How AI is transforming how leaders are developed in Accenture

Jacqueline Conway  00:00

The organizational peak is a perilous environment. It’s more complex and challenging than anything that’s gone before, and as a consequence, both executive tenure and corporate longevity are decreasing to survive and thrive at the perilous peak, executive leaders need to balance their functional leadership, a focus on execution with enterprise leadership that is ensuring the organization adapts in our new world. That’s what we’ll be exploring in the advanced executive leadership podcast. Welcome. I’m your host. Jacqueline Conway. I’m the Founder and Managing Director of Walden Croft, a consulting practice dedicated to helping executives and executive teams anticipate, navigate and lead at the perilous peak. In today’s episode, we’re diving into one of the most pressing and possibly transformative topics in Leadership and Learning, the rise of artificial intelligence and its role in reshaping how we develop support and scale leadership capabilities. My guest is Steve Williams, Accenture’s director of learning and leadership development. Steve shares how Accenture is at the forefront of integrating AI into leadership learning and development with groundbreaking innovations like digital twins, immersive simulations and personalized learning paths, from creating AI powered digital coaches to embedding generative AI into real time client interactions. Accenture is charting the future of leadership in a human plus AI workforce. This episode isn’t just about technology, it’s about the human side of AI. Steve discusses how organizations can use AI to augment leadership, enabling leaders to focus on what they do best, making sense of complexity, fostering collaboration and navigating uncertainty. At the same time, we confront critical questions about the ethics of AI. How do we maintain trust, protect privacy and ensure equitable access to these powerful tools. Whether you’re curious about how each eye is transforming leadership development, concerned about the challenges it represents, are simply exploring how to lead more effectively in the age of disruption, this episode offers valuable insights and inspiration. Let’s dive into this conversation with Steve Williams, welcome to the podcast. It’s lovely to have you here, and it would be great for the listeners, just for you to introduce yourself, say a little bit about who you are and what your role is in Accenture. Hey,

Steve Williams  02:59

Jacqueline, it’s lovely to be here. So I work in Accenture, and I’m responsible for learning and leadership development across a number of different business areas, ranging from our strategy business to our consulting business all the way through to our creative creative agencies in song. So responsible, really, for the learning and development across about 80,000 people. And, you know, etc, is a big place. And so we work across a number of different industries, so about 40 different industries, over 120 countries. And so a really complex environment, but a real privilege to be able to look at the Learning and Leadership for for our people.

Jacqueline Conway  03:38

I mean, is just enormous, isn’t it? It’s, How do you, how do you know where to begin with what you prioritize around learning in such a huge organization? That’s not

Steve Williams  03:52

always, not always easy, but I think we really look at a number of things. Really, we try to look at, you know, what is the what are the skills that our people need across a vast range of of different roles, starting with, with what they what they need, and then looking to really craft the experiences around that. And think about, you know, how do we create lasting and durable learning experiences for someone who might be a, say, a Technology Strategist or business strategist on one hand, and then you’d have a bunch of process experts to our data scientists all the way through to people who are experts in manufacturing supply chain or brand agents or designers. So a real range of skills and competencies needed by those people, but really starting to think about, you know, for them in their day to day, what do they need to be successful? What do they need to perform and start from there, and then start to craft around, around that, okay?

Jacqueline Conway  04:55

And, I mean, I guess this is a leadership podcast. It’s, it’s listen. To by executive leaders and people who develop executive leaders, and so what’s the leadership landscape like in Accenture, and what’s the learning sort of priorities for you there?

Steve Williams  05:13

I think from from a leadership perspective, we try to look at it at a number of different levels. So we don’t just necessarily think about okay, what is our executive development programs? We try to think about that in terms of okay, what are the essentials that everyone if you’re to work at Accenture, what are the essential, the leadership essential behaviors that everyone needs to have? And they’re really set from from the top. So Julie sweets, our CEO, right from from the top, she has set those leadership expect essentials that she expects of herself, and she expects of everyone who works at at Accenture. And then the next layer, then is really started to think about, well, leadership at all levels. So if you are either leading yourself or you are leading others, then what are the expectations around around that? And so we encourage everyone to be thinking about, what are their leadership needs and requirements, and we have programs associated to that. And then, of course, we’re thinking then about, okay, our top leaders or executive development, and we think about that in a number of different ways. It might be around, you know, if someone is leading a particular business segment, what is that? What are their needs and requirements there? Or are they leading a part of the enterprise? Or it might be that they’re leading us, you know, they have a specific role around, let’s say, client leadership or delivery leadership. And you know, what are the particular skills that they might need aligned to their industry or their functional area? So, so the way we try to think about leadership development in Accenture is really around a system, you know, right the way through, from these essentials to people leading at all levels of the organization, and then, you know, are more specific kind of executive development around that. Well, I

Jacqueline Conway  07:06

guess one of the things I’m really interested in is this interplay between the individual skills of of people, the skills that people might individually cultivate throughout their career, and then the necessity of them to work with others. And so the way that leadership becomes a kind of collective fact that they’re doing things with others. And I wonder is, what’s, what’s your perspective on that? Like, how much of the leadership work that you’re doing is being done with in a collective unit of performance, rather than an individual unit performance. For example, do you do team based work development, or is it individual development? Then that you hope people will translate back into a team environment? I think

Steve Williams  07:58

it’s, as with many things. It’s a mixture, mixture of both. And so we try to have flexibility in the system to enable someone to really be thinking about, okay, what are my individual needs? My individual needs might be very different to, you know, a peer who’s doing a very similar job to me, you know. So, so on an individual level, you know, I have my own needs and requirements. I have my own skills that I’m bringing to the tail and my own emotional intelligence that I might be bringing to to a situation you Jacqueline, you know, you might have a similar role to me, but, you know, have very, very different needs, and that might, at a very human level, change from year to year based on whether it be family circumstances or the role that I’m doing and so on and so forth. And so we have to have enough flexibility in our system to be thinking about, you know, me and as an individual, what, what do I need at a particular point in in time? But also then thinking about the collective, thinking about the collective in terms of, you know, how we growing our leaders to deliver for our clients and to lead themselves and to lead to lead others. And so we tend to think about it in that way. So to take an example for you, let’s say, you know, I need to grow my communication skills, because I’ve received some feedback around that. Let’s say I need to grow those things. Then, then we try to offer, offer the opportunity for people to sort of say, Okay, I need to grow, grow those skills. How might I do that? And you know, might be that there are individualized learning paths available to me, or it might be that I have the opportunity to take some some training or some coaching around those particular skills, and so that on an individual level, but then on a collective level, we think, Well, how is an organization do we want our people to communicate? How will that show up, for example, in the essential skills that we need for all of our people? And so it’s, as always, it’s looking at the trying to look at the individual needs of the business, and then looking at, you know, the collective you. Out across, you know, nearly 800,000 people then, then, obviously the individualization of that is, is quite difficult and gets very complex. But I think, you know, that’s, that’s where, you know, Gen AI and other tools like that can help us to start to think about, how can we bring that more individualized, a you know, approach to to learning for our people and the opportunities that that brings, yeah, but a lot of it does just come down, you know, to to things like our essentials that we expect everyone to have.

Jacqueline Conway  10:30

So I’ve got two questions on the back of that, Steve. One is about the mechanism, or the kind of machine that must be in place then to assess or invite people to consider what learning and development they might need on an annual basis, and then how that gets plugged into that system, and how that gets actually delivered. So that’s that. I mean, I’d be keen to hear about that, and then I would like to pick up on your AI point, because I know that you’ve got some really interesting things that you’re doing there. But I mean, what’s, what’s the mechanism in exchange in Accenture for identifying somebody’s learning needs? Again,

Steve Williams  11:11

this is something that we try to look at as as a system, really, and it’s something that you know is constantly, constantly evolving. I think everything that we try to do typically starts at the root of trying to think about someone’s performance. And so as we think of our performance cycles, we’ve moved very much to trying to think about that on an ongoing basis. So it was always on system. So, so rather than it be, oh, on an annual basis, you know, what’s my feedback from the year. And you know, okay, what’s my development plan for the next year is to really think about in a constant kind of cycle of priorities, to be thinking about, okay, what is my priorities now? And how do we constantly have a system where we are getting performance feedback on that to enable those career conversations, to enable our peers and our leaders to be able to give us that feedback. So, so the start of it is really thinking about, okay, what are performance goals for any particular individual? And that then enables us to scale that, you know, because as the onus of that is on the individuals and those around them, and the continuous feedback it’s getting into a culture of continuous feedback, and then enabling us to identify the areas where I might need to learn, or I might need to grow, subsequently that, you know, might end up that, you know, there is some training that needs to be done, or it might be that there’s some coaching that’s needed, or it might be simply that I need a little bit of performance support in the work that I’m doing. So that’s one element of it, and then also moving us more towards a reflective kind of culture where, let’s say, we have the opportunity. Now we’re doing this podcast together, and after that, you know, what are my reflections around that? What are you know? What is your feedback for me? What are my own reflections around that? And so on, helping us to learn, to grow and in doing so we’re doing that in in the moment. And so we’re doing that as a continual learning kind of environment versus a, you know, once and done, you know, hey, this your performance for the year and so on, so, and that’s something we’ll we’re learning as we go along. Yes, it’s a progression that we’re seeking to make. Does

Jacqueline Conway  13:22

that mean that you are building habits and practices of reflect, of reflection into meetings? Is there an expectation that there will be time taken either in the meeting itself or, I mean, are those things done in the meeting with each other, or are they done in a self reflective way after the meeting? And is that sort of diarised in are people, you know, has it been properly inculcated into the culture? I think this is

Steve Williams  13:52

certainly something that that we would like to say it is, but, you know, we were very much on a journey to enable that to happen. So I would be lying to you if I said, every meeting, you know, we have been able to do that, but that certainly our intention, and certainly we’re seeking to grow, grow that as we, as we go along, to enable a that opportunity, to say, let’s finish the call five minutes early, or to take the opportunity five minutes afterwards, to sort of say, you know, do you have any feedback for me on that, that particular point, or, you know, have that self reflection? And that’s certainly something that we’re working working towards. And

Jacqueline Conway  14:29

given that feedback is so important, is, is the the ability to feedback one of those leadership essentials that you talked about, it’s not,

Steve Williams  14:41

not necessarily directly one of one of those, but the leadership essentials that we have grounded across eight key areas. So they range from, you know, doing the right thing in in the decisions they’re making, it might be around kind of leading. With excellence, you know, and some of the behaviors that we expect around that it might be around, you know, what are we doing for our clients, and how are we partnering with our communities around us and those around us? But then one of the key areas is around, how are we caring for the people around them? So, how are we helping them to achieve their own aspirations, both personally but also professionally? And so helping people to have those honest conversation providing that direct feedback, would certainly be well part of that, as well as our commitment around inclusion and diversity and what that looks like in terms of the conversations that we we have, and then some of the other areas that we have as part of that around, you know, having the courage to change, having the courage to kind of bring others along on that journey, as we’re starting to help our people to change, and help our people to and support our people in the journey that they have within, within Accenture. So really, sort of those essentials kind of encompass a lot of those things, and then how we demonstrate that is in the day to day and the culture that we want to continue to build here. Yeah, okay,

Jacqueline Conway  16:13

let’s turn our attention now. I might circle back to some of those things, but let’s turn our attention now to AI because two of my colleagues saw your presentation that you did at the CIPD conference last year on so you’ve been in Accenture. You’ve been utilizing AI to really bolster your learning and development. And I mean, I think it would probably, I think it’d be fair to say that you’re fairly cutting edge in that, you know, the things that my colleagues saw when they when they came along and saw your presentation at the CIPD last year was, I mean, they came back and absolutely reeved about it. Do you want to say a little bit about how you’re using AI, and perhaps specifically that particular piece of AI that you’re using, and how you’re inculcating it in, actually, in Accenture,

Steve Williams  17:08

yeah, of course. So, I mean, you know, so, so what we, what we were, we were looking to do, and what we’re very much thinking about within Accenture, how do we enable this kind of human plus AI workforce. You know, ultimately, that’s what we’re we’re looking and we’re thinking about. So when we think about okay, what are the skills that our people need in a human plus AI partnership? And we’re thinking about okay as a workforce, a lot people need to have that resiliency and that adaptability, knowing that the speed of change that AI brings is going to be incredible, and the impact of that, and when we’re thinking about, okay, job roles, how we’re thinking that they’re probably going to need to be a little bit more fluid, and thinking about, well, the frequency and the adaptability that our people are going to need to be able to Think about in the future is going to be significant. And so as we think about, you know, okay, the skills question that our people have, we also need to think about, okay, what are the, what are the performance elements that they need to be thinking about as they have and are part of this new this new workforce. And so some of the things that are really important when we think about that new environment that we’re all going to be in is, of course, skills, of course, then training has a key element around that. But also with Gen AI, we have a real opportunity to not just look at kind of the training and the skills that our people need to very much in terms of the performance criteria that they need to have, and how, as a learning and development professional, how can we help to move people more towards this kind of learning in the flow of their work? Think about that these activities, like we mentioned, like reflection, thinking about on the job learning, micro learning, thinking about personalized learning. Think about coaching and mentoring and performance support, simulations, all these things that Gen AI enables us to do that. You know, as learning professionals, you know, we’ve been waiting for a number of years to be able to you know, across 800,000 people, how do you offer a personalized learning experience for for, for those different people. So as we were talking a little bit about that, and as we were thinking about that, and this is what the conference we were talking at really helped us to think about, was, how can we really start to think about personalized scales, learning paths and and a couple of the demos that we were looking at really were very much around enabling our people through Gen AI to experience Gen AI and to learn about Gen AI and also have Gen AI to help them and to coach them as we kind of go go through. So we showed a couple of demos. First of all, our demo was one around the. Where we simply had a simulated tool in chat, GPT, and we enabled our people to go in with zero programming knowledge, create a simulator based on a few simple prompts and enable them to be able to have a conversation through chat around, let’s say, a different, difficult conversation they needed to have, you know, and chat GPT would help them in terms of providing them prompts and thinking about things to think about, and so on and so forth. That was our first kind of demo, you know, relatively, relatively simple use of chat GPT to being able to create a learning simulator. The second demo that that we we have created, is to augment a huge program that we already have an existing program. So within Accenture, we’re tasked with looking at and solving some of the most difficult technology challenges with our with our clients, and we want all our people within Accenture to have a certain degree of technology literacy. We call that TQ, and which is a series of kind of micro learning that we expect our people to have. It could be across things like like Gen a items itself, or it could be around we want our people to understand more about blockchain, or around cloud or security, a whole range of different things that we want our people to have. And so that’s a micro learning program that we have and expect our people to do. What we wanted to think about was, okay, how can we have a digital coach to enable our people around technology? So what we looked at was we have our Chief Technology Officer, Paul Dougherty. He’s recently retired from Accenture, and with his permission, we did a digital twin of him. So we thought, hey, who better to help and to coach you around your technology than a chief technology officer? And rather than, you know, we sat in a room with Paul, you know, we’ll create a digital twin of him. And so we looked at how we could have Paul, you know, use that. We’ve kind of scaffolded the learning so that Paul, as our digital coach, would give us piece by piece information on how to do prompting. So that was kind of the first layer of what we wanted to do. And so we created a digital twin of him, and he would help us to to learn how to prompt. And so if I prompted, he’d give me a little bit of tips to sort of say, well, you need to stop doing that, and you need to think about, okay, as you’re going to speak to someone, you know, what do you need to say? So he’s able to prompt us in that way and so, and then provide feedback on that. And the second part of our simulation was to say, you’re going to meet with a client, you know, and we simulated that, that client with, with chat, GPT, and we wanted, we wanted the LLM to have all the knowledge that you would want them to have. And we would look at, not now necessarily, twinning real person. So we twin polarity. Now we’re now, we’re going to twin a synthetic person, and you would go in and you would meet, then the client, and you would have a conversation with that, with that client. Now the way that this gets really interesting is because we’re using chat GPT now that client is not only able to answer the questions that we might have, but is now able to flip the conversation and provide you feedback based on the things that you have done and learned. And so it gives us a really interesting and rich opportunity that an ordinary simulation wouldn’t have given us. Now with a simulation is actually giving us feedback as we’re kind of going in and doing that. And so it gave us a real, real interesting opportunity to kind of play with some ideas.

Jacqueline Conway  23:43

And how do I interact with this digital twin? I mean, am I doing? Is it text based, or is it, is there an avatar of this person on screen? Am I able to engage with them in conversation? Yes,

Steve Williams  23:55

you are so, and that’s, that’s where it’s, it’s, it’s really, you know, so some of the simulations that the first simulation I mentioned would be like a text based simulation. And here now we’re looking at a multi modal simulation. So we’re looking at voice, text and also then video, and all those coming together in an immersive environment. And you can imagine, you know, in the in the future, rather than, for example, it being a simulated client that, you know, what if, in the future, you know, as I go to my meeting, I go to my teams meeting, let’s say, on my Zoom meeting, whatever, whatever business meeting I might go then I have my digital coach actually sat next to me. So I’m in a real meeting, but I have my digital coach there, and afterwards that digital coach is then providing me feedback. I’ll take it even further to say actually my chief, HRO is actually in the meeting with me, or twin of my CFO is in the meeting. And so after the meeting, I get a feedback from a financial perspective, I get back from a. Human Resources perspective. You know, you can imagine these things were not, were not at that point, point yet, but, but it’s, it’s not so hard to think that in the future, those things could become possible for us, their whole host of kind of legal, policy things that would need to be worked through. But the concept is there, and I find that quite exciting, daunting and exciting at the same time. Yeah,

Jacqueline Conway  25:24

so do I absolutely daunting and exciting. And so would you in that? And I appreciate your saying that’s very early days, but so so you’re training the the digital twin, both from that person, but presumably, then you’re educating the AI on the basis of, then what the client’s needs are. So I would imagine as well, at the moment, you have to, we’re filtering client need through the interpretation of a person. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what systems you’ve then got for, kind of pulling this together to be able to then create data sets that help you understand the patterns that are emerging across different sort of client groups. But presumably it would add absolutely rocket fuel to that, if there was a way that the AI could be sitting in on the client assignment.

Steve Williams  26:20

Yeah. And so. So I think that they’re two different, two different things that we can touch on. So I think in terms of the simulation that we’re talking about here, let’s call Sarah, and Sarah is our client. We would feed in, in the information that so it’s, you know, just simply my prompt, that my prompt would be, I’m going to meet with, with, with Sarah. She is a CFO of a bank in this particular sector in this particular country, she has come to us with with an RFP around SAP implementation, for example, you know. So let’s say something like that. Then, well, the the LLM would be able to pull in that information, so, so she would come to that call, as it were, with that information. So that’s kind of one element when we think about this simulated environment. The other point that you mentioned, though, is very much well, how do we think about as as as we work with our clients? Then Gen AI is absolutely embedded in in everything that we do, you know, in terms of whether it be around process, mining, for for our clients, looking at their processes and redesigning their processes, whether it be around a set of integrated tools that Gen AI is doing the work in the background. You know, all these different things will be part of the future talents, kind of work bench, as it were, and that comes takes us back to that kind of augmentation of human plus AI in the future workforce, you know, some sectors will be changed different to others. But even as we think about our tablets, you know, or we think about our phones, you know, so much of that is all augmented by AI that quite often we won’t even realize it.

Jacqueline Conway  27:55

I’m just envisaging the acceleration of the capacity to be able to help is enormous. And as you’re saying, We’re early days where you can also imagine all of the ethical, security, privacy and other kind of issues that this throws up. And so I’m curious to hear about what, where you’ve how you’re managing, the kind of ethical aspect of it. You know, what conversations are you actively having, whether it’s just in your executive team, of your exec colleagues or or elsewhere, and Accenture around, how do we do this in a way that we are that we’re ahead of the ethical curve. Because, of course, one of the things that we’re witnessing just now, you know, you and I are recording this. We are, we were the 14th of January. You know, it’s the week after Mark Zuckerberg has said that he’s not going to be doing fact checking on meta anymore in the US different in Europe, and so we’re in this environment where and so the conversation is around, how do we keep people safe? What’s the environment that we’re in, and do we take the lead on technology? You know, do technologists then take the kind of ethical and social responsibility lead? Because legislatively, we can’t keep up, because the pace of change is so fast. So how are you grappling with all of those things in a in an AI more generally, but also in your learning and development perspective? Yeah, I

Steve Williams  29:37

think trust and security a real, real needs and real real concerns from and I won’t pretend to be, to be an expert on this, what, what we look at in in Accenture, is we’re not allowed to use any AI tool unless it has been through certain ethical AI guidelines. And. Processes so, so as we look at the latest tools that we want or might need to use, or anyone might want to use, then they all have to go through ethical AI standards and checks, and there’s a whole process around around that. And so let’s, for example, to use our illustration before you know, but say, oh, as a learning professional, hey, this is new, fancy tool over here. If that does not meet the ethical guidelines that we have within Accenture, then you’re not allowed to use that tool. And so it’s very much controlled by by experts and by by a team of people who look at all the use of AI within, within the environment. And that’s that’s really important. It’s really important as we, as we move forward, for for the use of those tools, but also for our own internal data, and also, then for our client safety and security and their data and their data privacy as well. And so that’s something that you know is very much ingrained within, Accenture to look at that from an ethics

Jacqueline Conway  31:03

well, so what’s next thing? I mean, you’ve got this, these digital twins, you’ve got this amazing, by all accounts, sort of program that, I mean, are you in the rollout phase of that now, or is, was that we’re

Steve Williams  31:21

still, we’re still at the earlier, earlier phases of this so, so the place where it will probably come to life is this big technology program that all our people do and and we’re working through, you know, how we roll that out at scale? So, you know, some of some of these programs, they are highly complex. There are vendor partnerships. They’re also, also the cost associated to some of these. So we’re really looking at rolling it out, you know, over the next six to 12 months. Is the time scale that we’re looking at with these digital coaches. We have some available already to us, you know, things, some of the text based things, but the multi modal ones are really we’re working through, you know, how that’s going to come to life for our for our people. And I think in terms of what’s next, I think one of the big questions is, is, you know, what is leadership’s role in the in the the age of Gen AI, how does that change in terms of the way that our leaders act and behave? And I think, you know, as we think of an augmented workforce, really thinking about, you know, what are the what are the skills, what are the mindset, what are the behaviors that are people we would expect our people to have? You know, what are human elements of of leadership, and how is that augmented by, by AI, there’s some big, big conversations that we’re having at the moment and

Jacqueline Conway  32:35

thinking back together. Yeah, fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I’ve got a couple of other questions. I’m just really want to hear your particular view on the first is that you mentioned about digital kind of coaching and AI coaching. I wonder what your perspective is on the coaching industry and where that’s going with you know, now that we’re in the AI age, well, we still have executive coaches that are human, or will we all switch to these kind of digital avatars and be able to kind of tap into the world’s knowledge in one place?

Steve Williams  33:11

I think, yeah, you know, I think definitely that there’s a place, you know, a place for both. I think you know, in terms of when we think of digital, digital coaches and digital avatars. I think we will see, see more of it, you know, in CES recently was, you know, there was the digital digital robot, you know, looked very much like a real companionship robot, you know. So be interesting to see where things, even on that scale kind of move move to I think there will always be a place for human human cultures to bring their specific insights, their emotional intelligence, to be able to seek, to really dig into question, understand the individual needs of a needs of A person. I think I don’t see us being a completely digitized society. You know, as individuals, we have more tech than we ever have done, and we ever it’ll only increase. Yet we seek human companionship. We seek emotional connection. We have that social dimension. And so I think as we think about coaching, those are the elements that we’ll continue to need to be very human kind of behaviors that people will still seek to have, but without denying the convenience, the opportunity to scale and to think about digital coaches in the moment when I need that, that that that coach, that is something that is very interesting to to us, and I think will will only increase

Jacqueline Conway  34:51

that. That leads me on to my last question, which is actually about, you know, the thing that differs. Enunciates humans from machines at the moment is, is that capacity that you talked about earlier on for reflection? So you’re building this reflective culture within Accenture, and I’m thinking more about kind of vertical development, and the way that we’re trying to develop leaders who are more have a have a greater kind of expansiveness of their consciousness, if you like, they are there. They are evolving themselves to be able to work with more complexity, to be able to sit with their own emotions more effectively, to work with creating a culture because they understand the first, second and third order implications of the decisions that they make. How so you talked about the leadership essentials, but I’m really interested in how do you spot and nurture and then develop and promote those people. What is it you’re looking for, and how do you find those, those kind of uniquely human things in your workforce?

Steve Williams  36:13

That’s a really good question. I don’t know. Don’t know whether really thought of it in that way. So I think that there are a couple of things that spring to mind. First of all, is in terms of ensuring that as we think about our career conversations, our performance conversations, our coaching conversations, really seeking to understand the human, understand the person behind, behind everything. That’s what this the first, first aspect is to really understand that. And the second thing is, then to really be thinking about, okay, what are the elements of of human potential that in this new era, in this new age, that we really value as a company? So really thinking about, you know, we can’t rely on AI alone, so how do we invest in the human potential and this idea of augmentation, how do we think about human plus AI together and invest in the human potential? You know, I find a helpful illustration. You know, if you’re buying this, this kind of Ferrari, if you’re buying a Ferrari that you know signifies, let’s say, AI, but you’re not investing in in the driving skills to be able to drive that Ferrari, then you’re not going to get the value. You probably end up crashing somewhere down the line right as you’re driving this, this new car. And so thinking about them both together, thinking about, okay, as an augmented system, you know, and then we think about the capacity of of the mind, and, you know, from a human’s perspective, how we’re bringing the right context to any particular conversation. How are we helping our people to do that, and identifying enough people the ability to be able to to do those things, how we then able to enable our people to ask very human led questions that you know, could be potentially augmented by answers from from Ai, but how are we asking the right questions to either solve the individual concerns or needs that we might have or the business requirements that we’re having so you know, how is our questioning and our discerning capacity as humans to be able to do that? And then, you know, from from, from the way that we we are, you know, our heart in terms of the way that you know we as humans kind of relate to to one another, and how we is our Compassionate Leadership towards others? You know, how is that potentially augmented by understanding and knowing those around us in a better way through the AI systems that we might have. You can see how those things could come together. But I think it’s, it’s some, it’s a it’s something that we, all, you know, Accenture included, are thinking about is, how do we how do we lead? How do we behave, how we humans in this new in this new age. I think one of the things that is exciting, and as I mentioned, daunting, is the speed, speed within which things are changing. Thinking about, you know, the role of humans in the future. Thinking about, you know, how AI affects that is fascinating. And as a learning professional and leadership professional, it’s really interesting to see the opportunities ahead of us, so I’m really excited about it, and looking forward to taking on some of those opportunities, also recognizing there’s some huge challenges as well that we need to wrestle with.

Jacqueline Conway  39:43

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