NVIDIA and Accenture just announced a powerful AI partnership. Accenture, which was originally part of Arthur Anderson, has a solid reputation as a consulting specialist. It has recently pivoted hard to AI and is moving to address the massive opportunity for AI consulting and implementation planning and execution by partnering with NVIDIA. Wrapping up a series of NVIDIA offerings, including NVIDIA AI Foundry, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Accelerated computing, the combination of the two firms creates what may be the most powerful AI consultancy yet launched.
Let’s talk about why this partnership leads the rest.
NVIDIA’s AI Leadership
If you look at the proliferation of successful AI deployments from a variety of vendors, they all have one thing in common and that is a close relationship with NVIDIA AI technology. While NVIDIA may not have created as big a splash as IBM initially did with Watson and Microsoft eventually did with Copilot+, it is the technology provider that eventually enhanced IBM’s offering and made the Microsoft effort possible given it provided OpenAI, which is at the heart of the Microsoft effort, the needed hardware and software technology that enabled the OpenAI platform.
While NVIDIA didn’t have the same visibility as IBM Watson did in the early 2000s, it was working furiously on this technology back then. While its success last year seemed sudden, it actually represented decades of expensive and largely unrewarded (until recently) AI development efforts.
Generally, any successful AI deployment today has NVIDIA at its heart. AMD and Intel are increasing their own capabilities, but NVIDIA remains comfortably in the lead thanks to its first-mover advantages, which is something that Accenture clearly saw when forming this comprehensive AI partnership.
Omniverse: A Key Differentiator
While it isn’t unusual to see a services entity embrace NVIDIA technology, the one part that is unusual is Omniverse, NVIDIA’s market-leading simulation platform that was initially created to assist with training autonomous vehicles. This platform, which remains largely unmatched in the market, is not being used to train automated factories and robotics, both critical parts of the industrial revolution we are now experiencing.
Omniverse has been used heavily by a number of companies in a variety of industries who are pivoting hard to robotics and AI, and it provides a relatively safe and inexpensive way to simulate what a site or solution would look like once completed, saving massive amounts of funds that would have otherwise been wasted on unnecessary and relatively unsafe real-world testing.
By emphasizing Omniverse, Accenture is showcasing its deep understanding of the potential for AI and how best to utilize AI safely.
Accenture’s Commitment
Accenture is spinning up a significant AI effort with 30K professionals serving 57K data and AI practitioners to provide a large suite of comprehensive services across its customers’ SaaS ecosystems. The demand is so great that even these massive staffing numbers may not be adequate to address it, but Accenture appears to be pulling out all the stops in order to create a market-leading AI service that should prevent the kind of failures the market has been seeing with AI deployments to date.
And what makes this particularly powerful is that NVIDIA is tied at the hip to Accenture for this effort providing a significant competitive advantage for this blended partnership service. Initial results of using this service are reported to be up to a 35% reduction in manual steps, immediate 6% cost savings, and, depending on effort, up to a 55% improvement in time-to-market for the completed effort.
In short, this service is proving itself to be better, faster and cheaper than non-AI alternatives and likely AI services from other providers.
Wrapping Up:
NVIDIA and Accenture are partnering to create a significant AI effort that is well staffed and well timed to address the massive ramp up in AI interest. In addition, given the high percentage of recent failed AI efforts, the express use of simulation capabilities using NVIDIA Omniverse coupled with NVIDIA’s other services and Accenture’s massive staffing should assure this joint AI deployment and consulting effort’s success.
Given only 10% of companies (Accenture’s numbers) have successfully deployed AI to date, this effort has an impressive revenue upside as companies gravitate from companies throwing technology at the market to efforts like this one that are run and staffed by people who are experienced with AI and know what they are doing.
