Accenture warns 90% of companies aren’t seeing a profit boost from AI – the productivity gap is widening
Almost nine out of ten companies are yet to see a financial benefit from artificial intelligence, despite a three-fold increase in workplace usage over the past two years, according to the head of the world’s largest consultancy in Britain and Ireland.
Matt Prebble, chief executive of Accenture UK and Ireland, said the disconnect between enthusiastic adoption and measurable return is now one of the most important questions facing boards on both sides of the Atlantic.
“In the last two years, we’ve seen three times as many people using AI in the workplace, but that individual productivity … that doesn’t actually translate to the actual performance of the company,” he said. His decision comes in line with new research by Accenture which shows that only one in ten UK organizations have successfully scaled their core business technology.
According to Prebble, the failure to extract value is rooted in companies treating AI as a bolt-on instead of reshaping the way they work “across people, process and technology”.
“We found that one out of ten companies is starting to get production to the end, but on the other hand, 90 percent of companies are not doing that,” he said. He remained confident, however, that AI will still have a “material impact” on businesses that are ready to show “confidence and willingness to reinvent” the way they work, with technology at the center of the redesign.
His warning comes at a time when CEOs and chief financial officers are sharpening their pencils on AI budgets. Businesses are increasingly asking whether the calculations they pour into AI tokens, the basic units used by large language models to learn, remember and generate content, deliver a secure return. The growing skepticism reflects a broader pattern of stagnant adoption in large enterprises as skepticism grows about the return of AI.
Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s chief operating officer, admitted last week that the ride-hailing and delivery group had yet to see any productivity boost related to the increased use of AI tokens. “That link isn’t there yet, is it?” he said. In March, Uber announced its annual budget for “agent”, or autonomous, AI, and the link between the large spending of tokens and useful features for consumers is still not convincing.
Microsoft has reportedly told some of its employees to switch to their internal model rather than other methods, in an effort to rein in costs. According to Axios, one unnamed company spent $500 million in one month on Anthropic’s Claude site after it left the workforce empty.
Rising cost pressures have strengthened critics of the sector’s overinvestment cycle. A widely cited MIT study reported by Fortune found that 95 percent of AI companies’ production pilots were failing to generate measurable returns, prompting renewed warnings of possible adjustments to the business models of the industry’s leading players.
Cultural storms are also building. Pope Leo has criticized the AI industry and called for stricter regulations, while graduates of several US colleges have encouraged pro-tech speakers. Prebble admitted that AI was suffering from a “mini-product crisis” in the West, which was “very different in Asia”, with concerns about job losses and the speed of change clouding the picture.
“You’ve seen leaders in the market talking about the removal of jobs and giving headlines about the impact of those who have completed their degrees or those who will graduate, which I think has created fear there,” he said.
He emphasized, however, that equating greater AI adoption with fewer jobs overall shows a “minimum view” of productivity. “If we continue in this cycle … things will be done differently. So there will be different skills and different skills required,” he added. “There are always those waves of technological change that come and it’s true that they always create new job opportunities and over time those job opportunities outstrip the previous job.”
For all the gloom over returns, Prebble argued that Britain still has time to turn AI into a national growth story. The UK may have largely missed out on the spoils of building an AI infrastructure, but he believes there is a credible way to exploit the application layer by playing to Britain’s strengths in life sciences and professional services. That view is in line with separate research by HSBC which suggests that AI adoption could unlock £105bn of revenue for medium-sized UK companies by 2030.
“If we can restore our development so that we can increase that across the country and around the world, we have great opportunities,” said Prebble.
Accenture has begun rebranding its 800,000 employees as innovators, a label Prebble said reflects the growth of the group advising clients on how to reshape their working models in the AI era. Last year the giant restructured its business, folding strategy, consulting, art, technology and operations into a single division called “regeneration services”. Earlier this year, reports emerged that the Dublin-based company had been monitoring how its employees were using AI tools as part of promotion decisions.
For now, however, the message from Britain’s biggest product manager for professional services consulting is ambiguous: the productivity revolution promised by AI is, for many UK plcs, still a promise rather than a payslip.
