Accenture Raises Fiscal Forecast With Focus On GenAI, Workforce Training

‘GenAI continues to be a catalyst for reinvention across the enterprise, and building out the data foundation necessary to capitalize on AI is an increasing part of that growth,’ says Accenture Chair and CEO Julie Sweet.

Accenture overcame a stable demand environment to grow its first fiscal quarter 2025 revenue and increase its full-year guidance on the back of an expanding emphasis on GenAI, its growing list of acquisitions, and on training its quickly growing workforce.

It was a message investors wanted to hear as they drove the company’s share prices up by over 7 percent to $372.16 per share by the end of the trading day.

Accenture Chair and CEO Julie Sweet Thursday told analysts during the company’s first fiscal quarter 2025 financial analyst conference call that said she was very pleased with Accenture’s performance in the quarter as it delivered on its strategy to position the company for strong growth in fiscal year 2025.

“Our clients continue to prioritize large-scale transformations, and we are their reinvention partner of choice, as reflected in our bookings of $18.7 billion, including 30 clients with quarterly bookings greater than $100 million,” she said.

Accenture had what Sweet called another “milestone” quarter in GenAI with $1.2 billion in bookings and about $500 million in revenue.

Accenture is responding by investing in its business and people, with $242 million invested across five acquisitions and with about 14 million training hours provided in the quarter to help bring the latest in solutions and technology to clients, provide employees with marketable skills and reinvent its services using GenAI.

“We increased our data and AI workforce to approximately 69,000, continuing progress against our goal of 80,000 by the end of fiscal year 2026,” she said. “We are proud to be recognized by Fortune as one of the world's best workplaces, jumping from No. 10 to No. 6.”

During the quarter, Accenture expanded by about 24,000 employees.

Among Accenture’s acquisitions in the first fiscal quarter were U.S.-based Award Solutions, which Sweet said expands the company’s learning offerings tailored to the unique needs of telecom network leaders, network operations, performance engineers and IT professionals; Germany-based health-care management consultancy Consus.health; Germany-based SAP-focused management and technology consulting firm Camelot Management Consultants; and Joshua Tree Group, a U.S.-based supply chain consulting firm specializing in distribution center performance.

The company expects to spend $3 billion on acquisitions for all of fiscal 2025.

Accenture’s demand environment in the quarter was similar to what the company has been seeing, Sweet said.

“Our clients are focused on reinvention, which means large-scale transformations,” she said. “We do not currently see an improvement in overall spending by our clients, particularly on smaller deals. When those market conditions improve, we will be well positioned to capitalize on them as we continue to meet the demand for the critical programs our clients are prioritizing as expected.”

Building the strong digital core required for reinvention was a strong driver of Accenture’s growth this quarter, Sweet said.

“GenAI continues to be a catalyst for reinvention across the enterprise, and building out the data foundation necessary to capitalize on AI is an increasing part of that growth,” she said. “Themes around achieving both cost efficiencies and growth continue across the demand we’re seeing. [Through] our strategy to be the reinvention partner of choice and how we are bringing together our services, our ecosystem relationships and our scaled investments in cutting-edge platforms like SynOps and GenWizard, as well as technologies like GenAI to drive value for our clients, we are helping our clients build their digital cloud core, including in the cloud, which saw double-digit growth this quarter.”

When asked by an analyst whether Accenture sees market conditions improving going forward, Sweet said that last year was a time of constrained spending, particularly on smaller deals, but since then the company has pivoted to a focus on winning more larger reinvention clients.

“The idea was to go after the demand, which is in the larger reinventions, and that that would position us to get back to strong growth in ’25 as those deals begin to layer in,” she said. “And so what you’re seeing is the result of what we’re really proud of, which was quite a bit of agility last year, that when the market changed, we changed. As you know, these are not easy deals to do quickly, and we quickly pivoted last year, went after the demand, and then put ourselves in this position. And that’s why we did underscore that the market environment has not changed. This is the result of the strategy we executed, which we’re uniquely able to do because we have all the skills and capabilities. We have the mix of consulting and managed services.”

When asked whether the upcoming change in the U.S. presidency and its focus on efficiency will have any impact on Accenture, Sweet said her company is excited because its competencies in federal are around driving efficiencies and helping keep the country secure.

“We’re working with a U.S. federal agency on securing critical infrastructure,” she said. And on changing citizen services, we work across very important agencies. And so we believe that we’re super well-positioned to continue to help the mission of the federal government to secure itself, to help citizens and to drive more efficiencies, which will be tied very much to cloud, data and AI. And what really makes us uniquely positioned is that we believe that there’s going to be an even greater appetite for taking commercial solutions to the federal government. And we are very uniquely positioned because we have strong government expertise, but we’ve got commercial and private sector solutions. We’re the leader with every major ecosystem partner. … The vast majority of what we do is mission-critical to the federal government. So we see a real opportunity to continue to partner with the new administration as we’ve partnered with all administrations.”

Accenture By The Numbers

For its first fiscal quarter 2025, which ended Nov. 30, Accenture reported revenue of $17.69 billion, up about 9 percent over the $16.22 billion the company reported for its first fiscal quarter 2024.

That included communications, media and technology revenue of $2.86 billion, up 7 percent; financial services revenue of $3.17 billion, up about 4 percent; health and public service revenue of $3.81 billion, up about 13 percent; product revenue of $5.43 billion, up about 12 percent; and resources revenue of $2.42 billion, up about 6 percent.

Of the total revenue, $9.05 billion came from consulting, up 7 percent, while $8.64 billion came from managed services, up about 11 percent.

Revenue from Accenture’s Americas business totaled $8.73 billion, up 9 percent, while GenAI new bookings totaled $1.2 billion.

Accenture also reported GAAP net income of $2.32 billion, or $3.59 per share, up from last year’s $2.01 billion, or $3.10 per share.

Looking Ahead

For its second fiscal quarter 2025, Accenture expects revenue to be in the range of $16.2 billion to $16.8 billion, up 5 percent to 9 percent over its second fiscal quarter 2024 revenue.

For all of fiscal 2025, Accenture raised its expected year-over-year revenue growth to 4 percent to 7 percent, up from its previous estimate of 3 percent to 6 percent.

Accenture also expects GAAP earnings for the year of $12.43 per share to $12.79 per share, up from its expectations of $12.55 per share to $12.91 per share. The new estimates would represent growth of 9 percent to 12 percent over fiscal year 2024.