Demand for AI is both real and rapidly maturing says Accenture

The world’s largest IT services and consulting company Accenture saw its advanced AI booking reach $2.2 billion in Q1FY26 from $1.2 billion in new bookings in Q1FY25. The company also disclosed that it had reached a milestone with advanced AI bringing in approximately $1.1 billion in revenue. The company, which was the first in the industry to call out AI related revenues, classifies advanced AI, as Gen AI, agentic AI, and physical AI, and does not include data, classical AI or robotic process automation.  

“We introduced the metrics in Q3 FY23, just months after Gen AI burst onto the scene, initially to size the reality of the opportunity and to demonstrate our early leadership. At that time, bookings were about $100 million across roughly 100 projects, and revenue was immaterial. We have measured it consistently since that time. To date, we have now delivered approximately $11.5 billion in bookings across 11,000 projects, with revenue of $4.8 billion. This will be the last quarter in which we share these specific metrics,” said Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Accenture.  

The reason behind the discontinuing calling out advanced AI related metrics according to the company is because it has become all pervasive. With the demand for artificial intelligence solutions becoming both real and rapidly maturing, the company feels it has reached a point where advanced AI is being embedded in some form across all its work and clients moving beyond proof of concept or used case development.  “ We're shifting to more scaled end-to-end solutions that integrate multiple forms of AI and it has become less meaningful to isolate the data specifically for advanced AI as it does not reflect how the demand is evolving on the ground, the full scope of our AI work or the value we're creating,” Sweet added.  

Accenture, which follows a September-August earnings calendar, saw a dollar revenue growth of 6% year on year, to $18.7 billion in Q1FY26. The company’s adjusted margins saw a 30-basis point expansion from 16.7% in Q1 of FY25 to 17% for the first quarter of fiscal 2026. The total bookings of $20.9 billion for the quarter also included 33 clients with a quarterly run rate of over $100 million. During the quarter it spent nearly $374 million on nearly 6 strategic acquisitions.  

With AI now embedded in most of its work, Accenture said that it will continue to invest on talent as it has nearly reached its goal of having 80,000 AI and data professionals. For the second quarter, with seasonal furloughs and a holiday season, the company expects its revenues growth to be moderate and be in the range of $17.35 billion to $18 billion including a positive forex impact and 1% negative impact from US federal business. For the full year, it has retained the earlier guidance of 2% to 5% in local currency and expects to invest about $3 billion in acquisitions.  

Advanced AI is increasingly embedded in our large transformation programs, either enabling future enterprise use or being implemented directly as part of our solutions. Our strong leadership in advanced AI is a clear competitive advantage as clients select us to help them capture the value of this technology now and over time and to build the readiness required to adopt it effectively across the enterprise. Momentum in the adoption of enterprise AI continues.