Accenture’s AI acquisitions and Industry X.0

In order to stay alive, all businesses in or near the maturity stage have the need foresee the future of the market and quickly adapt to these changes in consumer behaviour and trends. There’s an ongoing need to have flexible, growth oriented strategies. A couple of ways to do this is to shift their focus on their new products and scrap old loss making ones, or acquire promising up-and-coming startups. Most companies have complex strategies, each with its own budget. Since the advent of AI, the big names have been on a spree to gobble up AI startups.

Accenture (ACN) is continuing to use acquisitions to bolster its Industry X.0 initiative and provide next-generation technology services to industries. Under the Industry X.0 initiative, Accenture plans to combine emerging smart technologies, reinvent products and services from its very design, to manufacturing as well as support, which would increase efficiency and growth. Here is an insight into the companies that Accenture has acquired just this month, and how the startups may fit into its product segment and drive growth and organizational efficiencies.

Pillar Technology– Accenture completed its acquisition of Pillar Technology yesterday (27^th August 2018), just two weeks after it acquired Mindtribe. Pillar Technology provides its clients with embedded software capabilities. Its StepItUp product, provides unique solutions to employee learning, by creating a Social learning platform.  Its LOOP product provides for testing scenarios specific to client requirements, with various testing scenarios including replace or mock testing of hardware with various versions of software compatibilities. Their Pillar Lab product, creates various Proof-of-Concept solutions using Deep Learning and AI at the backend.

Mindtribe – Accenture acquired Mindtribe on 9^th August 2018, Mindtribe provides integrated hardware and software engineering services for clients looking for groundbreaking connected hardware solutions. Their solutions include – Adobe’s Ink and Slide, designed to enable digital drawings as close to hand drawings as possible; by providing the development of consumer hardware, evaluating technical and potential business cases. Scoot Networks, looking to promote electric vehicles and bicycles; by providing design of the bike’s electronics, and prototyping capabilities. Mindtribe would bring in Hardware design and integration capabilities to ACN’s Industry X.0 initiative.

Designaffairs – Accenture announced the acquisition of Designaffairs in June and completed the acquisition on 6^th August 2018. Designaffairs is a strategic design consultancy firm. Their services range from Industrial Design, UI Design, to Brand strategy and Project Management. The projects they’ve worked on include the Haptec Touch for Audi, Hyundai Driver Information System, Bosch TrackMytools – IoT for Craft business, Bosch GUI Styleguide – A Uniform UI across all business divisions of Bosch, Baomi Air Purifier – app controlled air purifier with Air Quality Index, Nescafe Milano – a cloud coffee machine. Designaffairs is expected to bring in future design capabilities to Accenture.

With its Industry X.0 initiative, Accenture is gearing up for the future of Tech, acquiring startups which would enable Design, Hardware and Software capabilities; and the synergy would help bring in an AI dimension to Accenture’s businesses as well its clients. In the next post, we’ll see the kind of companies Intel is acquiring to fuel its AI capabilities. Stay tuned.