Accenture dubs 800k staff 'reinventors' amid shift to AI

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/01/accenture-rebrands-staff-reinventors-ai-artificial-intelligence

by n1b0m • 8 months ago

58 64 8 months ago

ablation• 8 months ago

This is very, very funny. Pathetic too, of course. But mostly very funny. Has it ever delivered much more than boiler-plate consultancy packaged in buzzwords at the best of times? Now with added slop!

abdulhaq• 8 months ago

Actually, back in the day Andersens (and EDS) were some of the few companies that could deliver really big systems (for all their faults) e.g. https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to... . Each year a number of analysts had nervous breakdowns, I worked with one of them.

chasd004• 8 months ago

I worked on some very large very emergency contact tracing, disease surveillance, and vaccine management implementations during covid. Someone on one of my teams ended up in an inpatient facility after a breakdown. Having senior leadership break down in tears on calls was unusual but not unheard of during that time either. Analysts and others at that level went from ok to very not ok in about 90 days. No one cares about consultants, they get ground to dust and then replaced with another team. I was paid well but it was a tough time.

elzbardico2• 8 months ago

Accenture is more like a body shop or software factory than a traditional consultancy.

Their business model is based on the fact that most non-tech companies have a deeply seated prejudice against paying software and system engineers high salaries and that most of their software engineering senior leadership is hopelessly out of date in technology, but are well-connected with the rest of the leadership team, and can't be replaced directly by more competent, younger people.

So they spend vastly more money to outsource things to Accenture than they would do paying good salaries to engineers. But then, the idiots at Wall Street are allergic to any dollar spent on salaries, while always thinking dollar wasted on companies like accenture is "investment" and thus "a good thing".

consp• 8 months ago

Why keep people with knowledge of the systems in your company when you can not have it from the start! (/s obviously)

chasd004• 8 months ago

Accenture is a big place, it has a “nice part of town” where there’s genuinely good people who do good things. There’s also the boring part of town where they just “turn the crank and go home”. There’s also “the wrong side of the tracks” that’s just career nightmare fuel.

/not admitting I work there but… you know

tcmb• 8 months ago

For me this term makes them sound inefficient or even redundant, as in somebody reinventing the wheel.

didgeoridoo• 8 months ago

Perhaps that’s the point.

another-dave• 8 months ago

From a _consultancy_ it feels a bit on the nose. Do you have a system that's mostly working at the moment? We'll migrate that at huge cost to something else (for little upside, but it'll get sold in really well to senior management)

pwillia72• 8 months ago

should have gone with innovationeers

Esophagus4• 8 months ago

I like it - it’s like Disney’s Imagineer role, but much, much more stupid and without any of the fun stuff!

(Disney Imagineering seems like one of the coolest jobs on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Imagineering)

cyanydeez• 8 months ago

'Guys, know how we figured out the basics of what we do, and we teach the interns and juniors it, and everyone just gravitates towards a workable model? Yes? Well, forget all that, lets learn how to do that much, but ignore everyone else in the hopes we never have to hire juniors or interns again!'

ivape• 8 months ago

First, your role gets renamed …

Then you get laid off.

It’s kind of sad to see everyone being walked out of the factory, the final shutters on the modest profession of programming. I guess this is kind of exactly what it would look like, that bittersweet moment of ‘it’s actually really happening, and it’s actually really sad’.

Part of me wishes we could freeze time, that if we could just keep it like this, this many jobs, this many people, keep it a nice small village …

But this tidal wave before us doesn’t care. So long folks.

throwaway2905• 8 months ago

Most of people here think "I will be fine, only the other guy gets fired, programmers always will be needed". And we are tempted by new shiny stuff or we think using llms will help us keep the job but really by agreeing to what is happening and not being skeptic and standing against we dig our career graves. Kind of tragedy.

margorczynski• 8 months ago

A lot of people here have overgrown egos and really believe they are irreplaceable. And reality can come at you really fast.

lovehashbrowns• 8 months ago

Should’ve gone the art-industry route instead of this. Posting any kind of ai-generated art in an art community gets hostile pretty quickly.

JamesSwift2• 8 months ago

If you view yourself as a "backend developer" or, worse, "a react developer" then sure. If you view yourself as a "person who solves business problems with technology" then the only thing AI does is enable you to do more.

cgdub• 8 months ago

You're replying to an LLM.

sinenomine• 8 months ago

If you are 40 and haven't transitioned from a linear employee to manager or a small shareholder, your trajectory is that of jaded sadness. I write this to those who are still young enough to read and listen.

jeswin• 8 months ago

This is the wrong advice in my view. Senior engineers are the ones more empowered by AI than anyone else, provided they update their skills.

mistrial9• 8 months ago

this happened with all manner of engineering in America. Industry is power-driven, and only-workers do not protect a place to stand. At the same time, massive fortunes were made, and many, many companies died. Its not a static environment.

coldpie3• 8 months ago

Almost all of the couple-hundred employees laid off at my company in the past year have been managers.

For me, I paid off all my debts, and I'm reducing my spending to build up a big stockpile to weather a rough period or large salary decrease. TBH I'd rather find other kinds of work than lean into AI tooling. It's so boring & demoralizing.

RevEng• 8 months ago

What a world we will live in when everyone with skill and experience has moved in to management. Then who will be doing all the work?

myth_drannon• 8 months ago

That was probably the feeling of thousands of scribes when the printing press spread and more people could afford to buy books. The art of writing, including calligraphy, still exists, but primarily as a hobby.

camillomiller• 8 months ago

I love what they did with the Metaverse too. Such trailblazing work.

sethops1• 8 months ago

Haha, I hadn't heard about this before https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/metaverse

executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion

I wonder if that KPI is still on target.

coldpie3• 8 months ago

Hahahahah

81% of executives say metaverse related technologies are inspiring their organization’s vision or long-term strategy
90% of executives anticipate an increase in the level of resources their organizations will dedicate to metaverse related technologies in the next 3-5 years
$1T executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion

If ever there was an argument that executives would be more productive members of society if they were flipping burgers, it's this website.

chasd004• 8 months ago

I regret I have but one upvote to give.

At least with AI there’s some actual value there, the consulting firms have to jump on every trend because they market themselves as “thought leaders”. I expect a lot of AI shake out this year, people will find where it works and where it doesn’t as well as begins to realize AGI isn’t right around the corner. I’ve gone from pretty skeptical to cautiously optimistic about LLMs with respect to code. I was working on something a couple weeks ago and ran out of free tier claude. I was willing to pay the $20 out of my own pocket to keep using it for work tasks. That forced me to rethink my stance.

AndrewDucker• 8 months ago

To be fair, with the level of competence of most Accenture staff, they're basically on par with most AI anyway.

ryandvm• 8 months ago

Honestly, of all the people that should be sweating LLMs taking their jobs, it should be enterprise consulting folks - especially the ones at places like McKinsey. A large portion of those jobs involve writing bullshit rehashed documentation that nobody reads, which is a specialty of LLMs.

skizm• 8 months ago

McKinsey and other consulting companies aren't really paid to consult so much as they are paid scapegoats. Management just needs someone to blame if something goes wrong. LLMs won't really ever replace them.

pwillia72• 8 months ago

They are very concerned smaller shops are going to start eating their lunch since you can do what they do without hiring 1000000 people in the future

citizenkeen• 8 months ago

I can always trust a large consultancy to reinvent the wheel.

chasd004• 8 months ago

“Consulting: if you’re not a part of the solution there’s money to be made prolonging the problem” - despair.com

BruiseLee• 8 months ago

My employer wants to rename all software developer positions to "prompt engineers". This is to emphasize our shift to be "AI-first".

daveguy• 8 months ago

Yikes. Good luck. Hope you've already started the job search.

phantasmish2• 8 months ago

It's so hard to tell whether these people are genuinely stupid, or just pretending to be because that's what they think will be rewarded (and the latter might be correct and a non-stupid thing to do!)

userulluipeste• 8 months ago

I wonder if anyone will include the "prompt engineer" in their CV/Resume. Otherwise, if one of the future employers decides to crosscheck a title that's anything different than what your current employer wants to call you, then it may lead to a credibility loss.

simonw• 8 months ago

Is this a joke? It's so hard to tell these days.

binary1324• 8 months ago

Run screaming, do not look back.

stronglikedan• 8 months ago

As long as the compensation goes up, they can call me whatever they want!

Havoc• 8 months ago

That does sound like a consulting plan …

pan69• 8 months ago

They must have hired McKinsey to advice them.

petesergeant• 8 months ago

Curious job titles are also popular in the media and entertainment industries, including at Walt Disney, where technical experts who design and build its theme parks are referred to as “imagineers”.

Sorta shit you can pull off if you're Disney, absolutely not something you can pull off if you're fucking Accenture. People as old as me may remember the KPMG song[0]

0: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...

binary1324• 8 months ago

That’s so vapid only an AI psychosis binge session could have produced it

mrcsharp• 8 months ago

Are they reinventing how strip their clients of more money to produce more broken mess? [1]

This is all just so silly now.

[1] https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/2025/11/29/inside-t...

brazukadev• 8 months ago

Weak. Vibecoder would be much cooler

Accenture dubs 800k staff 'reinventors' amid shift to AI

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