From our Chair and CEO

Fiscal year 2024 demonstrated the resilience and agility of our business model, the power of our scale and reinvention in action.

The year was marked by a challenging market environment, and we rapidly shifted to meet our clients’ need for large reinventions—using technology, data, AI and new ways of working—that utilize the scale and depth of our expertise and ecosystem relationships.

Our clients turn to us for our unique combination of services across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song. Our strategists and deep industry, functional, customer and technology consultants work hand-in-hand with our clients and across services to shape and deliver these reinventions. Our managed services, our ability to harness AI to close talent gaps and our strong expertise across talent, change, HR and organizations differentiate all our services.

At the same time, we saw AI emerge as the new digital. Like digital, AI is both a technology and a new way of working, and its full value will only come from strategies built on both productivity and growth. And we believe it will be used in every part of the enterprise. We also believe the introduction of generative AI signifies a transformative era that is set to drive growth for us and our clients.

As part of this, data will continue to be essential to building the digital core. We expect that the work to prepare enterprise data, which is the fuel for AI, will be an increasing part of our growth.

To accomplish reinvention and take advantage of AI, businesses need to focus on talent, which includes accessing the best people at the right time, place and cost; being a talent creator to keep people market-relevant; and unlocking the potential of talent. We see talent as a top C-suite agenda item.

Our launch of LearnVantage, which provides comprehensive technology learning and training services, helps our clients reskill and upskill their people so they can be a talent creator.

Delivering results

Our success is reflected in our full fiscal year bookings of $81 billion, representing 14% growth in local currency, with a record 125 quarterly client bookings of more than $100 million for the year, 19 more than last year, demonstrating our agility to shift to meet our clients’ need for large reinventions.

We are proud to now have 310 Diamond clients, our largest client relationships, an increase of 10 from last year, expanding our base of deep client relationships and the vantage point we have on the market.

We delivered revenues of $65 billion for the year, representing 2% growth in local currency while continuing to take market share on a rolling four quarter basis, against our basket of our closest global publicly traded competitors, which is how we calculate market share. We expanded adjusted operating margin by 10 basis points and delivered adjusted EPS growth of 2%, while continuing to significantly invest in our business and our people with $6.6 billion in strategic acquisitions, $1.2 billion in research and development and $1.1 billion in learning and development.

We generated free cash flow of $8.6 billion, defined as operating cash flow of $9.1 billion net of property and equipment additions of $517 million, allowing us to return $7.8 billion of cash to shareholders. We completed the business optimization actions we announced in March 2023 to reduce structural costs and create greater resilience.

In recognition of our strong brand, we were proud to earn the No. 20 position on Kantar BrandZ’s prestigious Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands list—our highest rank to date with an 11% increase in brand value to $81.9 billion. We also earned the top spot on the World’s Best Management Consulting Firms list by Forbes.

We continue to advance our talent strategy to attract, retain and inspire outstanding people. We also continue to work toward carbon emissions reduction and removals, and we invest in our communities to help them thrive and provide our people with vibrant places to work and live.

Read on for more detail.

Caring for our people and our communities

We invested in our people to continue to develop their market-relevant skills and to help us reinvent our services using generative AI. Our people had approximately 44 million training hours this year, representing an increase of 10% compared with fiscal 2023, predominantly due to generative AI training. We also continue to steadily increase our Data & AI workforce, reaching approximately 57,000 skilled Data & AI practitioners at the end of fiscal 2024, against our goal of doubling our Data & AI workforce to 80,000 by the end of fiscal 2026.

We promoted approximately 97,000 people around the world in fiscal 2024, reflecting our commitment to providing vibrant career paths.

Over the next decade, our talent strategy is to have the best access to talent and to unlock our people’s potential through, among other actions, making our people feel they are “net better off” for working at Accenture and feel they belong and can thrive. In addition, our leadership in the market requires that we lead in innovation, which requires access to broad pools of talent that provide the variety of perspectives, observations and insights that are essential to continuously innovate. These strategies benefit from a diverse and inclusive workplace, and they earned us the No. 1 spot on the FTSE (formerly Refinitiv) Diversity and Inclusion Index for the fifth time in seven years.

We continue to build on our strong commitment to environmental sustainability in how we operate our business. During fiscal 2024, we received SBTi approval for new net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets aligned with SBTi's Corporate Net-Zero Standard.

Our long-term growth depends on thriving communities. We completed our inaugural Season of Impact, with over 81,000 of our people participating in over 400 unique activities supporting social and environmental causes—volunteering, eco-action, social innovation and giving—across our local offices and online. Overall, Accenture people performed 75,000 hours of service.

Living our Leadership Essentials

At the heart of our work are our Leadership Essentials, which foster our clients’ trust as we help them both navigate tough macros and reinvent. Our Leadership Essentials are critical to our long-term resilience and growth, as they set the standard for what we expect of our leaders at all levels, and they enable us to successfully create more 360° value.

• Always do the right thing, in every decision and action;

• Lead with excellence, confidence and humility, as demonstrated by being a learner, building great teams and being naturally collaborative;

• Exemplify client-centricity and a commitment to client value creation;

• Act as a true partner, to each other, our clients, our ecosystem and our communities—committed to shared success;

• Care deeply for all our people to help them achieve their aspirations professionally and personally;

• Live our unwavering commitment to inclusion, diversity and equality, as demonstrated by personal impact and overall results;

• Have the courage to change and the ability to bring our people along the journey; and

• Actively innovate—seeking new answers, applying a tech, AI and data first mindset, looking internally across Accenture and outside—to partners, competitors, startups, clients, academia and analysts—to learn, respectfully challenge our assumptions and apply the innovation, and cultivate and reward our people for doing the same.

Thank you

To our clients, shareholders, partners and communities: thank you for your ongoing support—we work every day to earn your continued trust. And I want to thank our 774,000 amazing people around the world, whose talent, dedication and commitment help position us for continued success and allow us to create even more 360° value for all.

Julie Sweet
Chair and Chief Executive Officer

October 10, 2024