Bengaluru: Marc Carrel-Billiard, who recently visited India, serves as a senior managing director at Accenture. He heads Accenture Technology Innovation, the R&D Labs, Accenture Strategic Growth Initiatives, Accenture Studios and Accenture Ventures. In his 25-year tenure at the company, he has pioneered technology, particularly in voice recognition, knowledge-based systems, and neural networks. In an interview, Carrel-Billiard shared his views on how business leaders can harness scientific advancements and technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI, quantum computing, blockchain, metaverse, and digital twins, and India’s role in these domains. Edited excerpts:
What has been Accenture’s broad vision while dealing with emerging technologies?
As we spelt out in our Technology Vision 2023 report, there’s a revolution at every level. While companies already have a technology strategy to manage their information (IT) and operational technology (OT, which is about physical or hardware systems), the strategy needs to encompass science tech (ST), too, if enterprises want to leverage the new reality over the next 5-10 years.
Many companies are using tools such as RPA (robotic process automation) for automation work and claiming to do AI. But next generation of AI is about generalizing AI, which explores how a new category of AI, spurred on by foundation models and large language models (LLMs), is used by companies. We are also looking at multi-sensorial next-generation metaverse that is not just about vision and audio, but also haptics. One key focus area of the metaverse, will be industrial digital twins (digital replicas of physical systems).
But, how do you capture the rapid pace of evolving technologies?
Our technology vision report has a different theme every year. This year it is: When Atoms meet Bits: The foundations of our new reality. That is, while we may live in a physical world, we parallelly live in a digital world, too. We are going to see convergence of those two worlds in digital twins: everything you do will basically be replicated by a computer. For instance, instead of going to a doctor to get your heart (or any organ) examined, you will get an alert because of predictive monitoring of your digital twin —whether you are on a plane, in a car, or anywhere. Besides, the value of the metaverse is not only to buy a house next to a big star, rather, it is a continuum of digitally-enhanced worlds, realities, and business models. Our life will be powered by digital twins, whether building digital twins of refineries or airplanes using 3D scanning to anticipate failures or monitoring. People at times do not appreciate the complex system modelling that goes into building a digital twin—they see only the user interface of a digital twin like the 3D model, or AR-VR (augmented and virtual reality) experiences. However, we need a very smart AI engine to simulate that stuff. At Accenture, we have made strategic investments in this complex system modelling to simulate organs, planes, refineries, and even climate change.
What is the contribution of Accenture’s India units?
In India, we have set up a generative AI and LLM Centre of Excellence (CoE) with 1,600 employees, other than advanced technology centres. We are working with Indian Institute of Science on collaborative research projects and developing intellectual properties in next generation computing technologies that enable AI at the edge, including cloud, edge, quantum, and neuromorphic computing and sustainable software engineering. People working at our Bengaluru lab also contribute to the lab in Dublin, which specializes in life sciences.
What advice do you have for your C-suite executives?
There are different types of clients—those that are very innovative. They have the culture and mindset for innovation. There are the followers who had been innovating, but didn’t know that they had the capacity to reinvent themselves. The third comprises laggards who are not much into digital transformation, and have migrated their services on the cloud to survive. We deliver our tech vision to clients by explaining our agenda and actions.
But innovators may want to wait for new technologies to mature to get returns on their investments. Do you agree?
Yes. That’s one reason why we advise our leaders to think about the six pillars when considering generative AI, or any new tech tool. First, we advise them to dive in with a business-driven mindset, where you just need to think about the power of a technology and rethink how it can reinvent part of the business (not the company) so that you don’t have to take a big risk. Basically to have your employees and, eventually, customers to experience it. For example, car makers put the whole document of a car in a book, or online with videos. Soon, it will be delivered with the help of Generative AI, using natural language processing or speech recognition, wherein you get to talk to the car or phone to get answers. The second is people-first approach. You need to demystify technology for employees, change their mindset to make them realize that these tools will make them powerful, rather than having their activities (jobs) taken away.
The third is getting your proprietary data ready, and connect it with a mesh-like technology. Four, choose the best green platform to run your system. Five, use Responsible AI to explain how your systems work. And last, but not the least, you need to figure out what you’re doing with this data. Nothing can stop Generative AI. We must adopt it, understand it, and try to leverage it in the best possible way.
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Updated: 24 Aug 2023, 12:09 AM IST
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