Accenture wants to lay off employees without AI potential

Accenture’s AI training courses: Business optimization or age discrimination in disguise?HJBC / Shutterstock

Accenture has announced plans to cut employees who are unable to train in artificial intelligence (AI). This is part of a wider restructuring strategy that will see the company focus on AI measures.

“Advanced AI is becoming part of everything we do,” announced CEO Julie Sweet last Thursday in the analyst conference for the fourth quarter of 2025, pointing out that Accenture will continue to invest significantly in this area. Employees are therefore expected to undergo extensive “further training and retraining”.

Preparation for client projects

“By definition, every new wave of technology has a time where you have to train and retool,” said Sweet. “Accenture’s core competency is to do that at scale. Our clients cannot possibly build all of the expertise they need on their own, they need us to go first and fast.”

“We are investing in upskilling our reinventors,” the Accenture boss said, using the company’s new name for its employees. However, she said, Accenture is “exiting on a compressed timeline” those for whom retraining is not a viable route to the skills required by the consultancy.

According to the CEO, Accenture has already trained 550,000 employees in the basics of generative AI. The move is part of a comprehensive, six-month business optimization program worth $865 million, which also includes layoffs and severance packages.

According to CFO Angie Park, the company expects to save over one billion dollars and plans to reinvest the freed-up budget in the business and the remaining workforce. The company also intends to maintain profit margins.

In addition to the cuts, the company continues to hire new employees and has expanded its AI capabilities with 77,000 AI and data experts employed in 2025 compared to 40,000 in 2023. “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,” Sweet explained. “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,” she added.Accenture wants to lay off employees without AI potential – ComputerworldRead More