Julie Sweet

Julie Sweet is the chair and chief executive of Accenture, the global professional services and technology consulting firm with approximately 700,000 employees across more than 120 countries. She was appointed CEO in September 2019 and became chair in 2021, overseeing the company's transformation into one of the world's largest AI and cloud services businesses.

In the ai-jobs-power-money debate, Sweet made international headlines in early 2026 when she made AI-tool adoption a mandatory condition for leadership promotion at Accenture, with employee log-in activity monitored to enforce compliance. The policy positions Accenture as one of the most explicit large employers to tie career advancement directly to AI use — a significant counter-point to the HBR research by Davenport and Srinivasan finding that only 2% of layoffs citing AI followed actual deployment. Sweet's mandate illustrates the enrichment pathway rather than the elimination pathway: systematic requirement to adopt AI tools across management ranks, with promotion stakes attached.

Accenture under Sweet has invested heavily in AI capability, with multi-billion-dollar commitments to training its workforce in generative AI tools. Sweet's mandatory-adoption policy reflects her assessment that the companies that use AI most systematically will outcompete those that do not, and that culture change at scale requires formal accountability rather than voluntary uptake.