The global IT services industry is not heading toward irrelevance in the age of artificial intelligence. Instead, it stands on the brink of another growth cycle provided companies are willing to reinvent themselves.
That was the message delivered by Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19.
Her remarks come at a time when AI-led disruption fears have weighed heavily on IT and software stocks in India and globally. The recent launch of Claude Cowork by Anthropic has intensified concerns that agentic AI systems could make traditional IT services and SaaS companies redundant.
Sweet, however, rejected that narrative.
“Humans in the lead”
“It is humans in the lead, not humans in the loop, that will determine our future,” she said, emphasising that technology adoption has historically expanded opportunity rather than eliminated it.
According to Sweet, when companies and countries embrace new technologies and use them to drive productivity and growth, they prosper. Advanced AI, she argued, should follow the same trajectory.
She cited a recent survey of C-suite executives across 20 countries, where leaders identified AI’s greatest value not in cost-cutting but in enabling growth. For CEOs, she said, the true measure of AI adoption will be the creation of new products, services and performance levels that were previously impossible.
“In a few years, if you cannot point to new products and services or new levels of performance that were not possible before, then you have not captured AI’s potential,” she noted.
Lessons from RPA
Sweet also pointed to past waves of technological anxiety, including the rise of robotic process automation. At the time, studies had warned that nearly half of US jobs could be automated.
Instead, she said, the IT services industry leveraged RPA to automate repetitive tasks while creating new roles and expanding capabilities. Companies that adopted automation freed up capital to invest in further innovation, contributing to sustained industry growth over the past decade.
Accenture itself, she highlighted, has more than doubled both its revenue and workforce during that period.
While optimistic about AI’s impact, Sweet stressed that growth is not automatic. Companies must be prepared to fundamentally rethink how they operate.
Businesses need to redesign processes built over decades and invest in reshaping their workforces, she said. Education systems must also evolve, with continuous learning replacing the traditional model of front-loaded formal education.
“Formal education is no longer the destination,” Sweet said, calling on governments to collaborate with the private sector to enable lifelong learning ecosystems.
As AI tools become more capable and agentic systems gain ground, Sweet’s central argument is clear: the future of IT services will not be determined by automation alone, but by how boldly organisations choose to reinvent themselves.