IT services and consulting firm Accenture is slashing more jobs from its Austin workforce.
According to Accenture, it will be laying off 218 employees. The layoffs will affect workers at a facility in The Domain, which is leased by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, according to the Austin Business Journal. The Ireland-based professional services group often works with Facebook on content moderation, according to the Austin Business Journal. This news comes after Accenture laid off more than 500 other employees at the same facility in May.
Accenture currently employs around 5,900 people in Austin, according to the Austin Chamber of Commerce.
The May Austin layoffs followed a wider announcement Accenture made in March in an SEC filing that said the company would be cutting 19,000 employees globally, or about 2.5% of its workforce, over the next 18 months.
In March, the Dublin, Ireland-based firm said it would spend $1.2 billion in severance to cut 2.5% of its workforce over the next 18 months and another $300 million to consolidate its office space. More than half of the eliminated roles would be among back-office staff, the company said.
What Accenture Said in its Quarterly Report
Accenture has 738,000 employees globally and said in its latest quarterly report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it continues to hire but had “initiated actions to streamline operations and transform our non-billable corporate functions to reduce costs,” CNN reported. The $167 billion company also downgraded its revenue growth outlook for the 2023 fiscal year to between 8% and 10% from its previous estimate of between 8% and 11%, CNN said.
The company had increased its workforce by 38,000 in the financial year that ended February 2023 to serve the increased demand for its services and solutions, it said.
“For the second quarter of fiscal 2023, attrition, excluding involuntary terminations, was 12%, down from 18% in the second quarter of fiscal 2022. We evaluate voluntary attrition, adjust levels of new hiring and use involuntary terminations as a means to keep our supply of skills and resources in balance with changes in client demand,” Accenture wrote in the filing.
“Our results of operations are affected by economic conditions, including macroeconomic conditions, the overall inflationary environment and levels of business confidence. There continues to be significant economic and geopolitical uncertainty in many markets around the world, which has impacted and may continue to impact our business, particularly with regard to wage inflation and volatility in foreign currency exchange rates. In some cases, these conditions have slowed the pace and level of client spending,” the firm said.
Accenture's AI Investment
Early in June, the tech staffing company announced a $3 billion investment in artificial intelligence (AI) in its Data and AI practice department. Accenture plans to "double AI talent to 80,000 people through hiring, acquisitions and training." According to Accenture, the investment into AI will take place over three years.
Accenture plans to use AI as a way to help clients across all industries. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said that because technology is "changing rapidly" she wants Accenture to use AI to help clients navigate their complex environments "quickly and cost-effectively to make smart decisions."
The company said it would invest in "assets, industry solutions, ventures, acquisitions, talent and ecosystem partnerships, which will deepen and develop new skills and capabilities across diagnostic predictive and generative AI" as a way to help its clients develop new strategies and business models.
Accenture's purchase of Nextira, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, seems to align with these goals.
Nextira’s employees will help Accenture’s AWS Business Group drive “enterprise-wide transformation at speed and scale” for the company’s customers, according to a prepared statement. They also will support the Accenture Cloud First business group, which focuses on helping organizations use cloud, data and AI to create value.
