October 5, 2026

Blog: Accenture Launches Advanced Intelligence Group to Help Clients Solve Their Most Complex AI Challenges

What’s New?

Why Now?

Most organizations have already identified where AI could create value. Turning that potential into measurable business results has proven much harder.

Accenture's latest Pulse of Change research found that only about a quarter of C-suite leaders report achieving widespread, sustained business value from AI. Only 15% say their organizations plan to redesign end-to-end processes with AI at the core over the next 12 months. The findings point to a gap between experimenting with AI and making it part of how the business actually operates.

Closing that gap requires more than access to AI technology. Many of today's highest-value AI opportunities require capabilities spanning data, operations, industry knowledge and technology platforms, particularly in areas where proven approaches are still emerging. Success increasingly depends on cross-domain specialists who bridge AI, industry, and technical innovation into business outcomes.

Pulse of Change suggests companies are responding by changing how teams are organized: 67% of C-suite leaders say they are introducing new team structures or cross-functional models to support AI adoption.

Introducing the Advanced Intelligence Group
The Advanced Intelligence Group will help Accenture address growing AI demand by bringing together more than 2,000 specialists globally. Embedded in Accenture’s AI and Data practice, the group pairs scientific rigor and peer-reviewed research with the functional and domain depth to solve the most complex enterprise challenges in a highly repeatable way, coupled with the engineering and delivery capability to turn the latest AI advances into value at scale.

The group provides a dedicated model for developing, identifying, and deploying specialists against clients' most complex AI initiatives. Forward deployed engineers are one example of the specialist profiles represented within the group, alongside data architects, knowledge engineers and AI solutions engineers. The initial cohort of specialists will focus on agentic AI, advanced data, supply chain and engineering, and data platform expertise across Databricks and Snowflake.

Through collaborations with ecosystem partners, group members gain access to specialized training, early product insights and opportunities for joint innovation that help accelerate client value.

Dr. Lan Guan, chief AI and data officer at Accenture, said, “The most valuable AI opportunities rarely come with a blueprint. They require specialists who can work at the frontier - where the science isn't yet settled, the industry context is non-negotiable, and the engineering still has to ship. Success increasingly depends on people who can connect those domains and apply that expertise in new ways. That's exactly where clients are looking for support, and why we've created the Advanced Intelligence Group.”

Putting the Group into Practice
At Cencora, one of the largest American pharmaceutical wholesale, distribution, and healthcare solutions companies in the world, the challenge was embedding AI into the operational reality of a business managing nearly one million SKUs and an exponential number of demand relationships across pharmaceutical distribution. Drawing on expertise spanning supply chain and distribution, data engineering and agentic AI, Accenture helped enable a transition from manual, intuition-driven forecasting to AI-enabled decision-making that no single-discipline approach could have delivered. Cencora’s SVP of Supply Chain Digital Transformation noted Accenture’s combined expertise helped them move faster than they thought possible.

NTT DOCOMO GLOBAL, the global arm of telecommunications leader NTT DOCOMO Group, partnered with Accenture's Data and AI teams to help develop Universal Wallet Infrastructure (UWI), the trust layer for a data-led, AI-driven society. Building UWI required specialist depth in advanced data and AI, in areas with few established precedents. Together, the companies developed the consent-driven data sharing at the core of UWI and shaped the early foundations of UWI's hybrid cloud wallet. This is uncharted territory, spanning how individuals share data on their own terms through to how identity and trust extend to AI agents. The collaboration has established UWI as infrastructure now deployed in enterprise settings, and is helping define what trusted infrastructure looks like for the age of AI.

Looking ahead
As AI evolves, the expertise enterprises need will evolve with it. Accenture will continue to develop the Advanced Intelligence Group around emerging capabilities and client priorities, helping clients prepare for what comes next while addressing the challenges they face today.