Accenture and Google Cloud recently advanced their alliance strategies across what are unquestionably two of the most critical areas of enterprise software deployment: Generative AI and cybersecurity.
The companies have expressed what they hope is an understanding of the progression path that organizations will now go through as they attempt to identify, architect and ultimately roll out generative AI functions. With so much of this work still in the prototyping stage, the firms say they want to offer the breadth of their own platform experiences to help customers determine optimal use cases.
Putting an emphasis on piloting projects for analysis and subsequent validation, the pair note their focus on bringing AI-fueled projects to life and building them in an environment that champions a safety-first approach to scale, with cybersecurity protection balanced at a level that is commensurate with all new tools and functions brought online.
With a need to adapt to “new risks” unique to generative AI, Accenture and Google Cloud have identified their particular focus on securing model data, managing cyberattacks and delivering remediation services that minimize the impact of any breach.
Massive or Minute?
The Accenture and Google Cloud generative AI Center of Excellence (CoE) arrived in December 2023. Approaching a year later, this service notes that 45% of joint client projects move from generative AI proof-of-concept stages to production. By way of analysis, it’s hard to know at this stage whether we should regard that as “only” 45% at this stage, given the still-nascent nature of generative intelligence and the number of defined best practices that customers have to grade themselves against, or whether it is a “massive” and impressive almost half.
The companies say they will further increase support for clients as they use AI to optimize critical business functions, address complex industry needs and protect against sophisticated cybersecurity threats.
As expected, both CEOs are on the record saying nice things about each other. Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture talks about generative AI as a catalyst for reinvention, long-term value and customers, customers, customers. Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud was also upbeat about this decade-long partnership and the need to solve complex business challenges through joint technical expertise, engineering resources and AI-optimized tools. He also mentioned customers, obviously.
Through the joint GenAI CoE, Accenture and Google Cloud have delivered new generative AI-managed services aligned with more than 60 joint industry accelerators.
“These accelerators are based on Accenture’s hundreds of generative AI use cases and help clients solve complex challenges across industries, such as optimizing supply chains to improve product distribution, enhancing retail experiences to increase purchase conversion rates and automating document processing to increase efficiency,” notes Accenture, in a press statement.
Accenture and Google Cloud have also provided clients with cloud infrastructure and AI models to build and scale multiple types of AI workloads. With access to Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) and Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), software engineering teams have been able to run demanding generative AI applications, while models like Gemini 1.5 Flash have delivered performance for high-volume, high-frequency tasks at a global scale.
To achieve these results, the firms say that many users have used Vertex AI as the platform providing a single surface to train, test and tune both Gemini and third-party models, enabling teams to bring generative AI applications to production and to monitor the models powering them for input skew and drift.
As noted above, there is also security operations work here. Accenture’s managed extended detection and response (MxDR) offering is integrated with Google Security Operations, which features security-specific GenAI platform capabilities from Google Cloud and GenAI operational capabilities from Accenture. Additionally, the joint service is now supplemented with frontline intelligence from Mandiant (a threat intelligence services company), combined with Accenture’s crisis management and consulting teams, enabling customers to quickly identify and respond to advanced cyber threats.
Services Solidification
Accenture has doubled its Google Cloud certifications to address the rising demand for Google Cloud technology, and its experts have been accredited with Google Cloud’s new Gen AI Skills badge. It is – arguably – this kind of work that may make the most difference when we look at the application of generative intelligence against the coalface of working operational businesses.
Inevitably (but also thankfully), this level of platform engineering fusion also features AI-powered code recommendations and a natural language chat interface for information retrieval to improve the speed and quality of software. Although we are yet to hear software developers sing the praises of these tools (more sound is coming from the vendors, unsurprisingly), these are the types of advancements that could be the tastiest morsels – and indeed the low-hanging fruit – that we first grab from the generative AI revolution.
