Accenture Retrains Its Workers as Technology Upends Their Jobs

Accenture has pledged to retrain nearly every one of its workers who is at risk of losing a job to automation, reports the Wall Street Journal . The consulting and outsourcing giant is using a large portion of the nearly $1 billion the firm spends on training each year. Accenture has invested in counselors and specialists to assist in matching newly trained employees to new assignments. Thousands of Accenture employees have already completed retraining and moved into new roles. Some employees, though, decided they did not want to learn a new job and opted to leave the company. Evidence suggests many businesses and investors see automation as creating shareholder value largely by reducing labor costs. Some 74 percent of executives in 2017 said they planned to use artificial intelligence to automate various tasks over the next three years, according to Accenture's research. Only 3 percent said they were going to significantly increase their investment in training workers over that period.