Julie Sweet

Julie Sweet, a former corporate lawyer who became the first female general counsel of Accenture, has led the consulting and IT-services giant — more than 700,000 employees — as CEO since 2019 and as chair since 2021. Under her, Accenture made arguably the biggest institutional bet in professional services that enterprise AI is real.

The $3 billion bet

In June 2023, months after ChatGPT’s debut, Sweet committed $3 billion over three years to Accenture’s Data & AI practice and set out to double its AI-skilled staff to 80,000. The wager paid off fast: by mid-2025 Accenture was reporting quarterly generative-AI bookings of $1.5 billion, and its internal training had taken the company from 30 people trained in generative AI in late 2022 to over 550,000 by fiscal 2025.

Sweet’s consistent message is that the technology is the easy part. Companies fail at AI, she argues, when they bolt it onto existing processes instead of rethinking them — if you are not significantly changing how you operate, you are not capturing the value. In 2025 she reorganized Accenture itself around that thesis, collapsing its major businesses into a single “Reinvention Services” unit. She has also told employees that failing to learn AI carries career consequences — a stance critics read as pressure, and she frames as preparation.