Accenture plc (ACN) Business

Item 1. Business

Overview

Accenture is a business reinvention and technology company. Our ambition is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and lead in the safe, widespread adoption of AI, and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work in the world. Our people bring deep insights across industries and functions, with capabilities spanning strategy, process, operating model, change management, talent, data, technology and AI. We deliver this expertise through consulting, managed services, proprietary assets and platforms, and increasingly, software. We bring innovation and new solutions informed by our experience across industries, enabling us to apply relevant insights, capabilities and leading practices from adjacent sectors to address emerging business challenges and opportunities. We serve more than 9,000 clients and generated revenues of approximately $74 billion in fiscal year 2026.

During fiscal 2026, we continued to make significant investments—in strategic acquisitions, in research and development (R&D) in our assets, platforms and industry and functional solutions, in patents and pending patents and in attracting, retaining and developing people. These investments help us to further enhance our differentiation and competitiveness in the marketplace. Our disciplined acquisition strategy, which is an engine to fuel organic growth, is focused on scaling our

business in high-growth areas; deepening our industry and functional capabilities; and expanding into new growth areas. In fiscal 2026, we invested $4.9 billion across 17 strategic acquisitions, $1.0 billion in R&D, and approximately $1.0 billion in learning and professional development, including approximately 46 million training hours.

We use our investment capacity to drive early leadership in areas of growth. For example, our early decision in fiscal 2023 to invest significantly to become a leader in AI with a $3.0 billion three-year investment positioned us to capture this new area of spend for our clients. We also recently announced that we expect to invest at least $1.0 billion over the next five years in AI safety.

Geographic Markets

Our three geographic markets—Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific—bring together our Reinvention Services in teams, which typically consist of industry and functional experts, AI, data and technology specialists and professionals with local market knowledge and experience, to meet client needs. The geographic markets have primary responsibility for building and sustaining long-term client relationships; bringing together our expertise from around the globe and collaborating across our business to sell and deliver our full range of solutions and services; ensuring client satisfaction; and achieving revenue and profitability objectives.

While we serve clients in locally relevant ways, our global footprint and scale in every major country give us the ability to leverage our experience and people from around the world to accelerate outcomes for our clients.

Our three geographic markets are our reporting segments. The percent of our revenues represented by each market is shown at right.

Reinvention Services

Reinvention Services brings together our ecosystem partner relationships, assets and platforms and our network of businesses, utilizing our Reinvention Partners and Reinvention Engines.

Reinvention Partners

Our seven Reinvention Partners are organized around how our clients operate, make decisions and buy services. Each Reinvention Partner aligns our end-to-end capabilities to a principal enterprise function, buyer or area of the industry value chain. This structure allows us to more easily and repeatably deliver business outcomes, embed the latest developments in data, AI, technology, assets and platforms, and scale reinvention deeper in a function and broader across the enterprise. Our Reinvention Partners increase C-suite access and provide new growth opportunities by focusing on client buyers and the outcomes they need.

Cybersecurity – helps clients reinvent cyber-resilience and value through trust—building defenses, protecting enterprises, managing risk, and enabling the secure adoption of emerging technologies, AI, data, secure AI, cloud and digital platforms.

Digital Core – helps clients reinvent their digital foundations—including technology strategy and architecture, AI, data, cloud, application modernization and management, digital infrastructure, and platform services—to create value at speed and scale.

Finance – helps clients reinvent financial performance and enterprise operations by supporting the CFO agenda, driving best-in-class performance, enabling insights and benchmarking, and transforming finance, accounting, and related processes through AI-powered, cloud-enabled capabilities.

Industry and Enterprise – helps clients reinvent core industry value chains and drive end-to-end, cross-functional reinvention intended to deliver growth and sustained enterprise value. Industry and Enterprise partners on reinvention across industries in Financial Services, Resources, Products, Health & Public Service and Communications, Media & Technology.

Song – helps clients reinvent how they grow by focusing on the end-to-end customer agenda—bringing together customer growth strategy, marketing, sales, service, commerce, design, digital products, AI and data to create customer-led growth.

Supply Chain and Engineering – helps clients leverage AI, data, digital technologies and deep engineering and manufacturing expertise across product and asset lifecycles to build competitive advantage. This includes redefining how products are designed, engineered, tested, sourced, supplied, manufactured, serviced, returned, and renewed, as well as digitally transforming how capital projects are planned, managed and executed.

Talent – helps clients reinvent how people and organizations work—delivering integrated approaches to leadership, talent and workforce, learning, operating model, change and experience, and HR to accelerate reinvention and equip people to work in new AI-enabled ways.

Reinvention Engines

Through our Reinvention Engines we develop stronger, more specialized skills; AI-enabled ways of delivering services; cutting-edge innovation; automation and some of the most advanced tools and methods. Together, our three Reinvention Engines help Accenture continuously innovate across our global network and bring new capabilities to clients faster.

AI and Data – builds and deepens our AI and data capabilities that enable enterprises to scale AI and realize value in their AI investment through developing cutting-edge AI and data skills and expertise, incubating emerging technologies and frontier AI partnerships, as well as developing AI platforms and assets that embed responsible, human-led AI into reinvented ways of working. It includes our Advanced AI and Data Centers on a global scale, which provide deep expertise and industry-relevant competency to develop, deploy, and continuously improve AI solutions.

Industry and Process – builds industry and process expertise and develops proprietary reinvention methods, AI-enabled ERP approaches, benchmarks, and intelligent operations capabilities. It is powered by our Intelligent Operations Centers and Global Delivery Centers, that are AI enabled and bring deep industry and process expertise to deliver business services at scale for clients.

Technology – builds advanced technology and ecosystem capabilities and related training and develops modern technology stacks through our Accenture Technology Centers, including through the early adoption of emerging technologies, research and development, and investments.

Ecosystem Partner Relationships

Our network of strong ecosystem partnerships, including our key technology partners, is important to our growth. Our partners come to us for help to drive adoption by enterprises, turn their technology into business outcomes and scale the adoption of AI. As the AI and data ecosystem continues to rapidly evolve, we have expanded these relationships and added new AI and data partnerships to expand our capabilities. Our key 18 ecosystem partners represented approximately 65% of fiscal 2026 revenue, with growth outpacing Accenture overall.

Assets and Platforms

We bring industry-specific solutions and services, as well as cross industry expertise, and we leverage our scale and global footprint, innovation capabilities, and strong ecosystem partnerships including our proprietary assets and platforms, such as GenWizard, SynOps and reinvention.AI, to deliver tangible value for our clients.

Network of Businesses

We are investing in a network of businesses focused on attractive growth areas. These businesses expand our capabilities in selected markets and are designed to operate with commercial and operating models tailored to their respective market opportunities. At the same time, each business is connected to our Reinvention Partners, described above, and benefits from Accenture’s client relationships, industry expertise, relationships across the technology ecosystem, investment capacity and global scale. Our network of businesses represented approximately 6% of our revenue in FY26.

The network currently includes businesses focused on areas such as operational technology security (through our acquisition of Dragos), AI and decision intelligence (through our acquisition of Faculty), capital projects (through the launch of Accenture Construct), data centers (through our majority acquisition of DLB), education (through Accenture LearnVantage), data (through our acquisition of Ookla), health (through our acquisition of the digital health platform Alfahealth), and mid-market solutions (through Avanade and our launch of Accenture Edge). We expect to continue investing in and scaling these businesses and may pursue additional areas where this model provides a competitive advantage.

Clients

We continue to strengthen our position as the reinvention partner of choice, serving more than 9,000 clients including approximately three quarters of the Fortune Global 100 and 500, and every G7 government. We believe our global footprint and breadth of capabilities mean we can serve more of our clients’ needs for large-scale transformations than any other player in the industry. Our deep and long-standing relationships mean we know our clients and their industries thoroughly. Our clients include large enterprises, emerging large enterprises, public sector entities and mid-market enterprises. We have long-term relationships and have partnered with 85% of our top 200 commercial clients and all of the G7 for 20 or more years, and have 317 Diamond clients, our largest client relationships.

Industry Groups

We believe the depth and breadth of our industry expertise is a key competitive advantage which allows us to bring client-specific industry solutions and services to our clients to accelerate reinvention and value creation. Our industry focus gives us an understanding of industry evolution, business issues and trends, industry operating models, capabilities and processes and new and emerging technologies. The breadth of our industry expertise enables us to create solutions that are informed by cross industry experience. We go to market through the following five industry groups within our geographic markets.

Our work with clients in the U.S. federal government is delivered through Accenture Federal Services, a U.S. company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Accenture LLP, and represented approximately 34% of Health & Public Service revenues, 14% of Americas revenues and 7% of total revenues in fiscal 2026. For risks related to our government contracting work, see Item 1A, Risk Factors—“Our work with government clients exposes us to additional risks inherent in the government contracting environment”.

People

We had approximately 814,000 people as of August 31, 2026, whose skills and specialization are a significant source of competitive differentiation. We serve clients at any given time in more than 120 countries, with offices and operations in 52 countries and the majority of our people are in India, the Philippines and the U.S.

Our Code of Business Ethics, which applies to all of our people, reinforces our core values and helps drive our culture of compliance, ethical conduct and accountability.

We were pleased that among our people who participated in the globally recognized Great Place To Work® Trust Index Survey™ in June 2026, 76% agreed that “Taking everything into account, I would say this is a great place to work.” In addition to earning the No. 4 spot on the World’s Best Workplaces™ 2025 list by Great Place To Work®, we are recognized as a Great Place To Work® in 16 countries, representing more than 80% of our people.

To drive reinvention, innovation must be at the forefront, which requires us to attract, develop and inspire top talent. Our focus is to create talent and unlock the potential of our people, to create strong leaders, and to help them achieve their professional and personal aspirations, while continuously evolving to meet new client needs.

During fiscal 2026, we invested approximately $1.0 billion in learning and professional development. With our digital learning platform, we delivered approximately 46 million training hours. We continually invest in strengthening the industry, technology, functional and AI skills of our people. As part of our strategic focus on driving reinvention and growth with AI, our global learning program integrates tools, platforms, and role-based learning, along with partnerships with leading educational institutions and certification programs. Additionally, Accenture’s industry learning framework and technology certification strategy are an important part of our competitive differentiation.

At the end of fiscal 2026, we had nearly 110,000 skilled AI and data practitioners, exceeding our three-year goal to double our AI and data workforce, through a combination of developing our people and hiring specialized talent.

We promoted approximately 124,000 people in fiscal 2026, demonstrating our continued commitment to creating vibrant careers and opportunities for our people.

We balance our supply of skills with changes in client demand. We do this through adjusting levels of new hiring and managing our attrition (both voluntary and involuntary). We believe people are drawn to our strong purpose, values and reputation.

Accenture’s total rewards consist of cash compensation, equity and a wide range of benefits. Our total rewards program is designed to recognize our people’s skills, contributions and career progression. Base salary, bonus and equity are tailored to the market where our people work and live. Certain rewards, like equity and bonuses, are opportunities for our people to share in the overall success of our company. As our people advance in their careers, they have greater opportunities to be rewarded. Accenture’s equitable rewards go beyond financial rewards and include health and well-being programs and practices—including physical, mental, emotional and financial well-being—that care for our people.

Global Reinvention Centers

A key differentiator is our global reinvention capability. We have one of the world’s largest networks of centers with deep capabilities that allow us to help our clients create exceptional business value. Our global approach provides scalable innovation, standardized processes, methods and tools, automation and AI, industry expertise and specialized capabilities, along with cost advantages, foreign language fluency, proximity to clients, and time zone advantages—to deliver high-quality solutions and services. Our global reinvention capability combines deep industry expertise with AI-enabled delivery, intelligent operations and digital engineering to help clients unlock new sources of value. Emphasizing hyper-productivity, quality, security, resilience, speed-to-market and predictability, our global delivery model supports all parts of our business to provide clients with price-competitive solutions and services.

Innovation and Intellectual Property

We are committed to developing leading-edge ideas and leveraging emerging technologies and we see innovation as a source of competitive advantage. We use our investment in R&D—on which we spent $1.0 billion, $0.8 billion and $1.2 billion in fiscal 2026, 2025 and 2024, respectively—to help clients address new realities in the marketplace and to face the future with confidence.

Our innovation experts work with clients across the world to imagine their future, build and co-create innovative business strategies and technology solutions, and then scale those solutions to sustain innovation. We believe our combination of people, platforms, assets and capabilities, including our global network of Innovation Centers, makes Accenture one of the leading strategic innovation partners for our clients.

This is all supported by our innovation approach, which includes Accenture Research, Accenture Ventures and Accenture Labs, our Innovation Centers as well as our Global Reinvention Centers. Our research and thought leadership teams help identify market, technology and industry trends. Accenture Ventures partners with and invests in growth-stage companies that create innovative enterprise technologies. Accenture Labs focuses on developing novel intellectual property (“IP”) as well as incubating and prototyping new concepts through applied research and development projects. Within this, we incubate and apply emerging technology innovations to business architectures, including robotics, quantum, computational biology and advanced AI along with many other disruptive technologies and ideas.

We harness our unique IP to deliver these innovation services. We have a global portfolio of patents and pending patent applications covering various technology areas, including AI, cloud, cybersecurity, automation, analytics and quantum. We leverage patent, trade secret and copyright laws as well as contractual arrangements and confidentiality procedures to protect the IP in our innovative solutions and services. These include our proprietary platforms, software, reusable knowledge capital, and other innovations. We also have policies to respect the IP rights of third parties, such as our clients, ecosystem partners, vendors and others.

To protect Accenture’s brands, we rely on IP laws and trademark registrations held around the world. Trademarks appearing in this report are the trademarks or registered trademarks of Accenture Global Services Limited, Accenture Global Solutions Limited, or third parties, as applicable.

Competition

Accenture operates in a highly competitive and rapidly changing global marketplace. We compete with a variety of organizations that offer solutions and services competitive with those we offer—but we believe no other company offers the full range of services at scale that Accenture does, which uniquely positions us in a highly competitive market. Our clients typically retain us on a non-exclusive basis.

Our competitors include large multinational IT service providers, including the services arms of large global technology providers; offshore IT service providers in lower-cost locations, particularly in India; accounting firms and consultancies that provide consulting, managed services and other IT solutions and services; solution or service providers that compete with us in a specific geographic market, industry or service area, including advertising agency holding companies, engineering services providers and technology start-ups, AI-native companies and software companies that can scale rapidly to focus on or disrupt certain markets and provide new or alternative products, end-to-end solutions, services, or commercial or delivery models; and in-house IT departments of large corporations that use their own resources rather than engage an outside firm, such as global capability centers (“GCCs”). Our ecosystem partners also offer solutions and services that compete with some of our solutions and services.

Information About Our Executive Officers

Our executive officers as of October 16, 2026 are as follows: