Jason Mlicki (03:14.954)
So Jeff, I saw a startling number today as I was preparing for our discussion with our guest. 183%. 183 % increase in business disruption since 2019. This is according to the Accenture Pulse of Change Index. I just find that number to be staggering. We’re talking about the likelihood of disruption for virtually any company, I guess.

over the last five years has nearly doubled. That’s essentially what the landscape you are operating in if you are the leader of virtually any company, really, large or small. think that’s other piece of this research that’s so interesting. does that number shock you or were you just like, yeah, I thought it’d be higher?

Jeff McKay (04:07.637)
It is a shocking number, but when put into context of COVID, which I assume was probably a big catalyst in that number, it probably isn’t as shocking. I wonder what the number looks like from 2020 to 2022 and 2022 to 2024 and then 2024 to 2025.

Because we went, you know, from everybody moving to the cloud and virtual to now AI. So I don’t know. Yeah. That number is probably going to stay up there. I would think.

Jason Mlicki (04:36.232)
Yeah, yeah, it’s already.

Jason Mlicki (04:48.156)
And maybe it keeps climbing. all right, well, let’s introduce our guest because he’s going to talk to us about this. So with us today is Francis Hinderman. Francis is the global managing director of Accenture Research. Accenture Research identifies and participates game-changing business, market, and technology trends through provocative thought leadership. His team of 300 researchers based in 20 countries partners with world-class organizations and academia to discover innovative solutions for clients.

Accenture Research produces more than 100 thought leadership research reports a year on priority topics selected by Accenture and its clients. So Francis, thank you for joining the show. We’re welcoming you here. We’re so excited to have you to talk about the research underpinning reinvention. And that’s actually where that data point came from, was from one of your reports on that. So welcome, Francis.

Francis Hintermann (05:43.086)
Thank you for inviting me.

Jason Mlicki (05:45.93)
Um, so, know, I kind of put you on the spot when I asked you to do this, I said, Hey, Francis, can you come on and give us a peek inside reinvention? Um, which was kind of a vague request, but I, you know, as you know, Jeff and I did an episode about reinvention. We both are really just kind of really impressed with what’s come out of Accenture in the last, I guess, 18 months as it relates to this. And, you know, you know,

Francis and I are connected through Bob Bade. And when Bob and I were running the Thought Leadership Conference, we always used to talk about the sizzle and the steak, idea of like thought leadership. The steak is the thought leadership research and the sizzle is the way you package it. And I feel like Accenture, when we did our discussion about reinvention, we felt like you hit it out of the park because you have the steak and you have the sizzle. So I really want to dig into the steak today. So let’s just talk about reinvention. guess to start out, the thing that I…

that jumps out to me is like, what is reinvention and how is it different than digital transformation? like, why is it a new thing? I guess is sort of maybe the starting point for me. Like, you know, how did we get to that point? That’s my question.

Francis Hintermann (06:54.926)
Yeah, it’s very good question because we’ve been through a series of changes in the past 20 years, right? And some of them triggered by technology changes. And so you may wonder, yeah, it’s just another technology change. We do not believe that. We believe it’s a full reinvention, which is at play right now. And one of the core reasons for that is that AI, generative AI, and now we call it

as well physical AI, so putting together that we call that advanced AI, that’s transforming all the functions of all organizations. When we used to look at previous waves of technology changes, we always had a kind of usual curve of adoption where you have on top the more technology intense industries like

technology industry itself, like the media industry, like the banking industry, and then down to the health industry and public services and education. This time around, we see something completely different. We’ve seen a level of adoption which is growing in all the industries, including, by the way, education. I happen to be myself an adjunct professor at a university and

That’s the first time that I see really universities adopting this new technology and wondering what they’re going to do with it because it’s changing the way you teach, it’s changing the way students learn and so on and so forth to an extent that was not the case with previous changes. So when we look at our clients and when we work on what that means for our clients, what we see is that they realize very rapidly

that this technology change is impacting all their functions. And that’s why they have to reinvent themselves. And we have to reinvent ourselves as well on the way, of course.

Jason Mlicki (08:57.128)
So that disruption that I talked about that’s in your report, you’re seeing that cut across virtually all industries and companies. It’s not siloed. So the reinvention is occurring everywhere to some extent.

Francis Hintermann (09:12.808)
For a very simple reason that we, all the three of us, experience is that that is impacting all the knowledge work. It’s not the kind of disruption that is, you know, ring-fenced in the technology department or in the technology industry. It is impacting everyone, the different degrees, different speed, but it is impacting everyone. And that’s what we’ve been studying since the beginning of this

a new change and we’ve seen that more and more across all industries and you sometimes people look at what we call the horizontal changes, transversal function and fair enough that’s where it starts. You know it starts with the marketing and sales function, it starts with the technology function itself, it starts with knowledge management within companies. Then the question is when is it going to be what we call verticalized, so looking at the

core value chain of the different industries. And we see that happening already in many industries. And that’s very different from previous changes. If you think about payments in banking, if you think about research and development in life sciences, if you think about underwriting in insurance, if you think about manufacturing in automotive, and so on and so forth, we can see the growing impact of these change on the way that functions operate.

That’s very different from previous waves of technology changes.

Jason Mlicki (10:45.652)
think what’s so compelling about your research, by the way, that’s what I’d like to get underneath a little bit more, is it’s not just like, we did a survey of 400 IT services buyers or whatever. You really kind of went multi-dimensional here. You went across years and you pulled from your client work, from original primer, you pulled from a lot of places.

to really get underneath reinvention and what it is. So can you just tell us a little bit more about kind of the research underlying reinvention, kind of how it was done and how you thought about it, I guess, maybe conceptually.

Francis Hintermann (11:26.062)
Well, it’s very good questions, of course. The first point is that we thought about it because we saw it happening to ourselves. our CEO, Julie Sweet, being the main spokesperson for our Fort Learship, she comes back from client meetings on a regular basis saying that the first question she has from clients when we present Fort Learship is about what are you doing yourself?

what is happening with your company? Because Accenture being a large company, the odds are that if that change we manage to implement it on ourselves, there is a fairly high probability that it can be implemented with success to our clients. So that’s the first thing we look at is we look at ourselves. How does it change the way we operate ourselves? So that was a core part of the trigger for the reason why we’ve been undertaking this research. The second point is that

As a large consultancy, we believe we’re part of the leaders in implementing AI and then generative AI with our clients around the world. So at some point in time, we wanted to learn the lessons from all these projects around the world. And that’s how we came to publish a new Fort Lear ship, something like nine months ago that we call making reinvention real, which was about the lessons learned.

from the first 2000 projects in which we implemented generative AI with clients. And when it comes to the research itself, you mentioned a survey of barriers, of course, we still do that. And on top of that, we implement AI and generative AI to our own work as well. there are some more generative AI driven research techniques that we implement in order to feed

our research, whether it is the wide space analysis, whether it is the data collection with our own AI tools that we develop internally and whether it is in the editorial phase as well. So it’s the whole combination of all these different inputs and all these different dimensions that led to the publication that you mentioned.

Jason Mlicki (13:46.952)
And in that work, you pulled it, you did the classic thought leadership research thing, right? You pull it out a slice and you said, okay, these are the people that are doing this bed study and you name them the reinventers with Jeff and I love, by the way, we love this idea of like kind of saying, Hey, there’s a set of companies that are reinventers. how can you tell us a little bit about how you can, it’s like, describe it as like, you know, you got this soup, right? You put all this stuff in the soup from all these different sources.

And now got to figure out like who are the leaders here. And it’s easy when it’s just a single silo, it’s just a survey. But when you’ve got all these different moving parts, how did you determine like who are the ones that are maybe at furthest along in the journey?

Francis Hintermann (14:31.968)
Yeah, no, no, first of all, thank you for your, your image of a soup. I’m not sure I will use it myself, but to stay on the analogy, one thing is absolutely true. I’m absolutely convinced that the research work incorporates more and more ingredients for the research that we prepare. Gone are the days where you could

you know, launch one survey and say out of one survey, we know the future of a company or industry or so on and so forth. I think it’s really the collection of different pieces that then can build what we believe is going to be the path forward for companies. And that’s the way we’ve been doing it in this case. And looking at all the ingredients.

we looked at what are the organizations which are already changing their processes with AI and generative AI within these processes. So not only as I was mentioning earlier on one or two functions which are transversal in the organization, but really all the functions including the core of a value chain of the organization. So that was the first point.

And the second point was about what is the impact on the financial results of a company, on the P &L, on the top line, on the bottom line, and the way we define reinventers, those which are first of all investing at scale across multiple functions in the company, and second, already reaping the rewards of this investment.

through an accelerated revenue growth and a higher bottom line. So that’s in a sense the way that we’ve done it with all the ingredients that we were mentioning earlier.

Jeff McKay (16:30.9)
So Francis, I’m curious, how did reinvention become the core of Accenture’s go-to-market strategy? You mentioned that the CEO brought back the big question from clients, but to make it permeate every part of Accenture, how was that done?

Francis Hintermann (16:54.382)
Yeah, it’s it’s thank you for your question. It’s a it’s a very defining moment for us. Of course, in the past, we had different positioning. Some of our auditors may of our audience may remember high performance business 15, 20 years ago. We believe that reinvention is absolutely critical for us at this point in time. And as I was mentioning before, we always look at

what is happening to us and how we reinvent ourselves, how we have to reinvent ourselves and the way we work. And as we were looking at multiple industries, we came to the conclusion that it was really the path forward for industries and for our clients. We work with the largest organizations in the world and that at some point in time, it’s not about only

quote unquote, a transformation that is going to impact one or two function, but it’s really across the board that companies have to reinvent their processes. And we speak about the work that is done by companies. We speak about the workforce of the workers, the employees, how they’re going to be impacted, how they’re going to be augmented, how they’re going to work with AI themselves. And we speak about the workbench. a sense, the workbench is about

the different technologies that you can leverage in order to reinvent the processes with which company work. And you know, there is this curve that we’ve studied many times in the past that is even more true now that it was in the past where we compare the evolution of a performance of technologies, which is evolving exponentially and the evolution of

business processes and the performance of business processes within organizations. And what we can see right now is that the gap is increasing in between what is theoretically feasible with technologies and what is actually implemented by companies. And reducing that gap that we call the value gap is a way to create more value for organizations. But in order to do that,

Jason Mlicki (19:00.681)
you

Francis Hintermann (19:10.89)
It means reinventing the processes. It’s not about implementing a chat bot to speak with your consumers and implementing some software engineering within your technology department that is going to give you the additional growth of revenues that companies aim to get or the additional growth of profitability that companies aim to get. It’s really the full reinvention of their processes.

That’s how we came to this idea of free invention.

Jeff McKay (19:44.627)
I can’t wait till Accenture reinvents government. Get in there, reinvent government.

Jason Mlicki (19:55.466)
only dream, right? You only hope. It’s funny, I opened this podcast with that 183 % increase in business disruption. I kind of feel like it comes full circle to that. And I didn’t even ask you to comment on that. And I guess I’m asking you to do that. Are you seeing that sort of business disruption, that pulse of change index? Is it accelerating?

Francis Hintermann (20:19.054)
Yeah, and that’s the paradox of it. that, absolutely, it’s the paradox of it is that Jeff was mentioning earlier that COVID has probably accelerated the change. Absolutely right, Jeff, of course. We’ve seen that amount of acceleration in 2020 when COVID happened in most of the countries where we operate. The interesting fact is that actually it has changed, has not decelerated since. It has keeps

keeps accelerating. And why is that? It’s because when we look at change, we look at the combination of different factors. And of course, we look at technology and what happened with generative AI, AI speaking about it today, and we can see it’s accelerating. It’s not only that. It’s about the dimension of geopolitics, for instance. Think about all the geopolitics changes which happened since 2020 and keeps happening.

If you’re a company based in the US, which is exporting, if you’re a company based in Europe, if you’re a company based in Asia-Pacific, regardless of where you’re located, we can see that geopolitics is impacting the way that companies operate more and more, right? And it’s not only geopolitics and technologies as well, consumers, the way that consumers buy is changing. We just released a few weeks ago,

our latest holiday shopping survey, and we can see that the behavior of consumers keeps changing. And more and more, actually, in America, for Thanksgiving, consumers were using AI engines to get the best deal. And get the best deal was actually counterintuitive in the sense that you think it’s always looking for cheaper options, and that’s relatively easy to do. But with agents,

You can then have a diversity of choices and you do not necessarily look for the cheaper option, but for a combination of criteria that an agent can get for you and so on and so forth. on the consumer end, we can see all these changes happening as well. And it’s happening on the employee side as well. We know that the employee’s expectation and have changed and keeps changing, right? As we speak about the return to office in America and we can see that

Francis Hintermann (22:37.836)
Some it’s happening, some is not happening at the speed that some companies expect, and so on and so forth. And that’s not even mentioning the impact of climate change in some regions. And when you aggregate all these elements of change, you can actually see that the change is not decelerating. It is actually continuously accelerating. And that’s what companies face today.

Jason Mlicki (23:05.002)
Yeah, it’s funny. I hadn’t thought about it. You mentioned employees and change. And I’ve always felt like, know, for so many years, the narrative has been, you know, with virtually any type of organizational change that employees are resistant to change. And I wonder if we’re flipping, if we have a younger workforce that has resistance to stability, that is like, if this place isn’t changing fast enough, I’m going somewhere else, because I’m not going to wait around for you guys to catch up because you’re just not doing it.

Francis Hintermann (23:32.686)
Yeah, no, it’s a very interesting point that you mentioned, Jason, and to me that makes me think of shadow AI, you know, in the sense that shadow AI is the gap we can see between what is the official use of generative AI in companies and what is the actual real use. And we’ve been measuring that gap. And in the latest survey we’ve been doing on that a few months ago, we’ve seen a gap of 10 points, meaning that

There are 10 % of employees who are using AI tools in their professional life that are not created by the companies. the companies, the leaders, in some cases are not even aware of it. But because people are using these generative AI tools in their private life, guess what? They’re using them in their professional life as well. And that’s real challenge, as we know, for companies for.

legal reason, IP reason, security reasons and so on and so forth. But that’s the type of change which is happening on the ground right now.

Jason Mlicki (24:37.086)
Yeah, fascinating.

Jeff McKay (24:37.577)
Yeah. It’s like instead of BYO, what was it? BYO bring your own own, bring your own. I can’t remember what that was. I was going to say BYOB, bring your own beer. but now it’s bring your own AI, to work. It’s crazy.

Jason Mlicki (24:44.052)
BYOD, bring your own device.

Francis Hintermann (24:57.582)
Yeah, it’s part of the changes which are happening and that companies have got to address and that we’re supporting them to address, of course, because it’s a way to, for me, it’s a very, it’s one of the surprises of the research we’ve been undertaking about these impacts of AI and generative AI is that we’ve been speaking about democratization of the adoption of AI and sometimes the

the term democratization is not understood in the right way. But the point is that more and more innovation is happening on the ground because people have got access to tools that they could not access before. They can access them as consumers and they use them and they use them in the private life and they use them then in the professional life. And it’s part of the changes in companies to catch up with that and make sure that

people as workers can use the relevant tools with the relevant legal protection, security protection, and so on and so forth. But the appetite for innovation is there on the ground. And as you were mentioning, we used to say lots of employees are resistant to change. Not so much from some of the surveys we do of employees. We can see that the appetite to actually use the high tools at work is pretty high. And sometimes it’s

The gap is in between the expectation of employees and what the company is providing in terms of training, in terms of tools. And that’s where the gap is right now.

Jason Mlicki (26:35.124)
Yeah, the gap is the opposite of the gap it had been. So go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff McKay (26:40.777)
Yeah, I want to shift a little. I want to talk about how you’ve kind of operationalized this research. In the research report that we broke down, there was talk of AI studios and industry specific diagnostics and some other tools that are being used. Can you tell us a little bit about how those came to fruition, how they work?

Jason Mlicki (27:00.337)
you

Jeff McKay (27:09.223)
and how they are working.

Francis Hintermann (27:11.566)
Yeah, no, absolutely. The point for us is that when we get into innovation and in this case, reinvention of processes for our clients, we see it as reinventing with them. And that’s the reason why we’ve developed these studios around the world where we can welcome companies, organizations in our own offices where they can use all the

the tools, all the different AI artifacts that we can produce with them and have access to our best experts. And in that world where we operate, where so much is happening online, we believe that in some circumstances, it is valuable for our clients and for ourselves to actually operate in the same room for a specific amount of time. And that’s what we do.

how we reinvent processes and help companies to change this way in these studios.

Jeff McKay (28:19.699)
I’m curious, Jason and I have had a couple of episodes on what I call the IC Triad, which is the sales, marketing, and delivery within professional services firms and how those functions are reinventing themselves because the walls between them are really starting to fall because of AI.

Jason Mlicki (28:34.399)
Yeah.

Jeff McKay (28:47.219)
I’d be curious to know is in your world of research, how are those walls kind of falling between sales and marketing and taking what you’ve created to market or what they’re bringing from the market back into research?

Francis Hintermann (29:05.102)
It’s a very good point. And actually, up to the point that we’ve been leveraging the change that is happening in our own marketing function as a pilot of a change that we are implementing within Accenture across the board. And we developed a case study out of it that we’ve been presenting to our clients. We have this partnership that you may have heard about with NVIDIA.

And so we brought in some of the Nvidia capability to actually reinvent with them our own marketing function. And we have a new tool that we call AI refinery that we are now marketing to our clients that we’ve been developing internally to reinvent the world marketing function and putting a lot of generative AI, of course, it, which has helped

our colleagues in marketing to increase their productivity significantly and as well be more creative in some of the function where it is required.

Jason Mlicki (30:16.97)
So one of the challenges, as you know, I mean, you’re a much more seasoned researcher than I am, is that I always feel like when we’re doing research, we’re sort of looking backwards a little bit. We’re looking back at how companies got to where they are now. And the question is always like, what’s it going to look like going forward? So guess I’m just kind of, this is more of an intuition question from you. Based on all the research you’ve done around this and you’re looking at all

what’s going on and how the reinventers are outperforming their peers. What do you think is gonna be the point? What’s the separation for the next three years out? you know, how are the reinventers gonna stay the reinventers and not become, you know, the disrupted next to some new peers that are taking their lunch? You know, what do you think is gonna be the most important, you know, piece of reinvention over the next few years?

Francis Hintermann (31:11.576)
Yeah, so thank you. It’s kind of you to mention that I am more experienced than you. I don’t know if I’m more experienced than you, Jason.

Jason Mlicki (31:17.684)
Well, I know you run an incredible team. I know you do great research. so that’s why I trust your judgment so much on Sunday Rebels.

Francis Hintermann (31:25.4)
So I can.

I can still share my intuition on it. Let’s say that as a background, our belief is that we are in this era where now we need to look at reinvention as being continuous in the sense that we’ve been, and you were mentioning some previous waves of technology change where it was a one-off. Implement ASAP in that

finance function and it’s done. Implement Salesforce in know, sales function and it’s done. What we’re looking at right now is completely different in the sense that, as we’re mentioning earlier, technologies are still evolving and still getting better in terms of performance. And that means that from our organization point of view, for us, the reinvention is not a one-off, but it’s continuous. And also if…

You ask me about the next three years, my intuition based on that is that the reinvention will continue and the way it will be in three years will be different from the way that we are today, definitely. And there will be more complexity, more technologies. Think about robotics and humanoid robotics. We know that there is a surge right now on robotics and what we call physical AI. And more and more we’re going to have to embed.

physical AI in processes on top of digital agent, will be physical agents on top of that. That’s going to make processes much more complex in many companies and industries. Think about space tech, right? Everybody’s speaking about space tech as something happening outside company processes. We actually believe it’s time to incorporate within some processes in some industries how they can actually use space

Francis Hintermann (33:26.412)
data into their own processes. And for us, that’s one of these emerging changes that we’re going to see more in the next three years. And that’s not even mentioning quantum computing, right, which is, according to experts in technologies in my own company, the next big wave that is coming down the road. So if you aggregate all these changes, some of them may be more disruptive than others, of course, but our belief is that it’s really not the time to think of

know, reinvention as a one-off and think of it as a continuous process, which means that you’ve got to have this mindset, first of all, not tell people that, you know, you have to go for this implementation of AI agents and that’s done because it will not be done. It will be part of a journey and put in place the processes to enable employees to, you know, benefit from it and contribute to it. As I was mentioning earlier about this,

democratization of IT that we’re living through, we can see a fabulous amount of innovation on the ground. And it’s important for companies to leverage that as they continuously re-entend the

Jason Mlicki (34:36.168)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (34:39.506)
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. It’s almost as if you’re describing a reality. I love where you went. It’s like, migrated to the cloud. Well, that’s done. But this is different. This is more like, it’s more like continuous improvement. It’s more like we’ve got to kind of adopt this mindset that disruption is going to continue to accelerate. And we have to constantly be thinking about how we reinvent ourselves.

to be relevant and thrive in this new reality, whatever that new reality might be as the reality seems to change quickly. So yeah, no, I love that. Jeff, what have we missed while we have Francis before we lose him? What have we not asked Francis that we should have asked him?

Jason Mlicki (35:26.878)
He always has a good question at the end that I have overlooked.

Jeff McKay (35:28.987)
Hahaha

I wanted to ask you, the case study on Accenture itself and its reinvention of its marketing, is that in a public domain that we can share with our listeners?

Francis Hintermann (35:45.39)
Absolutely, absolutely yes. I’m happy to share it with you.

Jeff McKay (35:47.571)
All right, I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. OK, good. So.

Jason Mlicki (35:53.502)
Yeah, I hadn’t seen that. I’m excited to read it.

Jeff McKay (35:57.107)
Yeah. So what’s next around reinvention and how you’re going to marketing? Anybody who’s watching football games has seen the reinvention ads and I mean, it’s everywhere. But what’s next? Can you share with us?

Francis Hintermann (36:15.81)
Yeah, what’s next for us is really the way that companies put people at the center of their reinvention. And as I was mentioning earlier on, the way we look at companies reinventing their talent engine in terms of not only recruitment, but the way you equip employees, the way you enable them to innovate, the way you enable them to learn with

these AI agents. just published a research that we call co-learning, which is all about the way that people can learn from technology, can learn from these agents, and can actually help the technology, help the agents to learn from them in order to become more efficient and more creative. So that’s this co-learning concept where you learn from technology, but the technology is learning from you as well. And that’s a new way to behave with technology.

And that’s why it’s really we entering this era where companies will reinvent their talent engine, will equip or will have to equip their employees. And that’s why we invested in this company called Udacity, which is there to help people to learn about AI, about all these changes and equip them because we’re convinced that these changes are happening at.

all levels in the organization, including at C level, including with CEOs. And we wanted to provide the services to them so that they can benefit from these changes as well. that’s what in our view is coming, Jeff, is really it’s kind of broad-based change that is not limited in a silo of the marketing function or the IT function, but really broad-based across organization. And that

We have not seen that in many organizations yet, and for us that’s what’s coming in the next three years.

Jason Mlicki (38:09.162)
You know, a companion question for you to close on is like, you know, what’s your general sense? Like, are you generally optimistic about about where we are or maybe more pessimistic, given everything you’ve seen as it relates to AI? Right. I there’s so much fear around AI. What’s your sense about it?

Francis Hintermann (38:28.2)
I’m extremely optimistic. So I’m part of the optimistic ones, Jason, because I think the amount of opportunities for organization, for companies to create value is truly unprecedented. And of course, that means that there are some changes to address and it’s important to embed people in that change at different levels of the organization.

But to me, in terms of the opportunities, absolutely there. And we can see that on the ground with the organization we work with, that the appetite to say this opportunity is enormous. So that’s why I’m absolutely optimistic about the next three years.

Jason Mlicki (39:13.268)
That’s great. Thank you. Well, Francis, thank you for joining us. Francis is the Global Managing Director of Accenture Research. And he is the, I’m maybe putting this label on you, the architect of the research underpinning reinvention. Thank you so much for joining us. I really, really enjoyed kind of hearing how you went about this. I think Jeff and I both said this. I do think it’s phenomenal work. I think that…

everything underlying reinvention and everything in the market around reinvention is just sort of Accenture at its finest in terms of being one of, think, one of the strongest sort of marketers in the world in professional services. So great work. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate it.

Francis Hintermann (40:02.136)
Thank you very much.