B TAM, and what the offering consists of. · Open the full presentation →
The four deals closed in Q3 and what each one adds — a concrete look at the tuck-in acquisition programme.
p. 11 — The four deals closed in Q3 and what each one adds — a concrete look at the tuck-in acquisition programme. · Open the full presentation →
The FY26 capital return plan: at least $9.5B expected, split between buybacks and a dividend raised 10%.
p. 12 — The FY26 capital return plan: at least $9.5B expected, split between buybacks and a dividend raised 10%. · Open the full presentation →
Bookings by type of work back to FY25, with the trailing book-to-bill line — the leading indicator for revenue.
p. 15 — Bookings by type of work back to FY25, with the trailing book-to-bill line — the leading indicator for revenue. · Open the full presentation →
The full revenue mix table: geography, industry group and type of work by quarter, with percentage shares.
p. 16 — The full revenue mix table: geography, industry group and type of work by quarter, with percentage shares. · Open the full presentation →
Headcount, utilization and attrition by quarter — the unit economics of a business that sells its people's time.
p. 17 — Headcount, utilization and attrition by quarter — the unit economics of a business that sells its people's time. · Open the full presentation →
ROIC, ROE and ROA across eight quarters; capital efficiency has drifted down over the period.
p. 19 — ROIC, ROE and ROA across eight quarters; capital efficiency has drifted down over the period. · Open the full presentation →

Q2 FY2026 Earnings Presentation — Q2 FY2026

Featured for two exhibits the other decks don't carry: the first-half acquisitions and the analyst-ranking map of the competitive field. · Open the full document →

CyberCX, Faculty and Ookla — the three deals that carried the first half, and the capability each was bought for.
p. 8 — CyberCX, Faculty and Ookla — the three deals that carried the first half, and the capability each was bought for. · Open the full presentation →
Analyst rankings across technology, AI, cybersecurity, consulting and operations — the competitive position in one grid.
p. 11 — Analyst rankings across technology, AI, cybersecurity, consulting and operations — the competitive position in one grid. · Open the full presentation →

Q1 FY2026 Earnings Presentation — Q1 FY2026

Three structural explainers found nowhere else here: the shift to fixed price, the scale of advanced AI, and what Song actually is. · Open the full document →

Roughly 60% of work is now fixed price, up about ten points in three years — Accenture taking on more delivery risk.
p. 7 — Roughly 60% of work is now fixed price, up about ten points in three years — Accenture taking on more delivery risk. · Open the full presentation →
The last disclosure of advanced-AI bookings and revenue before management folded them into the base, plus the $70B TAM claim.
p. 9 — The last disclosure of advanced-AI bookings and revenue before management folded them into the base, plus the $70B TAM claim. · Open the full presentation →
A rare segment explainer: what Accenture Song does, how it delivers, and the note that creative is a small share of revenue.
p. 10 — A rare segment explainer: what Accenture Song does, how it delivers, and the note that creative is a small share of revenue. · Open the full presentation →

Q4 and Full-Year FY2025 Earnings Presentation — FY2025

The full-year deck: the cleanest annual picture of the business, plus management's account of how it grows — AI, acquisitions, new lines. · Open the full document →

The full FY25 year on one page — $69.7B of revenue by geography and industry, plus the Cloud, Industry X, Security and Song split.
p. 3 — The full FY25 year on one page — $69.7B of revenue by geography and industry, plus the Cloud, Industry X, Security and Song split. · Open the full presentation →
Management's scorecard for FY25: guidance met, 129 clients above $100M of quarterly bookings, and where the cash went.
p. 4 — Management's scorecard for FY25: guidance met, 129 clients above $100M of quarterly bookings, and where the cash went. · Open the full presentation →
AI and data staff, bookings, projects and revenue from FY23 to FY25 — what the $3B investment actually produced.
p. 9 — AI and data staff, bookings, projects and revenue from FY23 to FY25 — what the $3B investment actually produced. · Open the full presentation →
The AI platform stack — GenWizard, SynOps and mySecurity over AI Refinery — and the claim that AI work pulls data work behind it.
p. 10 — The AI platform stack — GenWizard, SynOps and mySecurity over AI Refinery — and the claim that AI work pulls data work behind it. · Open the full presentation →
Capital invested and deal count for each year since FY20, with the inorganic contribution to growth beneath it.
p. 11 — Capital invested and deal count for each year since FY20, with the inorganic contribution to growth beneath it. · Open the full presentation →
Capital Projects built from $300M to $1.2B in three years through five acquisitions — the string-of-pearls method in one chart.
p. 13 — Capital Projects built from $300M to $1.2B in three years through five acquisitions — the string-of-pearls method in one chart. · Open the full presentation →

More from management

Q4 and Full-Year FY2024 Earnings Presentation — FY2024 · 13 pages · The FY24 full-year scorecard and the return-metric trend from 32% ROIC down to 26% — the baseline current results sit against. · Open →

Q4 and Full-Year FY2023 Earnings Presentation — FY2023 · 11 pages · FY23 results, the year the $3B AI investment began; ROIC still stood at 27% here, against 21% in the latest quarter. · Open →

Investor & Analyst Conference — Leading in the New — FY2015-FY2016 · 12 pages · Management's pre-AI framing of the same model: durable revenue growth, 10-30 bps of annual margin expansion, disciplined capital return. · Open →


Accenture plc's management answers for the business every quarter. These are the exchanges that explain it best — verbatim, from the call transcripts preserved in Sources. Each link opens the full transcript at that page in a new tab.

Q3 FY2026 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2026

The most recent call, and the one where the pivot toward platform and non-FTE revenue gets its clearest articulation. · Open the full transcript →

Management sizes the quarter's two shortfalls: a $100m Middle East revenue hit and large managed-services deals slipping to FY27.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): I also want to give you context on two factors that impacted our results this quarter. First, we were impacted by the conflict in the Middle East. We saw a revenue impact of approximately $100 million compared to our expectations, which was all consulting type of work – split evenly between the direct impact on our Middle East business and indirect effects outside of the region. In the last few weeks of the quarter, we saw this indirect impact globally in Products, and to a lesser degree, in Resources, mostly in discretionary spend. In addition, Sales in the Middle East were impacted by approximately $400 million and also in EMEA due to longer decision-making. Second, a couple of our large Managed Services opportunities moved into FY27 for company specific reasons.

p. 3 · Read in context →

Cybersecurity compounded from roughly $700m in FY16 to $10bn; the OT platform deal aims to more than triple that addressable market.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Our expansion into the OT cyber platform business builds on our strong foundation of cybersecurity services, including OT. We have grown our services organically and inorganically over the last decade from roughly $700 million in FY16 to $10 billion in fiscal 2025, a 35% CAGR over the period, 4 times that of Accenture’s over the same period. This investment more than triples our total addressable market in OT Security, which is growing double digit.

p. 5 · Read in context →

The mid-market defined and sized — clients with $300m to $3bn of revenue, a $240bn TAM — and the new business built to serve it.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): We are also expanding our total addressable market by going after a new, exciting customer segment: the mid-market. We estimate that the mid-market, which we look at as companies with between $300 million and $3 billion of revenue, is a $240 billion addressable market for us, growing high single-digits. That is why we are launching a new business next week called Accenture Edge. This business will embed Accenture’s large enterprise expertise and ecosystem relationships in business solutions designed specifically for the mid-market. We see that companies in this segment face many of the same technology, data, AI, cybersecurity and productivity challenges as large enterprises, but they often need solutions that are faster to deploy, more repeatable and right sized for their scale.

p. 5 · Read in context →

The stitching-risk question answered: why OT security, why now, and why three assets become one contract for the client on day one.

Tien-Tsin Huang (JPMorgan); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): And then finally, just why prioritize security as an enabler for AI versus other areas to win in AI? We obviously trust what you guys have done in the past. We're just trying to better understand, because this seems more strategic than about adding revenue per se. […] Exactly, this is about long-term growth and really a massive market when you start to think about how it's not even about assets. Everything's going to the physical world, right? Physical AI is coming, everything's going to be connected. And so you can't have an AI revolution unless you have critical infrastructure, and unless you secure when you start moving into physical AI, and you can't have that without OT security. 95% of spend in the past has been about IT security, and OT security is a much bigger market and critical need. And we're starting from a $10 billion cybersecurity services business that we've built over the last 10 years organically and inorganically, a 35% CAGR, and we've been in OT security all along. And so one of the things that we do really well is to understand where the technology is going to create demand in our clients. In terms of the platform itself, Dragos has an excellent platform. The addition of NetRise and runZero is just enhancing an already strong program platform. And what companies today do is they have a bunch of fragments, they have to like contract here and they have to contract here and they have to stitch it together. So day one, just the first thing is it's one contract, right? And then we'll enhance the platform, which Dragos has a ton of experience because they've been building that platform. So we don't see risk at all in terms of stitching it. And day one, we're already making companies a lot happier because they can have one buy, not three.

p. 14 · Read in context →

The four moving parts of the FY27 exit rate, given early: inorganic just under 2%, federal back to growth, deal timing, the conflict.

Angie Park (CFO): Yes. And I think, for us, we did because of the uncertainty that we experienced, particularly in the last three, the last few weeks of the quarter, we did want to make sure that you understood that more of the range is in play. And, Tien-Tsin, I think one of the things that you're trying to get underneath is really around our exit rate and what that looks like going forward, right? So, and I know that that's top of mind for you guys because you use Q4 as that basis, but I want to make sure that I get a few points out for you to consider because this is what we're thinking about as well. So if you think about the acquisitions that we have announced today and the expected closing, we do expect to enter FY27 slightly below 2% of inorganic growth. Secondly is our AFS headwind will sunset this quarter, and we expect that it will return to growth this quarter. The third is related to the managed services opportunities that Julie mentioned and when those actually, when they close in '27. And then, of course, the conflict that Julie already mentioned in discussing with Bryan, that's a variable and we'll see how that evolves. But at the same time, we are executing in new areas, including demand in AI and expanding our TAM.

p. 15 · Read in context →

Why the commercial-model shift runs through M&A: changing how clients buy long-standing services is slow, new categories start non-FTE.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): And Kevin, in terms of just the profile of that revenue, what you're seeing is that we are moving into higher growth areas. So, we're really excited about the cybersecurity acquisitions that we just announced. That's $208 million ARR growing at 53% [sic 48%]. So that's just an example of how we're using the acquisitions to move into higher growth areas. And they have a different profile in terms of their commercial model. So one of the things that I've said consistently is that in things that our clients have been buying in services for a long time, it's going to take a while to like change the buying patterns, which is why we're making, but it's much easier to go into new categories or to provide new kinds of value and switch to non-FTE models. And so you've seen that with what we just did with cybersecurity. You saw that with Ookla. We announced Alphahealth this week in Italy. That's also a services and platform combination. And so we're going to continue to move ourselves into non-FTE, in part by these acquisitions that will then drive organic growth.

p. 17 · Read in context →

Token spend gets the cloud-FinOps treatment — a new optimization practice — and so far no material crowd-out of services budgets.

Jim Schneider (Goldman Sachs); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): I was wondering if you'd maybe comment broadly on the client budgetary impact that you're seeing from AI infrastructure spending and token spending specifically in terms of upward pressure on their budgets and what impact are you seeing on sort of what you view as to be your addressable TAM in terms of services and even software and are you seeing any kind of change that would kind of drive some moderation in that infrastructure spending to benefit you in the coming quarters? […] So Jim, one of the things we're clearly seeing, in fact, we have a whole practice that we're starting to grow now is on how to help clients optimize their use of tokens. It feels a lot like the cloud scenarios that we remember when people were moving to the cloud and then they were like, “oh, wait a minute, we're spending a lot more on the cloud than we thought” and we built a whole FinOps practice on helping optimize cloud. So we definitely think that we're seeing that with the clients and they're coming to us because we're doing a really good job ourselves of being able to know how you use the tokens, which models you use for which problems and that's something we've been focused on since the very beginning. It's also helping because we have delivered real ROI and our clients are seeing the spend but they're struggling with the ROI and so it's helping us there. And at the same time, there's a certain amount of spending that's going to happen and so we're not seeing it be material to impact the spend on services today.

p. 18 · Read in context →

Fixed-price work is over 60% and still rising, with no margin difference by type of work — the risk sits inside the guided expansion.

Jamie Friedman (Susquehanna); Angie Park (CFO): And then for my follow-up, last quarter Q2, you had a disclosure about 2025 fixed-price at 60% of work. Can you talk about the evolution of fixed-price? Is that type of work in particular demand and how the margin characteristics of fixedprice may compare to the other dimensions of the company? […] We continue to see our fixed price work be over 60% and continuing to increase. There's no real difference as we look at it by type of work. It's in the similar zone for both consulting as well as managed services. And obviously you see that play out in our margins overall as well. So margins, not a big difference that I would call out relative to fixed-price versus the other commercial constructs, but it is embedded in our 20 basis points of expansion for the year.

p. 23 · Read in context →

Q2 FY2026 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2026

The best single call on why management believes AI is a tailwind, and the toughest questioning of that claim. · Open the full transcript →

The fixed-price disclosure in full: over 60% of work, driven by proprietary platforms and clients buying cost and delivery certainty.

Angie Park (CFO): Within bookings, the percentage of our work which is fixed price continues to increase over 60% in FY25. This reflects the rising importance of our proprietary platforms and clients’ need for cost and delivery certainty—where our scale, experience, and financial strength matter.

p. 6 · Read in context →

The cleanest statement of where Accenture sits in the AI stack: models supply the intelligence, Accenture supplies everything around it.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): We play a critical role in the AI-ecosystem. Foundation models provide the “intelligence”; and our role is helping clients understand what to deploy and when, how to integrate it into their systems, reimagine their processes, modernize their data and digital core, help redesign their operating models and do effective change management, and help build the capabilities and talent needed to scale AI across the enterprise. As the technology changes even more quickly, our clients are turning to us to help them navigate. They also want us to help them go faster—sometimes by building their capabilities and other times by leveraging ours.

p. 8 · Read in context →

The long funnel argued from installed base: hundreds of modern ERP estates were built before advanced AI existed and now have to be redone.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Let’s look at ERP. We have been the number one partner to all the major ERP ecosystem partners for years, and over the last several years, we deployed modern ERP systems across hundreds of clients. When those systems were implemented, advanced AI did not yet exist. Now those clients want to embed the new AI and data capabilities and transform their end-to-end processes. For example, with one of our largest Oil and Gas clients, we are seeing a clear pattern. First, they modernized their digital core. Over several years, we partnered on a major ERP transformation to implement a cloud-based platform that simplifies operations, standardizes processes, and creates a single source of data across the enterprise. It was a significant, multi-year investment. Now, with that foundation in place, they are investing again—embedding AI directly into the systems that run the business. This is not a separate layer of technology: it is intelligence built into core workflows— across finance, supply chain, asset maintenance, and field operations. These capabilities analyze large volumes of data, initiate routine actions, and support better decisions in real time. The impact is tangible: faster cycle times, fewer manual steps, lower operating costs, and stronger operational resilience. We are beginning to see this same sequence more broadly—modernization of the core, followed by AI-driven enhancement. Enterprise systems are becoming the platform that allows AI to deliver value at scale.

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Asked for hard evidence that Accenture is a net AI winner, management concedes there is no clean metric and names what it does watch.

Jason Kupferberg (Wells Fargo); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): What kind of quantitative evidence should investors be looking at to help substantiate the view that Accenture is a net beneficiary of AI. […] Thanks, Jason. I would just start with that at this point in our business, AI is permeating everything we do because it either is driving why clients are actually doing things like moving to the cloud. But when we're doing something that isn't specific AI, they're looking at our AI credentials because everything is aimed to get to AI. And then of course, we have direct AI and then our managed services business is being evaluated by how good our platforms are and their expectations of building AI. And so like to start with, like your first kind of way of looking at is, how is our business performing relative to everyone else and are we taking market share, right? That is the – because at this point, it's not isolated, right? It really is why we're winning and it's – you have to have it to win – you have to be leader to win at the levels we're winning of like $22 billion. And then we're going to give you metrics, Jason, over time that will change to kind of tell you. And so today, we look at market share, we look at our overall growth. And then the metrics we're giving you are the ones we're using, which is because everything is so tied to the big ecosystem, is our growth with that ecosystem outpacing overall growth? And then how are we doing with the emerging players? And then we are looking at how many companies are initiating AI with us among our client base, which are the metrics we gave you today. So the metrics will change, right, but they'll reflect what we're looking at as we drive our business.

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Why a better frontier model does not translate into bookings: the model is the engine, the wheels and transmission are the work.

Tien-Tsin Huang (JPMorgan); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Julie, appreciate your comments there on why it's a tailwind. But I was just thinking with these frontier models that are improving so quickly, it's driving a lot of news flow and a lot of debate. And are you seeing any correlation? Are you tracking this how these models and how they're improving and their capabilities improving and how that might impact your bookings growth and conversion to revenue? I'm just trying to understand if there's some kind of correlation or pattern and how that might impact your numbers here going forward as the frontier models improve. […] It's a great question and I think it goes to the heart of kind of what's diferent with models versus when you release functionality in a packaged solution as we've seen in the past, right, is the models are basically just a super powerful engine. So if you think about the car, right, you've got this great engine, only if it's connected to everything, if it has wheels, so you can actually make it run and the transmission to guard it. And so, when the models come out, there isn't a direct correlation to bookings or new work. But what it does is create the next opportunity for us to look at what are the solutions that it's going to now create. And so if you think about in earlier days, a lot of the work was focused on things like summarization and content creation, the better the models are, it's able to fuel things like moving into agentic – where you – and we're starting to see that. So we're starting to see more experimentation and use of agents really basic workflows as the models get better. So think of the release of the models as the beginning of creating new opportunities for us to take to our clients, even as a lot of work that we're doing based on everything that has already happened.

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The honest split on AI demand: 78% of the C-suite now says growth matters most, but efficiency use cases are still what gets bought.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): But with respect to AI, how would you characterize the mix of advanced AI work between growth or revenuegenerating use cases against the eficiency-led use cases? We hear a little bit of a pickup on the growth side, but love to hear what you're seeing on-the-ground there on the mix shift. […] So I think the first shift that's happening is the focus. It is not yet in the mix. So, our latest survey that we do every quarter of the C-suite and how their view of AI, the latest survey had 78% now saying we think growth is going to be the biggest value. That's not yet translating on-the-ground to being the biggest driver, mostly because of where the technology is. If you think about kind of the early days, a lot of it is about content, summarization, et cetera, that is really an eficiency play. And as the capabilities improve, you start to see more ability to take it into the core business and to do more complex work. So we are absolutely seeing an uptick in growth –growth-focused AI programs, but eficiency is still leading the way. I will tell you that the most exciting area right now on growth is conversational and agentic commerce. Demand is surging there. And I think as that – and that's where we're investing a lot, I think as that takes of, you're going to start to see real results from on the growth side from these new developments and that's a whole new market and it's a whole new opportunity for us that we're super well positioned, of course, because of Song.

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The capital-allocation doctrine: buy into higher-growth adjacencies to fuel organic growth, now with data and IP that break the FTE link.

Jonathan Lee (Guggenheim Partners); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Can you help us understand what's driving the step-up in deployment and whether this reflects a shift in acquisition strategy toward larger or earlier-stage assets, higher multiples in the market or perhaps a pivot toward IP-led deals? […] So, our strategy that we've executed over the last decade or so has been to use V&A often to go into new areas that are higher growth. So, we did that with Accenture Song. We've done that with Industry X, you saw us do that with capital projects over the last few years. And that is all to fuel organic growth, right? So, it's increasing our total addressable market by going into new higher growth areas. And that's again what you're seeing us do that. And we're doing that in key AI enablers. And so those are things like data centers, energy infrastructure. We're doing that in big secular trends like defense. You've seen those acquisitions over the last couple of years and public sector is another one. Education is another one. So, higher growth areas, increasing our TAM. And then increasingly, we see an opportunity to meet unmet demand in the market where you don't have solutions where we can build products either organically or by purchasing them. So, our Faculty acquisition, for example, has a really unique decision intelligence product. And then in addition, there are new commercial models where data is one of the key enablers of AI. And so you saw our Ookla acquisition, which is really about an incredible data set. And the way that then gets into our business is in the network is really core to both communications and all enterprises and to use AI, having this kind of a dataset is incredibly powerful and it's a completely diferent commercial model, a licensing and subscription base.

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What the pivot costs: higher multiples and a smaller immediate earnings uplift, accepted for higher growth and margin later.

Angie Park (CFO): Yeah. And so, in some cases, we are paying higher multiples than in the past. So the immediate uplift is lower in those instances than prior acquisitions. So that said, we are intentionally shifting towards higher growth, higher margin assets that are going to fuel organic growth and strengthen our capabilities, and it's really to position us for long-term growth and returns.

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The compression question head-on: if AI collapses an ERP migration to two weeks, why is that not a smaller TAM for integration work?

Jonathan Lee (Guggenheim Partners); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): As a follow-up, one of your partners recently highlighted the ability to reduce SAP ERP migration workloads to as little as two weeks using AI, how do you respond to concerns that AI tools are compressing project timelines, relative rate cards, and reducing the TAM for systems integration work? And are you seeing similar compression in your own engagements? And if so, how are you ofsetting this through volume or new service oferings? […] So, in general, you should think about our strategy is always that the more that we can use technology to bring more value to clients faster, the better it is for our business. And that's the strategy you've seen us execute ever since RPA really burst on the scene in 2015, because when you can actually make, especially the technical piece of it go faster, there's so much work, all the process change, all the change management, et cetera, that like the SAP deals are multi-year and those often become gating items that they're not investing in other parts of the technology landscape or other parts of the business because they are these huge projects. And so, we see this as whether it's in ERP or mainframe, it helps, because the actual technical piece is a small piece compared to the rest of the work and it leads to more work. And so, for example, just last week, we were at AIPCon Palantir's conference with SAP, Palantir and Accenture on stage saying we're going to develop those products. They're really not developed yet at scale in any way. But we're working together because it will be a net benefit to our clients, which means it will be a net benefit to us. That's how we think about it.

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Q4 and Full Year FY2025 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2025

The annual call: FY25 in full, the guidance convention, the talent rotation and the reorganization into Reinvention Services. · Open the full transcript →

What the AI figures do and do not include — the disclosure boundary behind $2.7bn of revenue and $5.9bn of bookings in FY25.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Our early and decisive decision in FY23 to invest significantly to become the leader in Gen AI with a $3 billion multi-year investment is clearly paying-of as we capture this new area of spend for our clients. In FY25, we tripled our revenue over FY24 from Gen AI and increasingly agentic AI to $2.7 billion. And we nearly doubled our Gen AI bookings to $5.9 billion. And as a reminder, these numbers only reflect revenue and bookings specifically related to advanced AI, which is Gen AI, agentic AI and physical AI and do not include data, classical AI or AI used in delivery of our services. We're now going to use the term advanced AI as it encompasses the latest developments that are starting to gain traction.

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The talent rotation stated plainly — upskill first, exit fast where reskilling will not work — alongside the single-unit growth model.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): In addition to continuing to hire world-class talent, in FY25, we developed and are implementing a refreshed robust three-pronged talent strategy to rotate our workforce. We are investing in upskilling our reinventors, which is our primary strategy. We are exiting on a compressed timeline, people where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need. And, we're continuously identifying areas of how we operate Accenture to drive more eficiencies, including through AI in order to create more investment capacity. […] Finally, our growth model. On September 1, we launched reinvention services, which brings all of Accenture's capabilities into a single unit. Nearly 80% of our large deals are multi-service. The model as we fully roll it out will make it faster and simpler to sell and deliver everything Accenture ofers and to rotate our oferings to embed more AI and data and equip our people.

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The roughly $865m charge decomposed: compressed severance for the talent rotation plus divestiture of two off-strategy acquisitions.

Angie Park (CFO): Before I move on to the details of the quarter, I want to spend a moment on the six- month business optimization program we initiated in Q4, for which we recorded a charge of $615 million and expect to record an additional approximately $250 million in Q1, for a total of approximately $865 million over the period. The business optimization program has two parts. One related to rapid talent rotation that Julie mentioned, which reflects severance associated with headcount reductions that we are making in a compressed timeline, and second, related to the divestiture of two acquisitions that are no longer aligned with our strategic priorities. These actions will result in cost-savings, which will be reinvested in our people and our business.

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Why enterprise adoption lags the mindshare — and why management treats that gap as its demand pool rather than a threat.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): It is well recognized that advanced AI has taken the mindshare of CEOs, the C-suite and boards faster than any technology development we've seen in the past two decades. At the same time, as reported widely, value realization has been underwhelming for many and enterprise adoption at scale is slow other than with digital natives. This is why our clients are turning to us. We know that the gap between mind share and faster actual adoption is because the enterprise reinvention required to truly unlock the value of advanced AI is hard and has significant costs. There is a huge diference between how we're all using AI in our individual lives that is incredibly easy and what it takes to use it in an enterprise. The opportunity for AI is at the intersection of business strategy and tech and org readiness. For most companies, the biggest gap between mind share and adoption is tech and org readiness. We're still in the thick of cloud, ERP and security modernization. Data preparedness is nascent and many companies grapple with fragmented processes and siloed organizations. Generations of leaders need new skills to understand how AI should inform their business strategy. The workforce needs new skills to use AI and new talent strategies and related competencies must be developed.

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The guidance convention that recurs every quarter: the top of the range assumes no change in discretionary spend, the bottom allows decay.

Tien-Tsin Huang (JPMorgan); Angie Park (CFO): I wanted to – my first question I'll ask on visibility on revenue growth, if that's okay. Just love to hear your thoughts on visibility compared to the last couple of years given the backlog, which is quite big with large deals, you have the pipeline, of course, and then what you're seeing on discretionary spending given the economic backdrop as you see it? […] As we look at FY26, we feel really good about our positioning. And so as you said, you saw our strong bookings of $80.6 billion in FY25 that positions us for FY26. We can see our backlog from the large deals. And if you look at our pipeline and looking at our pipeline, it's solid overall and we see strong demand for our large transformation deals. From a discretionary perspective, what we've assumed is at the top-end of the range, there's no change in discretionary spend, while at the bottom of the range, it allows for deterioration. And by the way, as you think about our guidance of 2% to 5% excluding AFS, we're at 3% to 6% for the year.

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The core bull case in management's own words: client AI savings are not lost, they fund the next item on an effectively unlimited list.

Tien-Tsin Huang (JPMorgan); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Just give us your latest thoughts on AI driven productivity and those gains and how they might unfold. I get that question quite a bit from investors. Do you see potential deflationary efects and how might that impact Accenture services both positively and negatively? […] Great. Thanks, Tien-Tsin. So we don't see AI as deflationary. We do see and are seeing it as expansionary similar to every tech evolution we've been through. The move from an analog to digital, from on-prem to cloud and SaaS, and is many of you who have been with us over the course of the years have known, in every successive tech evolution, we've become stronger. And so if you look at AI, we see the same thing. Yes, AI absolutely boosts eficiency in areas like coding or operations, but those savings don't disappear. They're being reinvested into new priorities. The list of what our clients want to do with technology is truly virtually unlimited. And so when we can save them money by delivering our services with advanced AI, that frees up their budget to do the next things on their list and that's what they're doing. They're always going to those next priorities and we're best-positioned then to help them. That is how we delivered our 7% growth last year. I mean, two years in, we're seeing the pattern for how that journey to advanced AI is expanding our business. And by the way, I will add that one of the most consistent things that I'm telling CEOs today is that their AI strategy has to focus on both growth and productivity. And almost every CEO that I've talked to says they pivoted way too far toward productivity and not enough to growth, which of course, we are helping them with, with things like Song. And we give that advice really from our own experience in how we have successfully grown through every tech evolution, embracing the productivity on one-side and then capturing the opportunity it creates on the other side by helping our clients.

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A disclosure question answered candidly: data is kept out of the advanced-AI figure so the new-spend number stays clean.

Jamie Friedman (Susquehanna); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): I wanted to ask, Julie, about the way you're defining advanced AI. And I think if the transcript is right, you say Gen AI, agentic AI and physical AI. I'm actually asking about why you're saying you won't – you're not including data because we've sort of been trained that data is foundational. So why is the data component not in the definition of advanced AI? […] Because what we're trying to help share with you is how we're taking spend in a new market. And by the way, data is absolutely critical. In fact, one out of every two projects in Gen AI, agentic AI, physical AI now has significant data pull-through. So our data business is on fire, right? Like this is an absolutely critical area. Companies are just getting started. It's nascent in many places. It's part of the digital core that we're building. It's just that to date, we've wanted to share with all of you transparently the really new areas.

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Where the savings go: over $1bn from the optimization program is reinvested, leaving only modest margin expansion on the table.

Bryan Bergin (TD Cowen); Angie Park (CFO): Can you talk about, maybe assumed savings you expect to achieve from this optimization plan and how it may help you evolve your operations? I'm specifically curious if you see that kind of combined with Gen AI adoption internally, allowing you to operate at a sustainably higher utilization as that did tick-up this quarter. […] I think that for overall, we expect savings of over $1 billion from our business optimization program, which we expect that we will reinvest in our business and in our people because it's so important for our future growth. And so we expect to reinvest that while still delivering modest margin expansion.

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Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2025

The shock call: the GSA federal contract review disclosed live, and the thesis tested on how much revenue was really at risk. · Open the full transcript →

The disclosure that reset the stock: GSA told agencies to review contracts with the top 10 consultancies and terminate the non-critical.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): First, Accenture Federal Services. Federal represented approximately 8% of our global revenue and 16% of our Americas revenue in FY ‘24. As you know, the new administration has a clear goal to run the Federal government more efficiently. During this process, many new procurement actions have slowed, which is negatively impacting our sales and revenue. In addition, recently, the General Service Administration has instructed all federal agencies to review their contracts with the top 10 highest paid consulting firms contracting with the U.S. government, which includes Accenture Federal Services. The GSA's guidance was to terminate contracts that are not deemed mission critical by the relevant federal agencies. While we continue to believe our work for federal clients is mission critical, we anticipate ongoing uncertainty as the government's priorities evolve and these assessments unfold. Based on our significant experience across federal and commercial clients, we see major opportunities over time for us to help consolidate, modernize, and reinvent the federal government to drive a whole new level of efficiency.

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How management framed the March 2025 shift: uncertainty sharply elevated since December, industry fundamentals asserted to be unchanged.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Second, in recent weeks, we are seeing an elevated level of what was already significant uncertainty in the global economic and geopolitical environment, marking a shift from our first quarter FY ‘25 earnings report in December. At the same time, we believe the fundamentals of our industry remain strong and we are very well positioned with our clients because all strategies continue to lead to reinvention through new ways of working, tech, data, and AI. We are confident in executing our strategy to help clients reinvest. As you would expect, we are laser focused on bringing tremendous value to our clients. Our strengths lie in our agility as the market we operate in changes, utilizing our deep client and ecosystem relationships and our leading position in Gen AI and technology more broadly. We are also well diversified across markets, industries, and types of work, which enables us to continue to lead in a changing market context as we have done before.

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Pressed to quantify federal exposure, management declines to split it: 8% of the business, the range is the disclosure.

Tien-Tsin Huang (JPMorgan); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Is there – maybe to ask it differently, just is there a way to frame the real revenue at risk? I know mission-critical is, maybe hard to define it here on the call, but is there anything that you can share in terms of what's really at risk or not at risk thinking about duration or is it really more of an issue of replenishing work, etc.? Just trying to get a better understanding of visibility there. […] Sure. And so, Tien-Tsin, what I would say is, and what we've been clear about is the guided range we're giving for the quarter and for the year reflects our best view of the impact that's coming from both the slowing of new procurement actions and the assessments of the work that we're doing, and so we don't get into different pieces of it, but – those two things, the range of outcomes and that's reflected in the range. I mean, it is 8% of our business. We have lots of other parts of our business that are about that size that we are always looking at estimates and assumptions. And so this is our best view of it today and the range reflects it.

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A precise correction of the premise: uncertainty rose in recent weeks, but management says no slowdown had shown up in the business.

James Faucette (Morgan Stanley); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): As we talk about the little bit of the slowdown that you've seen in recent weeks, how would you characterize it geographically or industry vertical? Just trying to get a little more color there. And what do you think those customers are looking for in terms of their, proceed or continue to pause or hesitate, type of decision making? […] Thanks, James. I want to be clear, we haven't seen a slowdown in the last few weeks. What we commented on, which I think is kind of everyone is well aware of is in the last few weeks, there's been an elevated level of what was already significant uncertainty and there's a couple of big themes around that, obviously tariffs, and that's a global discussion. That is not just an Americas discussion. And also consumer sentiment, which is a little bit more of an Americas discussion. And so we're really just commenting on what I think we're all seeing and that's only been in the last few weeks, and so we're already, of course, in the heart of the discussions of clients globally who are talking about it.

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Do clients claw back the AI savings? Managed-services contracts already assume technology-driven productivity, so the model is unchanged.

Keith Bachman (BMO Capital Markets); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): But are you seeing any changes in the nature of your economic relationship with your customers? In other words, are customers asking for some of the savings or is there any change in that narrative on how the supply side and economic relationship broadly speaking with your customers may unfold as Gen AI matures a little bit? […] So I think in the first question, what we've been seeing with Gen AI is what we've seen in the past when we have new technologies, like, I take you back to 2015 when we first announced MyWizard, which we now call GenWizard, as we've introduced Gen AI and that was that major shift that occurred with respect to automation, which by the way is still relevant, right? And so that – we are not seeing a different change. We've been continuously – remember like, particularly, on the managed services side, our contracts assume that there's going to be more efficiency driven from technology. Gen AI is allowing that to kind of go up over time. But like the way that the model is working is just very similar to what we've seen with prior waves of big efficiencies from technology. So we're not seeing new patterns evolve there.

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What management says holds the business together through shocks: decade-long client relationships, diversification and ecosystem position.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): And then again, what I would say on the – how things might layer in. CEOs are actually focused on: how do I succeed regardless of the level of uncertainty? So the conversations we're having are not, hey, what happens if the tariffs that – this gets resolved, etc., it's okay. We have a higher level of uncertainty than we did 90 days ago, and so how do we then reinvent faster, right? What do we need to shift to? CEOs, and this is not from – this has been going on for now for a few years, right? They're embracing that their responsibility is to grow regardless of what has been, in my tenure as CEO, in the last six years, a series of a lot of different events. And that's why as we think about our own business, right, we continue to anchor on the characteristics that have allowed us to be the leader over these different cycles, that's the deep client relationships. Our top 100 clients we've been with for over 10 years, the diversification of geographies, industries, I do want to give a shout out to all my industry teams. The industry groups all – we had broad based growth, but it allows us for that diversification as well as types of work and then the all-important ecosystem relationships and our leadership in Gen AI and technology. Those are the building blocks of our resilient business and we all, our CEOs and ourselves have to be agile to succeed in whatever market and that is what our range reflects. The fact that we took the bottom off of the range reflects our belief in our resilient model as we continue to navigate.

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Q3 FY2023 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2023

The origin of the AI strategy: the $3bn investment explained, with a candid read on cost, ROI and how long it would take. · Open the full transcript →

The commitment that set the next three years in motion: $3bn into AI and a doubling of the data and AI workforce to 80,000.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Our approach to AI is clear. Just as we have successfully done with cloud, we are investing to take an early lead, and position for the opportunity ahead. Last week, we announced a $3 billion investment in AI, a big step to accelerate our clients' reinvention journey, which includes us doubling our data and AI workforce from 40,000 to 80,000 strong, including the expansion of our center for advanced AI that today has over 1,600 generative AI experts bringing new assets such as our AI Navigator for Enterprise to life, and developing new GenAI-powered industry solutions. And across this all, we are leading with responsible AI to be the most trusted source in helping our clients mitigate the risks as they drive value.

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The bifurcation that has shaped demand ever since: small discretionary projects falling away while large transformations hold up.

Lisa Ellis (MoffettNathanson); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): Let's dive in on the Strategy & Consulting. I know it was a high single-digit decline this quarter. That – just looking back at your comments from last quarter, I think that came in a little bit softer than you expected. But then you also called out many new projects coming in related to GenAI and other technologies. Can you just talk a little bit about kind of what's changed, what that evolution looks like and kind of what's your confidence level in the time horizon that we'll see Strategy & Consulting improve over the next couple of quarters? […] So the big difference in our expectations from last quarter and where we ended up, really was all in the small deals. And we saw further – they came in lower than we expected, and we saw that extend to Europe and the Growth Markets. Now that was both in S&C and systems integration. But that's the big reason that we have a difference in sort of where we thought where we would be this quarter. Now, our job is to continue to pivot to higher – where there is higher-growth, and we're working on that in digital manufacturing, supply chain, data and AI. But that will take a little time. And what we're seeing is that there's a lot of extensions going on in small deals, but it's the newer, small projects, while at the same time, we continue to have very strong bookings and interest and huge opportunity in transformations.

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The clearest statement of the managed-services model anywhere in the set: at least 10% productivity every year, and how it gets found.

Lisa Ellis (MoffettNathanson); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): But can you give your view on how you see GenAI impacting the IT services industry overall? Like, a lot of people make an analogy to sort of the impact of offshoring on the industry and sort of other big sort of step function changes to the operations and the kind of composition and the way IT services is done. Can you kind of give your latest perspective on that, how you see it affecting Accenture and your industry more broadly? […] So think about it first in context of Managed Services. Every year, right, we have to find at least 10% of productivity. So we talk a lot about our platform, things like myWizard and that. That's all AI-enabled. Just year-to-date in operations, not using GenAI, right, we have automated 13,000 jobs and then we've reskilled those people and redeployed them. Our business model requires us to get at least 10% productivity year in and year out. As we're getting to the maturity of automation and AI before generative AI, we see generative AI as our ability to continue to give at least that 10% productivity year in and year out. So in the Managed Services area, we see that more as the ability to continue doing what we have to do as kind of the next generation of technology. Where we're super excited is in software development that is more around our systems integration and our big transformations around platforms because while we do automate there, we think GenAI may provide a real opportunity to do even more. And remember, our strategy is to deliver compressed transformations. So the more that we can find ways to deliver faster and less costly, that's going to be a big differentiator. So we're leaning in hard.

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Unusual candor at the peak of the hype: GenAI is expensive, the ROI is unproven, and the $3bn is a bet on being early anyway.

Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): At the same time, these technologies are really early. And so for example, we're doing a lot of experimentation now. It's really good for things like documentation, but complex integrations, being able to use them for highly architectured systems, which is what our large enterprises do – GenAI isn't there yet, right? So we think it's going to take some time. We also don't yet know the cost. And one of the things we are really – a lot of clients are looking at us for is to help them with the business case because most of the studies, including our own, are all about what’s potentially [the] uses of it. But because these products aren't out yet, we know that – it's much more expensive to use GenAI, it's much more energy [intensive] [corrected]. And so the actual ROI – so there's the art of the possible, but what's actually the return – it's still really early days. So we're very excited that we can get new kinds of productivity, particularly on things like consulting and systems integration but it's early days yet. And we are leaning in because we think it's a big opportunity for us to differentiate. And that's why we are investing $3 billion over the next three years because we think this is like another Cloud First moment where we were out early, we invested at scale.

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Asked to underwrite the $3bn against the Cloud First precedent, management declines to quantify — a record of what was not promised.

Tien-Tsin Huang (JPMorgan); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): So on the AI front, you did mention, I think, the Cloud First. Do you draw that parallel when you guys – I think that was three years ago, you did a $3 billion Cloud First investment. That's paid off very well for you. So I'm curious, do you expect a similar return here on the $3 billion you're putting into AI? How should we measure that? Or is it going to perhaps convert differently in terms of the returns? […] Tien-Tsin, that's a great, clever way to try to get us to talk about more of the future. But what I would say is we've got a great track record of investing and getting a great return. And so we think that it's going to pay off well.

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Where the money was expected to come from: not pure GenAI but the data and digital-core work that has to happen before it.

Bryan Keane (Deutsche Bank); Julie Sweet (Chair and CEO): I get that it's early, but the big question everybody is asking is how long will it take before it moves the needle in bookings and revenue. Is that a couple of years out still? Or is that the time frame and the rapidness of the use of the technology should push it earlier than a normal technology wave? […] Well, Bryan, I think in general, we think GenAI is going to go faster than, say, cloud, right, which took more like a decade. I would focus on – so first of all, we're being very rigorous when we talk about GenAI because we're really saying like what are the actual GenAI. The big growth, we think, is going to be in all the companies that then have to get their data done faster. And we're not lumping that together. And so I don't know what others are going to do, but we're really being very pure in saying like, "Hey, this is pure GenAI." And if you think about where companies are, our research shows like only 5% to 10% of companies are mature right now with data and AI, and they're the ones that are really going to be able to use GenAI at scale. We just had this research done that came in last week that hasn't been published yet. About 50% of companies have not started on their data or AI journey, and everything in between – some are good in data but not AI. They're having a hard time to scale. So where we think growth is going to come particularly next year, the bigger growth is going to be not in like the pure GenAI, but it's going to be in helping companies finish getting their end-of-life data migrated to the cloud. Because you need your data in the cloud, right? It's going to come in the data strategy and the – all the governance and getting it architected while some of the stuff around GenAI gets sorted out. So for example, cost is not there yet. And how do you take data from one cloud and there's cost to take it and put it another cloud. All of that, we're going to be working with our clients and our technology partners – to really create the right business cases. But the growth we think in the near term is going to be from accelerating the digital core. And that's why we feel really good about the bigger transformational deals continuing next year because there's so much work to do.

p. 16 · Read in context →

More calls

Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call — Q1 FY2026 · 23 pages · Go here for the data-center services thesis: the DLB Associates majority stake and the roughly $12bn addressable market management expects to double by 2030. · Open →

Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call — Q3 FY2025 · 21 pages · The call that announced Reinvention Services, folding Strategy, Consulting, Song, Technology and Operations into one unit from September 1, 2025. · Open →

Q4 and Full Year FY2024 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2024 · 22 pages · The trough year in management's own words: 2% local-currency growth on $81bn of bookings, the completed cost programme, and the CFO handover to Angie Park. · Open →

Q2 FY2024 Earnings Call — Q2 FY2024 · 23 pages · The sharpest description of the discretionary squeeze — “another turn of the dial on constraining spending” — and how it changed the shape of bookings. · Open →

Q4 and Full Year FY2023 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2023 · 24 pages · Useful for the runway sizing management uses (share of workloads still off the cloud) and for how badly the CMT industry group dragged on FY23. · Open →

Q4 and Full Year FY2021 Earnings Call — Q4 FY2021 · 19 pages · The Cloud First precedent that every AI answer is measured against: a dedicated unit taking the cloud business from $12bn to $18bn in a year. · Open →


Accenture plc's annual reports contain management's most considered account of the business. These are the sections, passages and visual pages worth opening in the originals preserved in Sources.

Accenture plc — FY2025 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2025

First report on the new operating model: services folded into one Reinvention Services unit, segments recut into three markets. · Open the full document →

To our Shareholders — p. 3 · Read the full section →

Management's own read of the year: a market it calls persistently challenging, and the advantages it says it leaned on.

Julie Sweet on the fiscal 2025 market and the advantages the company says it built on.

In fiscal year 2025, Accenture delivered strong financial results and significantly elevated our competitive positioning, taking our next big steps to position us for growth in the age of AI. We built on the rapid shift we made in our business by the end of fiscal year 2024 to address challenging market conditions, which continue to persist. We then took action to fully capitalize on the competitive advantages we have built over a long period of time. […] These advantages include our ecosystem partnerships; our breadth of capabilities; our deep and trusted client relationships—we have partnered with 195 of our top 200 clients for 10 or more years; our track record of investing in new skills and rotating our business with successive technology revolutions; and our ability to invest. We know our clients and their industries inside and out, and, with these competitive advantages, we believe we can serve more of their needs for large-scale transformations than any other player in the industry.

p. 3 · Read in context →

Item 1. Business — Overview — p. 22 · Read the full section →

The business description in management's words: what Accenture sells, to whom, and the three axes it manages by.

How the company defines itself, its markets and its two types of work.

Accenture is a leading solutions and global professional services company that helps the world’s leading enterprises reinvent by building their digital core and unleashing the power of AI to create value at speed across the enterprise, bringing together the talent of our approximately 779,000 people, our proprietary assets and platforms, and deep ecosystem relationships. Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most AI-enabled, client-focused, great place to work in the world. […] We serve clients and manage our business through three geographic markets: Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and Asia Pacific. These markets bring together all of our Reinvention Services with both local and global talent and solutions. We go to market by industry, leveraging our deep expertise across our five industry groups— Communications, Media & Technology, Financial Services, Health & Public Service, Products and Resources. We deliver two types of work: Consulting and Managed Services.

p. 22 · Read in context →

Reinvention Services — p. 23 · Read the full section →

The structural change of the year — five separately described services collapsed into one business unit from September 1, 2025.

The September 1, 2025 consolidation of all services into a single integrated unit.

Effective September 1, 2025, we brought all of our services, which are described below, together into a single, integrated business unit called Reinvention Services. With this change, our client-focused growth model is bringing together all our capabilities across strategy, consulting, technology, operations, Song and Industry X, […] plus our technology ecosystem partnerships, to create more leading solutions faster and embed AI and data more easily into creating and delivering our solutions and services. […] With the majority of our large deals today already involving capabilities across multiple areas, the full rollout of our model is designed to make it faster and simpler to sell and deliver everything Accenture offers across our client base, while embedding more AI and data and equipping our people.

p. 23 · Read in context →

Industry Groups — p. 24 · Read the full section →

Where the revenue actually sits: five industry groups, their fiscal 2025 revenue and the sub-industry mix inside each.

Fiscal 2025 revenue and sub-industry splits for Communications, Media & Technology, Financial Services and Health & Public Service.
p. 25 — Fiscal 2025 revenue and sub-industry splits for Communications, Media & Technology, Financial Services and Health & Public Service. · Open source page →

Size of the U.S. federal business, disclosed as a share of group, market and total revenues.

Our work with clients in the U.S. federal government is delivered through Accenture Federal Services, a U.S. company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Accenture LLP, and represented approximately 36% of Health & Public Service revenues, 15% of Americas revenues and 8% of total revenues in fiscal 2025.

p. 25 · Read in context →

People — p. 26 · Read the full section →

A 779,000-person workforce is the cost base; this is where the fiscal 2025 talent reset is stated in plain terms.

The refreshed three-pronged talent strategy, including exits on a compressed timeline.

We are implementing a refreshed three-pronged talent strategy to meet current and future client demand: investing in upskilling people, which has been and continues to be our primary focus; exiting people in a compressed timeline where reskilling is not a viable path for the skills we need; and identifying areas to drive even more operating efficiencies in our business, including through AI.

p. 26 · Read in context →

Item 1A. Risk Factors — Risks and uncertainties related to the development and use of AI — p. 32 · Read the full section →

The risk that AI substitutes for the billable work Accenture sells, written by the company that is also selling AI.

Item 1A. Risk Factors — If we do not successfully manage and develop our relationships with our ecosystem partners — p. 35 · Read the full section →

Accenture states that a very significant portion of its revenue rests on partners' technology — partners who also compete with it.

Dependence on ecosystem partners, and the ways that dependence can turn.

We have alliances with companies whose capabilities complement our own. A very significant portion of our revenue and solutions and services are based on technology, including platforms and software, provided by our ecosystem partners. […] The business that we conduct through these alliances could decrease or fail to grow for a variety of reasons. The priorities and objectives of our ecosystem partners may differ from ours. They offer solutions and services that compete with some of our solutions and services. They may also form closer or preferred arrangements with our competitors.

p. 35 · Read in context →

Item 1A. Risk Factors — Our work with government clients exposes us to additional risks inherent in the government contracting environment — p. 42 · Read the full section →

Pairs with the MD&A: the federal business is 8% of revenue and is being audited, repriced and terminated at the same time.

Audit and cost-recovery exposure on government contracts, including retroactive rate adjustments.

Government entities, particularly in the United States, often reserve the right to audit our contract costs and conduct inquiries and investigations of our business practices and compliance with government contract requirements. U.S. government agencies, including the Defense Contract Audit Agency, routinely audit our contract costs, including allocated indirect costs, for compliance with the Cost Accounting Standards and the Federal Acquisition Regulation. These agencies also conduct reviews and investigations and make inquiries regarding our accounting, information technology and other systems in connection with our performance and business practices with respect to our government contracts. Negative findings from existing and future audits, investigations or inquiries, or failure to comply with applicable IT security, supply chain, or other requirements, could affect our future sales and profitability by preventing us, by operation of law or in practice, from receiving new government contracts for some period of time, or result in other adverse consequences described in the following paragraphs. In addition, if the U.S. government concludes that certain costs are not reimbursable, have not been properly determined or are based on outdated estimates of our work, then we will not be allowed to bill for such costs, may have to refund money that has already been paid to us or could be required to retroactively and prospectively adjust previously agreed to billing or pricing rates for our work.

p. 42 · Read in context →

Item 7. Management's Discussion and Analysis — Overview and Key Metrics — p. 51 · Read the full section →

Management names what is acting on results — an unchanged discretionary environment and cuts to U.S. federal spending.

Demand conditions and the stated effect of U.S. federal spending reductions on Accenture Federal Services.

Our results of operations are affected by economic conditions, including macroeconomic conditions, the overall inflationary environment, new and rapidly changing technologies, and levels of business confidence. We continue to see significant economic and geopolitical uncertainty in many markets around the world, which has impacted and may continue to impact our business. While the discretionary environment is unchanged, clients continue to prioritize large-scale transformations, which include becoming AI-ready. In addition, the U.S. administration is reducing federal spending and the size of the federal workforce under the guidance of the Department of Government Efficiency. We are seeing impacts from these efforts in our federal government business (“Accenture Federal Services, or AFS”), including delays in new procurements, reductions in price and contract scope, and contract terminations. These changes have had an adverse effect on AFS’s results and could in the future have a material impact on our results of operations or financial condition.

p. 51 · Read in context →

Why the $80.6 billion bookings number and the $34 billion of remaining performance obligations are not the same thing.

The majority of our contracts are terminable by the client on short notice with little or no termination penalties, and some without notice. Only the non-cancelable portion of these contracts is included in our remaining performance obligations disclosed in Note 2 (Revenues) to our Consolidated Financial Statements under Item 8, “Financial Statements and Supplementary Data.” Accordingly, a significant portion of what we consider contract bookings is not included in our remaining performance obligations.

p. 54 · Read in context →

Accenture plc — FY2024 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2024

The edition just before the reset: five separately named services and the old North America / EMEA / Growth Markets segments. · Open the full document →

Our Strategy — p. 23 · Read the full section →

The prior strategy statement, organized around 360° value and a combination of five distinct services — the framing FY2025 replaces.

The fiscal 2024 growth strategy, built on 360° value and five separately named services.

The core of our growth strategy is to be our clients’ reinvention partner of choice, delivering 360° value to our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities. Our strategy defines the areas in which we will drive growth, build differentiation and enable our clients to transform their organizations through technology, data and AI to create value every day. We aspire to be at the center of our clients’ business and help them reach new levels of performance and to set themselves apart as leaders in their industries. […] Our clients turn to us to help them drive reinvention with our unique combination of services across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song. Our strategists and deep industry, functional, customer and technology consultants work hand-in-hand with our clients and across services to shape and deliver these reinventions.

p. 23 · Read in context →

More annual reports

Accenture plc — 360° Value Report 2025 — FY2025 · 69 pages · Companion to the FY2025 annual report, not an edition of it: the client, talent and sustainability data behind the 360° value language. · Open →

Accenture plc — FY2023 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2023 · 119 pages · The year of the $3 billion generative-AI commitment and $2.5 billion of acquisitions, with strategy still framed as 360° value. · Open →

Accenture plc — FY2022 Annual Report (Form 10-K) — FY2022 · 99 pages · The 10-K on its own, before the shareholder letter was bound in; Song appears here as the renamed Interactive business. · Open →

Accenture plc — 2021 Irish Statutory Accounts (Directors' Report and Consolidated Financial Statements) — FY2021 · 102 pages · Not a 10-K but the Irish-law filing for the same year: parent-company statements and directors' disclosures the 10-K omits. · Open →


Competitors describe Accenture plc's market in their own filings and calls. These verified passages and visual pages show where their strategies meet, using source documents preserved in Sources.

IBM (IBM)

IBM Consulting is the closest large Western analogue to Accenture's technology-and-consulting model, names Accenture first among the competitors of its Consulting segment in its own 10-K, and is the only peer that publishes a cumulative generative-AI 'book of business' split between software and consulting - the nearest public comparator to Accenture's GenAI bookings disclosure.

IBM's stated cumulative generative-AI book of business at the end of 2025: over $12.5bn inception-to-date, of which more than $10.5bn sits in consulting rather than software. IBM's own framing is that the pairing of a technology stack with consulting at scale is the differentiator.

Arvind Krishna, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer: The breadth of our AI offerings is another key differentiator. Combining an innovative technology stack with consulting at scale, and our client zero journey. Our cumulative Gen AI book of business now stands at over $12.5 billion, of which software is more than $2 billion and consulting is more than $10.5 billion, with both seeing their largest quarterly increase to date.

p. 2 · Read in context →

IBM's stated GenAI penetration of its consulting business in Q1 2026 - about 40% of signings, 30% of backlog, over 20% of revenue and $4bn of ARR - plus its claim that 80% of the GenAI book comes from clients newly captured.

James Kavanaugh, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer: Consulting. Consulting is about 40% of our signings, 30% of our backlog is GenAI now, over 20% of our revenue. And on an ARR revenue perspective, in the first quarter, we eclipsed $4 billion ARR. […] 80% of our GenAI book of business right now is coming from capture from net new clients overall.

p. 12 · Read in context →

Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH)

The US-listed peer whose service mix overlaps Accenture's most directly, and the one whose 10-K enumerates the fullest named list of direct competitors - Accenture at the head of it, alongside every other peer on this tab. Its calls are also where the share-shift question inside the IT services market gets asked most bluntly.

Cognizant's own definition of its competitive set in its FY2025 10-K. Accenture heads the named list of direct competitors, alongside every other peer featured on this tab, and the filing sets out the factors Cognizant believes decide these contests.

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, Form 10-K (FY2025), Item 1 - Competition: The markets for our services are highly competitive, characterized by a large number of participants and subject to rapid change. Competitors may include systems integration firms, contract programming companies, application software companies, cloud computing service providers, traditional consulting firms, professional services groups of computer equipment companies, infrastructure management companies, outsourcing companies, boutique digital companies and clients' in-house technology resources, such as GCCs. Our direct competitors include, among others, Accenture, Atos, Capgemini, CGI, Deloitte Digital, DXC Technology, EPAM Systems, Genpact, HCL Technologies, IBM Consulting, Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro. […] The principal competitive factors affecting the markets for our services include the provider’s reputation and experience, strategic advisory capabilities, digital and AI capabilities, performance and reliability, responsiveness to customer needs, financial stability, corporate governance and competitive pricing of services.

p. 18 · Read in context →

Cognizant's stated Q1 2026 bookings momentum - 21% growth, seven deals of $100m+ TCV and one above $500m - framed by management around its 'AI builder' positioning.

Ravi Kumar, Chief Executive Officer: I believe our work to become the world's permanent AI builder is resonating, demonstrated by our first quarter performance. […] Q1 bookings grew 21% year-over-year. We signed 7 large deals with TCV of $100 million or greater, including 1 mega deal valued at more than $500 million.

p. 1 · Read in context →

An analyst puts the share-shift question directly - bookings growing well ahead of the industry - and asks whether the share is being bought with margin. Cognizant's CEO answers both: the deals were 'properly priced', and he attributes the wins to a repeatable large-deal template, rising win rates and self-originated deals. The elision drops only the CEO's opening aside.

Amit Jawaharlaz Daryanani (analyst), and Ravi Kumar Singisetti, Chief Executive Officer: And then if you go back to the bookings growth, I think bookings were up like 18%. And clearly, the industry is not growing at that rate. So it's fair to assume that your folks are picking up a good better market share over here. I'm curious, what do you attribute the share gains to? And are these share gains coming at potentially a lower margin point, at least initially versus what you traditionally get? […] We have successfully won competitive deals that were properly priced, and we are confident we will meet our margin targets. Looking back, last year we secured 29 deals and the year before, 17, and now we have established a strong template that is helping us improve consistently. Our win rates have seen a notable increase, allowing us to source and originate new deals. For instance, we originated a $1 billion deal ourselves, demonstrating our agility in the market.

p. 11 · Read in context →

Capgemini (CAP.PA)

The European peer whose portfolio - strategy and consulting, technology, engineering/R&D and managed operations - maps most closely onto Accenture's, and which names Accenture as a competitor in every one of the five regional markets it reports. Its 2025 Universal Registration Document is published in French; both exhibits are page images of the market and competition sections.

Capgemini's own sizing of the market it serves - business/technology transformation plus engineering R&D at an estimated $1.8 trillion (Capgemini's own estimate, built off Gartner's Q4 2025 services forecast at constant currency excluding IaaS, adjusted for ER&D) - broken into five regions of >$780bn North America, >$75bn France, >$130bn UK & Ireland, >$300bn rest of Europe and >$520bn Asia-Pacific/Latin America/rest of world. Accenture is the first name in Capgemini's competitor panel for all five regions. Section 1.2.1, 2025 Universal Registration Document (French).
p. 16 — Capgemini's own sizing of the market it serves - business/technology transformation plus engineering R&D at an estimated $1.8 trillion (Capgemini's own estimate, built off Gartner's Q4 2025 services forecast at constant currency excluding IaaS, adjusted for ER&D) - broken into five regions of >$780bn North America, >$75bn France, >$130bn UK & Ireland, >$300bn rest of Europe and >$520bn Asia-Pacific/Latin America/rest of world. Accenture is the first name in Capgemini's competitor panel for all five regions. Section 1.2.1, 2025 Universal Registration Document (French). · Open source page →
Capgemini's competitive-environment section (1.2.3), which sorts its rivals into categories and places Accenture in the consulting group alongside Deloitte, EY, PwC, McKinsey and BCG - separate from the technology players (Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, TCS) and the digital natives. The right-hand column of the same page lists the ten factors Capgemini says decide wins, price among them.
p. 18 — Capgemini's competitive-environment section (1.2.3), which sorts its rivals into categories and places Accenture in the consulting group alongside Deloitte, EY, PwC, McKinsey and BCG - separate from the technology players (Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, TCS) and the digital natives. The right-hand column of the same page lists the ten factors Capgemini says decide wins, price among them. · Open source page →

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)

The largest India-headquartered peer by revenue and headcount, and the one that has stated an explicit ambition to become the world's largest AI-led technology services company - a claim aimed at the position Accenture occupies. It is also taking the business into capital-intensive AI data centres, a direction Accenture has not followed.

TCS's stated Q1 FY27 (quarter to June 2026) order book of $9.5bn TCV and its disclosed AI services run-rate of $2.6bn annualised, growing 13.6% sequentially - the metrics TCS uses to argue it is converting AI demand. The elision drops three named deal bullets, the largest an $800m mega deal with SKF.

K Krithivasan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director: We delivered a TCV of $9.5 billion, including net new AI-led business transformation deals […] The third key takeaway is our AI services revenue continues to accelerate. At the end of Q1 FY27, it stands at $2.6 billion in annualized revenue, which is up 13.6% QoQ.

p. 3 · Read in context →

Infosys (INFY)

Competes with Accenture across the same large-deal, AI-transformation and managed-services pipeline, and is unusually explicit in public about two things Accenture investors care about: how big management thinks the AI services market is, and how much of AI-driven productivity gets handed back to clients in price.

A reporter anchors on the 5.5%-of-revenue AI figure Infosys gave at its Investor AI Day and asks what share it targets of the $300-400bn AI services market Infosys has cited for 2030; the CEO says Infosys is targeting 'a very good market share' of a number it sources to an external study, and declines to disclose the AI revenue behind it. Infosys's own sizing of the AI opportunity, on its own terms.

Ritu Singh, CNBC TV18, and Salil Parekh, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director (Q4 FY26 media conference call): On AI, for instance, you told us in your investor briefing that 5.5% of the revenue in the third quarter came in from AI. The total addressable market is about $300-$400 bn. You know, in the fourth quarter, is there a number you could provide us, annualized what is the number you see? If there is more clarity you could give us, or what market share do you target from this $400 bn figure? […] So, we are targeting a very good market share from that number, which was for 2030 what we had given, the addressable market from an external study. The growth in AI services is very strong, but we have not disclosed that revenue number externally here.

p. 6 · Read in context →

The base figure behind that ambition: at its 2026 Investor AI Day, Infosys put the work inside its 'AI value framework' at 5.5% of revenue in Q3 FY26. It is a self-defined perimeter, not a reported segment, and the only AI revenue number Infosys has quantified publicly.

Salil Parekh, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director (Investor AI Day 2026): So what I am showing you in the Hexagon in the AI value framework is not theoretical. These are things that are actually happening on the ground with Infosys. This is what we are executing. And this for us today represents 5.5% of our revenue in Q3, and it is growing at a robust pace.

p. 10 · Read in context →

An analyst asks why productivity gains hurt rather than help margin. Infosys's CFO answers that competitive intensity has risen and AI productivity is largely passed back to clients - the pricing mechanism that decides whether AI delivery gains stay with the vendor or are competed away. The elision drops only the speaker label.

Yogesh Aggarwal (analyst), and Jayesh Sanghrajka, Chief Financial Officer: And just a quick follow-up, you mentioned productivity pass-through impacted margins. I was just wondering why should that be the case, if there was productivity improvement? […] So Yogesh, market is competitive. As I said, the competitive intensity in the market has gone up and the productivity will get passed back to the client largely.

p. 32 · Read in context →

HCLTech (HCLTECH)

Overlaps Accenture in infrastructure and digital-workplace managed services, engineering/R&D and now AI transformation, and is the peer most willing to publish its own sizing of the shared market and to name AI-driven deflation as a structural threat to the headcount-based services model.

HCLTech's stated sizing of the market it shares with Accenture - roughly $1.5 trillion of enterprise IT services by 2028 at a 4.9% CAGR - set against its own statement that the headcount-led services model is at risk from AI.

HCLTech, FY2025 Annual Report - Management Discussion and Analysis: In the near term, the technology services sector may encounter some challenges due to uncertain macroeconomic conditions globally. But the outlook remains positive over the medium to long term as technology intensity increases across the entire global economy. The industry is adjusting to changes in discretionary spending as clients develop their AI investment plans. Although a short-term slowdown may occur, the total addressable market for enterprise IT services, which is the largest segment of enterprise technology spending, is forecasted to be approximately $1.5 trillion by 2028 with a CAGR of 4.9%. […] The traditional services business model, which relies on increasing staff to boost revenue, is at risk, being challenged by the rise of AI.

p. 127 · Read in context →

HCLTech's July 2026 framing of the market in three buckets - AI-native, AI-amplified and AI-disrupted - with a stated intent to outrun the deflationary curve in the disrupted part, and $171m of quarterly 'advanced AI' revenue growing 62.1% year on year.

C. Vijayakumar, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director: We began FY27 with a focus to grow our advanced AI-led offerings, increase our relevance with clients, capitalize on the full range of AI-related market opportunities in our pursuit of becoming the world's best AI solutions provider.

As mentioned previously, our intent is very clear, benefit disproportionately from the AI-native and AI-amplified opportunities, which together represent the fastest-growing pool of enterprise spend, while in AI-disrupted services, we intend to innovate faster than the market to stay ahead of the deflationary curve rather than be defined by it. The fruition of this is reflected in our growing advanced AI revenue. Advanced AI revenue for the quarter stood at $171 million, marking 10.6% QoQ and 62.1% YoY growth.

p. 4 · Read in context →

More peer documents

Q3_FY2025 — 14 pages · Tracks the same GenAI book of business one year earlier at over $9.5bn inception-to-date, letting you build the accumulation curve IBM reports against Accenture's. · Open →

Q2_FY2026 — 12 pages · IBM's most recent read on where enterprise AI adoption stands ("clients remain in the early stages") and on consulting demand converting from it - the July 2026 update to the GenAI book quoted above. · Open →

CTSH_annual_report_FY2024 — 148 pages · Prior-year Cognizant 10-K carrying an identically worded competitor list; useful for confirming the named rival set is stable rather than newly drafted. · Open →

Q4_FY2025 — 14 pages · Cognizant's fullest discussion of pricing pressure and deal duration, the two variables behind ACV versus TCV divergence across the peer group. · Open →

CAP_annual_report_FY2024 — 67 pages · Capgemini's English-language consolidated accounts, with 2024 revenue by region and firm bookings of EUR 23,821m - the hard numbers behind the French market section. · Open →

TCS_annual_report_FY2026 — 361 pages · TCS's FY26 integrated report sets out the five-pillar 'Infrastructure to Intelligence' strategy and the vendor-consolidation demand thesis in management's own words. · Open →

INFY_annual_report_FY2026 — 384 pages · Infosys's FY26 MD&A and risk sections cover competitive landscape, win rates and vendor consolidation - the filing-level version of the call commentary quoted above. · Open →

HCLTECH_annual_report_FY2026 — 485 pages · Page 107 carries HCLTech's FY26 net new deal wins of $9.3bn TCV and its claim to be taking a significant share of a mid-market segment it sizes at over $400bn - the flank of the shared market rather than the large-enterprise core. · Open →


Source: S&P Capital IQ consensus via Xpressfeed · Generated 2026-08-01.

The consensus tape shows a company that keeps beating and keeps getting trimmed: eight consecutive normalized-EPS beats through FY26 Q3, against FY27 and FY28 EPS estimates cut 1.4% and 2.3% over the past six months. Revenue estimates fell alongside EPS rather than diverging from it, so the cuts read as a top-line mark-down rather than a margin story. The trimming stopped roughly a month ago, with every 30-day change inside 0.1%. The street has settled at neutral: no sell ratings anywhere, but 13 analysts at hold and targets spanning USD 130 to 275.

FY28 EPS consensus is down 2.3% in six months, and revenue is down 2.4% right alongside it

Almost all of the damage landed between the six-month and three-month marks; the last 30 days are flat to marginally higher on all four lines, so the cutting cycle has paused rather than reversed. FY28 was marked down harder than FY27 on both metrics.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · Point-in-time consensus; Δ90d is Now versus 90d.

Metric FY 180d 90d 30d Now Δ90d
EPS (normalized) FY2027 $14.89 $14.88 $14.67 $14.68 -1.3%
EPS (normalized) FY2028 $16.16 $16.12 $15.78 $15.79 -2.0%
Revenue FY2027 $77.95bn $78.00bn $76.64bn $76.61bn -1.8%
Revenue FY2028 $82.72bn $82.75bn $80.70bn $80.77bn -2.4%

Eight straight normalized-EPS beats, but revenue just missed for the first time in the visible record

Normalized EPS has cleared consensus in all eight captured quarters, by as much as 5.9% in FY26 Q1, which reads as conservative guidance. Revenue beat seven times before coming in 0.2% light in FY26 Q3 — the first crack, and it lines up with the period when forward revenue estimates were cut.

Current sequences by metric: Revenue: 1 consecutive miss; EPS (normalized): 8 consecutive beats.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · Consensus is captured before each actual first became effective.

Quarter Metric Consensus Actual Surprise Outcome
Q3 FY2026 Revenue $18.75bn $18.72bn -0.2% Miss
Q3 FY2026 EPS (normalized) $3.71 $3.80 +2.5% Beat
Q2 FY2026 Revenue $17.84bn $18.04bn +1.1% Beat
Q2 FY2026 EPS (normalized) $2.84 $2.93 +3.3% Beat
Q1 FY2026 Revenue $18.53bn $18.74bn +1.1% Beat
Q1 FY2026 EPS (normalized) $3.72 $3.94 +5.9% Beat
Q4 FY2025 Revenue $17.36bn $17.60bn +1.4% Beat
Q4 FY2025 EPS (normalized) $2.97 $3.03 +2.0% Beat
Q3 FY2025 Revenue $17.32bn $17.73bn +2.3% Beat
Q3 FY2025 EPS (normalized) $3.32 $3.49 +5.0% Beat
Q2 FY2025 Revenue $16.61bn $16.66bn +0.3% Beat
Q2 FY2025 EPS (normalized) $2.81 $2.82 +0.3% Beat
Q1 FY2025 Revenue $17.14bn $17.69bn +3.2% Beat
Q1 FY2025 EPS (normalized) $3.42 $3.59 +5.1% Beat
Q4 FY2024 Revenue $16.38bn $16.41bn +0.2% Beat
Q4 FY2024 EPS (normalized) $2.77 $2.79 +0.6% Beat

EPS is set to outgrow revenue in every forward year as gross margin edges from 32.0% to 32.3%

Consensus revenue growth troughs in FY27 before FY28 reaccelerates, while normalized EPS compounds faster than revenue in each year. Note the coverage asymmetry: EBITDA is carried by 9 to 11 analysts against 19 to 28 on revenue and EPS, so the margin line is the thinnest part of the forward view. Driver-level detail behind these lines sits in the Visible Alpha tab.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · YoY uses the prior fiscal year from the feed; analyst count and range use the first displayed period.

Metric FY2026E FY2027E FY2028E YoY Analysts Low / high
Revenue $73.56bn $76.61bn $80.77bn +5.6% 23 $73.32bn / $74.00bn
EPS (normalized) $13.87 $14.68 $15.79 +7.3% 27 $13.79 / $14.13
EBITDA $14.02bn $14.85bn $15.82bn +5.5% 11 $13.67bn / $14.77bn
Gross margin 32.0% 32.1% 32.3% +0.0pt
Free cash flow $11.20bn $11.74bn $12.58bn +16.9%

No sell ratings anywhere, yet 13 analysts sit at hold and targets span USD 130 to 275

Mean and median targets sit at USD 178.89 and 179 across 25 estimates, with the high more than double the low. The absence of any sell or underperform rating alongside a plurality at hold is the shape of coverage that has stopped downgrading but has not re-engaged.

Currency: USD · Scale: money in millions, absolute · Analyst counts shown explicitly.

Street view Reading Analysts
Recommendation mix Buy 11, Outperform 3, Hold 13, Underperform 0, Sell 0 27
Consensus score 2.07 27
Target price mean $178.9; median $179.0; high $275.0; low $130.0 25

Coverage collapses to 2 analysts at FY29

FY2029 carries just 2 estimates for revenue, normalized EPS and net income, so any outer-year growth step is two houses rather than the street. FY28 is thinner than the front years too: 21 analysts on normalized EPS spanning 14.13 to 16.90, and only 9 on EBITDA.


Visible Alpha broker models via S&P Xpressfeed · 20 brokers · 435 line items · freshest revision 2026-07-19.

Broker models describe a business whose reported growth troughs in FY-2027 at 3.88% before re-accelerating, even as constant-currency growth is already improving from 3.72% in FY-2026 to 4.16% in FY-2027. The differentiated detail sits below the P&L: Generative AI bookings compound in every modeled year while total bookings grow mid-single digits at an unchanged 1.14x book-to-bill, and Managed Services passes Consulting in the revenue mix in FY-2026. Margin is the quiet constant, with operating margin rising from 15.58% to 16.03% across the window on a delivery base the models barely grow. Where the models genuinely diverge is the size of the AI ramp and how the cash is deployed, not the near-term P&L.

Generative AI carries the bookings story — total bookings still grow mid-single digits at a 1.14x book-to-bill

Generative AI bookings rise in every modeled year, yet total bookings grow mid-single digits and book-to-bill sits at 1.14x from FY-2025 through FY-2027 — on these models AI work is more a relabelling of demand than an addition to it. Underneath, Consulting book-to-bill improves from 1.08x to 1.11x while Managed Services slips from 1.21x to 1.16x. Four brokers carry the Generative AI line from FY-2026 onward against six on the other bookings rows.

Line FY-2025A FY-2026E FY-2027E FY-2028E YoY Brokers
Bookings
Total Bookings $79.36bn $83.60bn $86.94bn $91.05bn +5.3% 6
Bookings - Generative AI $5.13bn $9.91bn $15.51bn $21.05bn +93.2% 4
Bookings - Consulting $37.75bn $40.19bn $41.48bn $43.12bn +6.5% 6
Bookings - Managed Services (Outsourcing) $41.61bn $43.41bn $45.46bn $47.92bn +4.3% 6
Book-to-bill
Book to bill ratio - Total(x) 1.14 Ratio 1.14 Ratio 1.14 Ratio 1.13 Ratio -0.7% 6
Book to bill ratio - Consulting(x) 1.08 Ratio 1.11 Ratio 1.11 Ratio 1.09 Ratio +2.7% 6
Book to bill ratio - Managed Services (Outsourcing)(x) 1.21 Ratio 1.16 Ratio 1.17 Ratio 1.17 Ratio -4.1% 6

The growth dip is currency, not demand: 4QFY-2026 reported growth falls to 2.61% while constant currency holds at 2.98%

Reported growth swings from 7.52% in 2QFY-2026 to 2.61% in 4QFY-2026, while constant currency travels only from 4.37% to 2.98% over the same stretch. The swing factor is the forex line, worth 3.40% in 2QFY-2026 and -0.36% by 2QFY-2027. The constant-currency and forex rows carry 11 brokers in the forward quarters against 17 on reported growth, so read them as the smaller, more considered sample.

Line 4QFY-2025A 1QFY-2026A 2QFY-2026A 3QFY-2026A 4QFY-2026E 1QFY-2027E 2QFY-2027E 3QFY-2027E Brokers
Revenue
Revenue $17.37bn $18.53bn $17.89bn $18.80bn $18.07bn $19.38bn $18.66bn $19.49bn 19
Growth bridge
Revenue growth - YoY - Total(%) 6.2% 4.8% 7.5% 6.3% 2.6% 3.4% 3.4% 4.1% 19
Revenue growth - YoY - CC(%) 3.8% 3.8% 4.4% 4.1% 3.0% 3.8% 3.9% 4.1% 14
Revenue growth - YoY - Forex(%) 2.5% 1.1% 3.4% 2.4% -0.3% -0.3% -0.4% 0.0% 14

Managed Services passes Consulting in the FY-2026 mix, and operating margin still grinds from 15.58% to 16.03%

Managed Services overtakes Consulting on both revenue and mix in FY-2026 and holds the lead through FY-2028, a shift toward the lower-price, longer-duration half of the business. Margin does not pay for it: gross margin edges from 32.02% to 32.30% and operating margin from 15.58% to 16.03%, on a headcount line the models take from 797,266 in FY-2025 to 829,050 in FY-2028. The staff row rests on six brokers, well below the 17 to 18 on the P&L rows above it.

Line FY-2025A FY-2026E FY-2027E FY-2028E YoY Brokers
Mix
Revenue - Managed Services (Outsourcing) $34.38bn $37.18bn $38.75bn $40.80bn +8.1% 11
Revenue - Consulting $35.03bn $36.42bn $37.70bn $39.47bn +4.0% 11
Revenue mix - Managed Services (Outsourcing)(%) 49.5% 50.5% 50.7% 50.8% +1.0pt 11
Revenue mix - Consulting(%) 50.5% 49.5% 49.3% 49.2% -1.0pt 11
Margin
Gross margin(%) 32.0% 32.0% 32.2% 32.3% -0.0pt 19
Operating margin(%) 15.6% 15.8% 15.9% 16.0% +0.2pt 19
Operating income/(loss) - Operating $10.82bn $11.60bn $12.14bn $12.84bn +7.2% 20
Delivery base
Staff(#) 797,266 Number 793,144 Number 812,459 Number 829,050 Number -0.5% 7

M&A does much of the growth work: organic growth is modeled at 1.85% in FY-2027 against an FY-2026 spike in deal spend

The organic line — four brokers only — is modeled at 2.09% in FY-2026 and 1.85% in FY-2027, well under the reported rate, while acquisition spend steps up sharply in FY-2026 before settling back. Repurchases are modeled lower in FY-2027 and FY-2028 than in FY-2026, so the payout ratio rises from 45.70% to 50.90% on a mix leaning more on the dividend. Cash generation is the dependable part: FCF per share moves from 14.88 to 20.67 across the window.

Line FY-2025A FY-2026E FY-2027E FY-2028E YoY Brokers
Organic engine
Revenue growth - Organic(%) 3.9% 2.1% 1.9% 2.6% -1.9pt 7
Cash deployment
Purchases of businesses and investments, net of cash acquired $1.26bn $7.49bn $3.59bn $3.82bn +494.2% 13
Purchases of shares $4.74bn $5.98bn $4.73bn $4.35bn +26.2% 15
Total payout ratio(%) 45.7% 47.2% 49.7% 50.9% +1.5pt 11
Cash generation
Free cash flow $9.41bn $11.17bn $11.61bn $12.51bn +18.8% 15
FCF per share($) $14.88 $18.04 $19.07 $20.67 +21.2% 14

The live arguments are the size of the AI ramp and the pace of buybacks — not the FY-2027 P&L

Line Period Median Q1–Q3 Min–max Brokers
Bookings - Generative AI FY-2028E $17.50bn $14.86bn–$23.69bn $11.45bn–$37.74bn 4
Purchases of shares FY-2027E $4.80bn $4.00bn–$5.20bn $2.50bn–$7.00bn 13
Free cash flow FY-2027E $11.59bn $11.06bn–$12.15bn $9.42bn–$13.87bn 14
Staff(#) FY-2028E 815,592 Number 783,812 Number–862,444 Number 761,994 Number–929,843 Number 6

The most differentiated lines here are also the thinnest-covered

Generative AI bookings and organic revenue growth carry four brokers, and staff and total bookings six, against 17 on revenue and 18 on operating income. Utilization is a single-broker line and attrition a two-broker line, so neither is consensus and neither is shown here. Consensus was last updated 2026-07-19, but the bookings and organic rows were last revised 2026-06-28 and 2026-06-19 respectively, so they predate the newest P&L marks.

Headline P&L consensus, momentum and beat/miss live in the CapIQ tab.


Source: S&P Capital IQ transcripts via Xpressfeed · latest indexed call 2026-06-18 · generated 2026-08-01.

Latest call digest

Accenture plc, Q3 2026 Earnings Call, Jun 18, 2026 · 2026-06-18T12:00:00

Q3 FY2026 — reported June 18, 2026. Revenue of $18.7 billion grew 3% in local currency (6% in USD), about 4% excluding the federal business. Bookings were $19.3 billion, down 3% in local currency, for a 1.0 book-to-bill; consulting bookings of $10.3 billion held a 1.1 book-to-bill while managed services bookings of $9.1 billion came in at 1.0. Operating margin was 17%, up 20 basis points; EPS of $3.80 grew 9%; free cash flow was $3.6 billion.

The prepared remarks and the Q&A pulled in different directions. Management opened on strategy — a majority stake in Dragos plus runZero and NetRise to build an OT security platform ($208 million of ARR growing 48%), a new mid-market business called Accenture Edge targeting what they size as a $240 billion market, and capital deployment raised to approximately $9 billion for the year from the $5 billion flagged in March. The quarter's two negatives were disclosed but not dwelt on: roughly $100 million of revenue impact from the Middle East conflict, all in consulting type of work and split evenly between direct and indirect effects, plus approximately $400 million of sales impact in the region; and a couple of large managed services opportunities slipping into FY27 for company-specific reasons.

The Q&A went straight at those two items and stayed there. Analysts pressed on whether the Middle East drag persists into Q4, on the size of the managed services pushout, on why consulting bookings strength is not showing up in consulting revenue, and on what protects the bottom line if revenue lands at the low end. Julie Sweet's answer to Morgan Stanley's request to sensitize the Q4 range was a single line of confirmation.

Guidance as actually stated: Q4 revenue of $17.75–$18.4 billion, 1% to 5% growth in local currency, with the federal headwind anniversarying and that business returning to growth. Full-year FY26 revenue was trimmed to 3% to 4% local-currency growth from 3% to 5%; adjusted operating margin was set at 15.8% (20 basis points of expansion) versus the prior 15.7%–15.9% range; adjusted EPS was narrowed and raised at the bottom to $13.78–$13.90; free cash flow of $10.8–$11.5 billion and at least $9.5 billion of shareholder returns were maintained or raised. The tax-rate range moved up to 24%–25%. Angie Park said the company expects to enter FY27 slightly below 2% of inorganic contribution, and flagged an intention to access the long-term debt market to fund the elevated acquisition outlook. An Investor Day was announced for New York City on October 14.

Participant coverage from the latest call.

Group Participants Count
Management Operator; Alexia Quadrani — Executive Director of Investor Relations, Accenture plc; Julie T. Sweet — CEO & Chairman, Accenture plc; Angie Park — Chief Financial Officer, Accenture plc 4
Analysts Bryan Keane — Research Analyst, Citigroup Inc., Research Division; Tien-Tsin Huang — Senior Analyst, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division; Jason Kupferberg — Managing Director & Senior Equity Analyst, Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division; Kevin McVeigh — Analyst, UBS Investment Bank, Research Division; James Schneider — Senior Research Analyst, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division; David Koning — Associate Director of Research & Senior Research Analyst, Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division; James Faucette — MD & Equity Analyst, Morgan Stanley, Research Division; James Friedman — Senior Analyst, Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division 8

Curated latest-call exchanges; one row per analyst topic.

Analyst Firm Topic What changed in Q&A
Bryan Keane Citigroup Inc., Research Division Whether the Middle East drag fades in Q4 Asked why macro uncertainty is still in the guide if the conflict is easing. Sweet said the indirect impact only began in the last few weeks of the quarter and sits mostly in discretionary spend, so more of the range is in play for Q4; she declined to time a recovery and pointed to automotive as an industry already challenged before the conflict.
Bryan Keane Citigroup Inc., Research Division Size and timing of the managed services pushout Framed the shortfall as roughly $2 billion below his model and asked whether it lands in Q4. Sweet said the larger deals moved to FY27, not Q4, and that Q4 should not be modeled as materially larger as a result — a direct answer that closed off the easiest bull case on bookings.
Tien-Tsin Huang JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division Integration risk and dilution in the three OT security acquisitions Asked about above-average risk in stitching three assets together and about initial dilution. Sweet addressed market size, Dragos's platform maturity and the single-contract benefit to clients, and said she does not see stitching risk at all. The dilution part of the question was not answered.
Tien-Tsin Huang JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division What protects earnings if revenue lands at the low end Asked specifically what levers exist to defend the bottom line given ongoing investment. Park redirected to the FY27 exit-rate building blocks — inorganic contribution, the federal anniversary, the FY27 deal timing, the conflict — and reaffirmed margin and EPS expansion for the year. No cost lever was named.
Jason Kupferberg Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division Consulting bookings strength versus tepid consulting revenue The sharpest fundamental question of the call, raised on an LTM basis rather than a single quarter. Park attributed the gap to the Middle East impact, all of which fell in consulting, and pointed to four consecutive quarters of consulting bookings growth plus the federal return to growth as the Q4 catalysts. Sweet added that consulting content is growing inside large managed services programs.
Kevin McVeigh UBS Investment Bank, Research Division What $9 billion of acquisitions contributes in FY27 Park said the deals should put the company slightly under 2% of inorganic contribution entering FY27. Sweet used the answer to make the strategic point — the cyber assets carry $208 million of ARR growing 48% — framing acquisitions as the route into higher-growth, non-FTE revenue.
James Schneider Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division Whether AI infrastructure and token spend crowds out services budgets Sweet said the company is building a token-optimization practice on the model of its cloud FinOps business, does not see token spend as material to services demand today, and stated plainly that client budgets have not been increasing — which is why TAM expansion into OT security and the mid-market matters.
James Faucette Morgan Stanley, Research Division Scenarios behind the Q4 range, and margin implications of product acquisitions On the first question, Sweet confirmed the analyst's own framing — deterioration at the low end, improvement at the high end — in a single sentence. On the second, she described the acquisition mix and rising valuations but did not address the long-term margin trajectory that was asked about.
James Friedman Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division Fixed-price mix and its margin characteristics Park said fixed price remains above 60% and continues to increase, with no meaningful margin difference between consulting and managed services, and that it is embedded in the 20 basis points of expansion guided for the year.
David Koning Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division FY27 margin expansion cadence Asked whether the usual 10 to 30 basis points still applies given the new acquisitions. Park declined to guide and restated the standing goal of improved gross margin and SG&A while investing — a notable non-answer given the company volunteered an FY27 inorganic figure earlier in the same call.

Theme tracker

Themes are curator-classified across supplied calls.

Theme Status Quarters mentioned Read-through
Reinvention and large-scale transformation as the demand anchor persisted Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026, Q2 2026, Q3 2026 The single most stable element of the story across all twelve calls, with the $100 million-plus quarterly client bookings count used throughout as the proxy. It matters because it is the one metric management has never reframed or retired, which makes it the cleanest series for judging whether the strategy is still working.
Constrained discretionary spend persisted Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026, Q3 2026 Present in nearly every call since FY23 and never resolved. What changed is the framing: through FY25 it was described as a market that would eventually improve, and by Q3 2026 it was described as a multi-year industry challenge to be structurally offset by entering the mid-market.
Advanced AI bookings and revenue disclosure dropped Q4 2023, Q1 2024, Q2 2024, Q3 2024, Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 Disclosed every quarter from FY23 and explicitly retired in Q1 2026, with a cumulative total of roughly $11.5 billion of bookings and $4.8 billion of revenue given as the final data point. Management's stated reason is that advanced AI is now embedded in nearly everything. The effect is that the most direct external check on AI monetization is gone, replaced by the broader top-10 ecosystem partner metric.
U.S. federal (AFS) headwind persisted Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026, Q2 2026, Q3 2026 Emerged abruptly in Q2 2025 with the GSA contract review and has been quantified in the guide every quarter since. Q3 2026 guidance has it anniversarying and returning to growth in Q4, which removes roughly a point of drag but also removes an explanation management has leaned on for two years.
Non-FTE commercial models and product-led acquisitions emerged Q2 2026, Q3 2026 Ookla and Faculty introduced the idea in Q2 2026; the OT security platform deals in Q3 2026 made it the organizing logic of capital deployment, alongside the raise from about $5 billion to about $9 billion. This is the clearest change in the equity story in the twelve-call window and the least tested.
Mid-market expansion emerged Q2 2026, Q3 2026 Two mid-market acquisitions were disclosed in Q2 2026, and Q3 2026 launched Accenture Edge as a distinct business with a lighter client coverage model. Management ties it directly to offsetting the small-deal weakness that has held back consulting for several years.
Cybersecurity as a growth engine persisted Q4 2024, Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026, Q2 2026, Q3 2026 A recurring growth callout across the window — $9 billion of revenue growing 23% in FY24, 16% growth in FY25, very strong double digits in Q1 2026 — supported by the CyberCX acquisition and now the OT platform deals. Q3 2026 changed its role from a services line to the anchor of a platform business, which is a different risk profile than the growth commentary that preceded it.
Fixed-price mix above 60% of work emerged Q1 2026, Q2 2026, Q3 2026 First quantified in Q1 2026 as about 60% of FY25 work, up roughly 10 points over three years, and repeated in each call since as evidence of commercial-model evolution. It is the mechanism management points to when asked how AI productivity gains are retained rather than passed through.
Tariffs and policy-driven uncertainty dropped Q2 2025, Q3 2025, Q4 2025 A recurring analyst and management topic for three consecutive calls, then absent from Q1 2026 onward. The uncertainty language did not disappear so much as change subject, moving to the Middle East conflict from Q2 2026.
Per-quarter growth callouts for Song and Industry X dropped Q1 2025, Q2 2025, Q4 2025, Q1 2026 Growth rates for these two businesses were given regularly through Q1 2026 and are absent from both Q2 2026 and Q3 2026; Song is not mentioned at all in the latest call. Two quarters is a short absence, so this is worth watching rather than concluding on, but it coincides with the disclosure shift toward ecosystem and TAM metrics.
Middle East conflict emerged Q2 2026, Q3 2026 Introduced in Q2 2026 as a risk with no significant financial impact, and quantified in Q3 2026 at roughly $100 million of revenue and approximately $400 million of sales. It is the proximate reason the FY26 revenue range was trimmed and the stated reason more of the Q4 range is in play.
Top-10 ecosystem partner revenue metric persisted Q4 2025, Q1 2026, Q2 2026, Q3 2026 Introduced at the end of FY25 as 60% of revenue growing faster than the company overall, and explicitly designated in Q1 2026 as the metric that survives the retirement of the advanced AI disclosure. It is now the primary quantitative proxy management offers for AI-driven demand.

Guidance ledger

Quotes, calls, and speakers are source-verified; outcomes are curator-classified.

Verbatim guidance Call Speaker Curator outcome Outcome note
“For the full fiscal '25, we expect our revenue to be in the range of 3% to 6% growth in local currency over fiscal '24, which includes an inorganic contribution of a bit more than 3%.” Accenture plc, Q4 2024 Earnings Call, Sep 26, 2024 · 2024-09-26T12:00:00 Angie Park kept FY25 finished at 7% local-currency growth per the Q4 2025 call, above the top of the original range. Guidance was raised twice during the year.
“For operating margin, we expect fiscal year '25 to be 15.6% to 15.8%, a 10 to 30 basis point expansion over adjusted fiscal '24 results.” Accenture plc, Q4 2024 Earnings Call, Sep 26, 2024 · 2024-09-26T12:00:00 Angie Park kept Adjusted operating margin came in at 15.6%, a 10 basis point expansion — the bottom of the range, after the range was trimmed to 15.6%-15.7% in Q2 2025 and to 15.6% in Q3 2025.
“We expect our full year diluted earnings per share for fiscal '25 to be in the range of $12.55 to $12.91 or 5% to 8% growth over adjusted fiscal '24 results.” Accenture plc, Q4 2024 Earnings Call, Sep 26, 2024 · 2024-09-26T12:00:00 Angie Park kept Adjusted EPS of $12.93 was reported for FY25, 8% growth and slightly above the top of the original range.
“For the full fiscal '25, we now expect our revenue to be in the range of 5% to 7% growth in local currency over fiscal '24.” Accenture plc, Q2 2025 Earnings Call, Mar 20, 2025 · 2025-03-20T12:00:00 Angie Park kept Delivered at the top of this range at 7% local-currency growth, despite the federal disruption disclosed on the same call.
“For operating margin, we now expect fiscal year '25 to be 15.6%, a 10 basis point expansion over adjusted fiscal '24 results.” Accenture plc, Q3 2025 Earnings Call, Jun 20, 2025 · 2025-06-20T12:00:00 Angie Park kept Matched exactly: adjusted operating margin of 15.6% and a 10 basis point expansion were reported for FY25.
“For the full fiscal '26, we expect revenue to be in the range of 2% to 5% growth in local currency over fiscal '25, including an estimated 1% to 1.5% impact from our federal business.” Accenture plc, Q4 2025 Earnings Call, Sep 25, 2025 · 2025-09-25T12:00:00 Angie Park pending Raised to 3%-5% in Q2 2026 and trimmed to 3%-4% in Q3 2026, so the current guide sits inside the original range. FY26 is not complete.
“This year, we expect an inorganic contribution of about 1.5% and we expect to invest about $3 billion in acquisitions this fiscal year.” Accenture plc, Q4 2025 Earnings Call, Sep 25, 2025 · 2025-09-25T12:00:00 Angie Park pending The spend plan was raised to about $5 billion in Q2 2026 and to approximately $9 billion in Q3 2026, contingent on announced deals closing this fiscal year. The 1.5% inorganic contribution for FY26 has been reaffirmed at each step.
“We continue to expect our full year adjusted diluted earnings per share for fiscal '26 to be in the range of $13.52 to $13.90, or 5% to 8% growth over adjusted fiscal '25 results.” Accenture plc, Q1 2026 Earnings Call, Dec 18, 2025 · 2025-12-18T13:00:00 Angie Park pending Narrowed upward to $13.78-$13.90, or 7% to 8% growth, by Q3 2026. Not yet reported.
“For the full fiscal '26, we now expect revenues to be in the range of 3% to 5% growth in local currency over fiscal '25, including an estimated 1% impact from our Federal business.” Accenture plc, Q2 2026 Earnings Call, Mar 19, 2026 · 2026-03-19T12:00:00 Angie Park pending Cut to 3%-4% one quarter later, with the Middle East conflict and slipped managed services deals cited. The top of this raise is no longer available.
“For the full fiscal '26, we now expect our revenue to be in the range of 3% to 4% growth in local currency over fiscal '25, including an estimated 1% impact from our federal business.” Accenture plc, Q3 2026 Earnings Call, Jun 18, 2026 · 2026-06-18T12:00:00 Angie Park pending The current full-year guide, set alongside a Q4 range of 1% to 5% that management said has more of its span in play than usual.
“For adjusted operating margin, we now expect fiscal year '26 to be 15.8%, a 20 basis point expansion over adjusted fiscal '25 results.” Accenture plc, Q3 2026 Earnings Call, Jun 18, 2026 · 2026-06-18T12:00:00 Angie Park pending Points to the upper half of the original 10 to 30 basis point range set in September 2025, and was reaffirmed in the Q&A as including the fixed-price mix effect.
“we do expect to enter FY '27 slightly below 2% of inorganic growth” Accenture plc, Q3 2026 Earnings Call, Jun 18, 2026 · 2026-06-18T12:00:00 Angie Park pending An unusually early FY27 data point, repeated later in the call. Sweet noted it was volunteered ahead of the normal September guidance cycle.

Q&A pressure map

Question counts and firms are curator tallies; analyst coverage shown above.

Topic Questions Firms Pressure / response
U.S. federal exposure, DOGE and the path back to growth 10 JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, BofA Securities, Research Division, Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division, TD Cowen, Research Division, Barclays Bank PLC, Research Division, Wolfe Research, LLC The most persistent line of questioning from Q1 2025 through Q2 2026, with analysts repeatedly asking for a revenue-at-risk figure that management consistently declined to break out, answering only through the guided range. The pressure has now stopped: there was no federal question at all on the Q3 2026 call, which fits the headwind anniversarying in Q4.
Discretionary spend and what would unlock a budget recovery 13 BofA Securities, Research Division, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division, Wolfe Research, LLC, Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division, Morgan Stanley, Research Division, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, Citigroup Inc., Research Division Asked in essentially every call in the window, usually as a search for a catalyst. Management's answer moved from pointing at the January-February budget cycle, to stating there is no visible catalyst, to declining the premise outright in Q1 2026.
Whether AI deflates Accenture's own revenue 7 Mizuho Securities USA LLC, Research Division, BMO Capital Markets Equity Research, BofA Securities, Research Division, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, TD Cowen, Research Division, Guggenheim Securities, LLC, Research Division The most conceptually pointed thread: whether clients capture the AI productivity gain, whether project timelines compress, and whether rate cards fall. Management has answered consistently — AI is expansionary, savings get reinvested, fixed-price contracts already assume technology-driven productivity — without ever quantifying the pass-through.
Acquisition pace, valuations and inorganic contribution 10 JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, BMO Capital Markets Equity Research, Morgan Stanley, Research Division, Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division, UBS Investment Bank, Research Division, Guggenheim Securities, LLC, Research Division, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division Intensity has tracked the spend: light in FY25 when deal volume fell, heavy in Q2 and Q3 2026 as the plan went from about $3 billion to approximately $9 billion. Park has acknowledged paying higher multiples with lower immediate uplift; the question analysts keep returning to, and that has not been answered directly, is what the product mix does to the long-term margin trajectory.
Bookings conversion and the consulting book-to-bill gap 8 JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, BMO Capital Markets Equity Research, Morgan Stanley, Research Division, TD Cowen, Research Division, BofA Securities, Research Division, Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division, Susquehanna Financial Group, LLLP, Research Division Analysts have repeatedly tried to bridge strong bookings to weaker reported growth, including a request for the ACV-to-TCV relationship that management declined. The sharpest version came in Q3 2026, when Wells Fargo pointed out the disconnect holds on a trailing twelve-month basis, not just in the quarter.
Headcount, revenue per person and the talent rotation 11 BofA Securities, Research Division, TD Cowen, Research Division, Wolfe Research, LLC, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division, Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division A steady thread through the business optimization program and the shift to hiring for new skills. Management's standing answer is that revenue and headcount decoupled with the arrival of RPA around 2015, which sidesteps rather than addresses the question of how much of the recent gap is AI-driven.
Middle East impact and the width of the Q4 range 4 Citigroup Inc., Research Division, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Research Division, Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division, Morgan Stanley, Research Division Concentrated entirely in the latest call and the dominant subject of it. Four of the eight analysts who asked questions came at the Q4 range from a different angle; management confirmed the low end implies continued deterioration but did not name what it would do in that case.

Language shifts

Only language evidence verified against the referenced component is shown.

Observation Verbatim evidence Call ID Component
Guidance framing turned conditional in Q3 2026. One quarter after telling investors the company always calls it like it sees it while raising key elements of the full-year guide, the outlook was introduced by flagging that more of the range is now live. “Given the macro uncertainty, we expect more of the guided range to be in play for Q4.” 1990916397 5
The most direct statement in the window that client budgets are not expanding. Earlier calls described spending as more of the same or unchanged; here it is stated as a constraint that AI has not lifted, and used as the justification for buying into new addressable markets. “the budgets haven't been even with AI, they're spending it differently, but they haven't been increasing” 1990916397 31
Discretionary weakness was reclassified from a cycle to a structural feature of the industry, with the mid-market presented as the offset rather than a recovery in client budgets. “the industry has had this challenge now for a few years on discretionary spend, which is really smaller deals” 1990916397 28
For contrast, the FY24 close framed the same weakness as a waiting position — positioning now, upside when the market turns. That conditional optimism has not appeared in the FY26 calls. “When market conditions improve, we will be well positioned to capitalize them.” 1885277147 2
Sweet declined the premise of the discretionary-recovery question outright in Q1 2026, a sharper register than the earlier practice of deferring to the January-February budget cycle. “I'm not waiting around for it to come back” 1962181978 25
The advanced AI bookings and revenue series was retired with explicit notice, removing the disclosure that had been the industry's clearest external read on AI monetization since FY23. “This will be the last quarter in which we share these specific metrics.” 1962181978 2
New hedged-optimism vocabulary appears in the latest call. Large enterprise AI programs are described as early and promising rather than as a demand driver already in the numbers. “Finally, clients with more advanced digital cores are starting to take on larger AI programs, exciting green shoots.” 1990916397 4

Twelve calls show a company responding to a services market that has not improved by widening the market it addresses — OT security software, the mid-market, non-FTE and platform revenue — rather than waiting for discretionary spend to return. The execution record on guidance is good: FY25 was delivered above the original range and each FY25 commitment in this ledger was met. What the history does not yet show is that widening translating into faster growth, and the retirement of the advanced AI disclosure makes that harder to verify from outside. The FY27 debate is whether roughly two points of inorganic contribution and a returning federal business are enough to lift the growth rate, or whether they mostly replace the drags they are offsetting.