The classic problem of companies that make or use technology is that they focus on the technology more than the people who use it. That needs to change quickly, according to a new report released early Wednesday by Accenture PLC.

The management consulting and professional services company said key technologies, including artificial intelligence, cloud computing and virtual and augmented reality, will enable companies to weave themselves more intimately into how their customers live and work. Think Amazon.com Inc. and its Alexa, which in some cases allows businesses to enter their homes for deliveries using the digital assistant.

At the same time, the report, “Intelligent Enterprise Unleashed: Redefine Your Company Based on the Company You Keep,” warns that enterprises will need to understand how these technologies require them to change their relationships with customers and business partners.

“Technology isn’t just a peripheral or something people use,” said Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture. “Technology is core to the human experience and how you and I work and how we live our lives.”

Even more than that, he said, “the trust you build with consumers and workers and others using technology is fundamental to getting the right to deliver these profound intrinsic services that people are demanding.”

Accenture contends that the current tech transformation is unique in that the changes involved aren’t just new technologies sold to consumers, but information getting fed back from those consumers and their smart devices. That means businesses must build new partnerships with customers, employees and governments, as Tesla Inc. is doing to fulfill its need for extensive private and public infrastructure and policies for its electric and autonomous vehicles.

Jeff Frick, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s live video operation theCUBE, interviewed Accenture executives, including Daugherty, and other technology experts at the company’s Monday evening event in San Francisco ahead of the report’s release.

In the report, Accenture identified five emerging technology trends that will provide both opportunities and challenges for companies. Most of them may sound familiar, but the company added its own spin, emphasizing the importance of how people interact with technology and the feedback loops caused by massive amounts of data shuttling between businesses and people’s devices. “The future is really about human plus machine working together,” Daugherty said.

Citizen AI: Businesses that want to use AI to best advantage need to understand the impact it could have so they can “act as responsible representatives.”

Extended Reality: The idea of this combined VR and AR, said Daugherty, is that “you can access what you want, the experience you want, when you want it.” Wal-Mart Stores, for instance, used it to train managers for what Black Friday will look like. Indeed, Mark Carrel-Billiard, global lead at Accenture Labs, calls extended reality “the end of distance.” Although it’s mostly a consumer business for now, in just a couple of years, that will flip to become 70 percent enterprise, he added.

Data Veracity: Now that they run on huge amounts of data, businesses are coming to see how this makes them more vulnerable to fraud and manipulation. They will need to follow a “dual mandate to maximize veracity and minimize incentives for data manipulation” to avoid continuing problems and maintain or restore trust with customers.

Frictionless Business: As companies flocking to the cloud today understand, they need to redesign their businesses, not just retrofit existing processes in the cloud.

Internet of Thinking: AI, robotics and immersive experiences are opening up new business opportunities, but there’s both a big skills gap in the workforce to take advantage of them that needs to be addressed and a need for business to modernize their infrastructure to reach out and make sense of data from all those distributed smart devices commonly known as the “internet of things.” “Every product in the world will be intelligent,” said Carrel-Billiard. “They all learn about what you’re doing. We need to understand where all the processing power for these will be sitting.”

Here’s the full video with Accenture’s Paul Daugherty (left), and you can see all the interviews on theCUBE’s Accenture event playlist:

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