Global technology consulting giant Accenture Plc said in a series of announcements today that it’s expanding its strategic partnerships with the three biggest cloud computing providers to help enterprise customers take advantage of the latest developments in artificial intelligence.

The expanded partnerships build on Accenture’s plan to invest $3 billion into its Data & AI practice, which was announced last week.

Accenture’s renewed focus on AI comes at a time of great interest in so-called generative AI, the technology that powers advanced chatbots such as OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. Enterprises are keen to take advantage of generative AI, which enables chatbots to engage in humanlike conversations, answering questions, helping with research, writing poetry and blog posts, searching the internet and more. Other examples of generative AI include OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Stability AI Ltd.’s Stable Diffusion, which can create photorealistic images based on natural language prompts.

Accenture Chair and Chief Executive Julie Sweet said this month that her company is seeing “unprecedented interest in all areas of AI.” As a result, Accenture is rushing to help its customers pursue that interest, with plans to double its AI talent pool to 80,000 professionals and create “accelerators for AI readiness” across 19 distinct industries.

Given these moves, it makes perfect sense for Accenture to increase its cooperation with the industry’s leading cloud infrastructure providers, whose hardware powers much of the world’s AI applications.

Accenture said today that it will work with Amazon Web Services Inc. to develop a number of new, industry-specific and cross-industry AI offerings, including prebuilt models and training platforms. The idea is that it can help companies move away from experimentation to actual adoption, Accenture said.

It plans to help clients deploy Amazon Bedrock and use Amazon’s most advanced foundational models, such as Amazon Titan, as well as other platforms such as AWS SageMaker, a machine learning service. Some of the industries it plans to tackle include customer support, financial services, life sciences and supply chain. It will also look to hire more AWS AI talent for its consultancy, and equip its existing teams with AWS skills, certifications and training.

Accenture’s collaboration with Microsoft Corp. is focused on the co-development of “new industry and functional solutions,” as well as new use cases for AI in financial services, contact center, security and logistics, to name just a few areas. It said it will work closely with the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service Engineering team and the Microsoft-focused consultancy Avanade Inc. on training and equipping people with advanced skills in generative AI. In the meantime, it’s working with a number of clients to pilot new technologies such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Security Copilot, Semantic Kernel and Azure OpenAI Service.

Google Cloud wasn’t left out of the party. Accenture said it will collaborate with the No. 3 cloud to co-develop various new services and offerings that take advantage of its industry experience and Google Cloud’s suite of generative AI tools. The plan is to find ways to use generative AI to improve business processes across 19 industries and six business functions, Accenture said.

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