Accenture : Technology Vision – 2023

Foreword

Businesses must embrace the foundations of our new reali

While standing at the edge of the next great technological era, enterprises must navigate economic and geopolitical uncertainty. The natural inclination of many organizations is to pull back. We have a different perspective. Now more than ever is the time for leaders to lean into strategies powered by technology to create differentiation. In fact, 10 years ago we predicted every business is a digital business, and this could not be more accurate today.

We've talked about the five key forces of change that companies must harness over the next decade, including the need for total enterprise reinvention. Cloud, AI, and the metaverse, in particular, have accelerated to such degrees that they dramatically speed up change, bend the innovation curve and create more and more value for every business and organization.

Yet our research shows that only 8% of companies are adopting a strategy of total enterprise reinvention. These are the Reinventors, and we believe every company must aspire to be one. Among that backdrop, our Technology Vision provides insights to enable leaders and their organizations to act now to embrace technology and use the foundations of a new reality as a path towards reinvention.

With this vision, we examine our movement between two types of worlds, physical and digital. Over the years, enterprises and individuals have taken many steps to create their presence in the digital space, consciously moving back and forth between physical reality and the digital ones they created. We believe the time has come to change that. The next wave of business transformation will erase the demarcation between those worlds to fuse them into a new reality.

The goal is not incremental improvement, but a step change towards total reinvention. Not everyone may be ready for this change, but leaders must prepare now for the future where the movement between worlds is seamless and often simultaneous.

We look forward to sharing our latest Technology Vision and building the foundations of a new reality with you.

Technology is the answer. The time is now.

Julie Sweet

Chief Executive Officer

Paul Daugherty

Group Chief Executive -

Technology & Chief Technology Officer

ContentsThe foundations of our new realityWhen Atoms meet Bits:

We live in two parallel realities, one of atoms and one of bits.

When we shop, we either go into a store or pull up a webpage. We work in person or remote. We collaborate with people and computers, but usually not at the same time. We live our lives split between the digital and the physical, and, frankly, moving across these separate realities is exhausting and inefficient. Transitioning between them can be challenging, confusing, or impossible, and while it can be easier to focus on just one or the other, doing so is fundamentally limiting.

So, it's time to change that. The next wave of business transformation will shift from creating isolated digital capabilities to creating the foundations of a new reality-a shared reality that seamlessly converges the physical lives we'vebeen leading with the digital ones we've been rapidly expanding. The goal is not incremental improvement, but a step change. An online store here or a smarter object there may have been good enough in the past, but we are now realizing that the true value of combining digital and physical together goes much further. Look at generative AI. Interest in generative AI is surging, with new tools capturing the world's attention faster than any other recent technology. But how people are using them right now-to create digital images and content- is just the beginning. We can already see that this technology is poised to shape the future of science, enterprise data, how we design and manufacture products, and so much more.

TechnologyVision 2023

In healthcare, this shared reality is pushing us towards personalized care. With funding from the European Union, a consortium of hospitals, researchers, and startups have joined the Neurotwin project, an effort to build digital twins of individual human brains.1, 2 Each twin would be used to help healthcare providers understand and predict triggers for neurological diseases and improve preventative interventions. The project is set to launch two studies on individuals suffering from Alzheimer's and epilepsy in 2023.3

Is it challenging? Yes. But even at a time when the world faces an uncertain economic climate and is still in the shadow of recovery from COVID-19, we are seeing enterprises make some of their most ambitious bets yet. They are fueling a new wave of digital-physical convergence that's pushing us closer to a seamlessly shared reality-leveraging the best of atoms and bits to drive novel possibilties.

Even problems as big as sustainability are being re-examined through the lens of what we can do when we combine physical sciences and digital technology. In 2022, AB InBev expanded productionfacilities for its barley upcycling company, EverGrain, which uses technology and science to find new applications for byproducts of the beer-making process.4, 5 The company created a new barley milk-based coffee drink with Airship Coffee, is developing snacks with barley-based ingredients with Post Holdings, and even developed barley straw-based packaging for Corona, turning a traditionally discarded byproduct into paper board boxes that take 90% less water to fabricate.6, 7, 8

But not everyone is ready for this step change. For many years the guiding pillar of enterprise innovation has been taking processes, even whole parts of the organization, and digitizing them-from how the factory floor is run, to loyalty programs, advertising, supply chains, and recently the entire workforce. For people, the story has been no different. People have spent years building a digital life: from how we do our banking, to establishing ourselves on social media, to choosing streaming over cable-which the relative majority of TV watchers did for the first time this past summer.9

96%

of executives agree that the convergence of digital and physical worlds over the next decade will transform their industry.