AUSTIN, Texas — Accenture, an information technology services and consulting company, is slashing more jobs from its Austin workforce.
According to Accenture, it will be laying off 218 employees who are working at a facility in The Domain. This news comes after Accenture laid off more than 500 other employees at the same facility in May.
Then earlier 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."
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."
In order to help, the company will invest "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.
Anant Agarwal, the founder of edX, a global learning platform, said moves like these are reflective of a shift from the computer age to the AI age. Agarwal said "upskilling," or learning additional skills, will be key for many workers.
"If you are a computer programmer, you will very quickly need to upskill to be able to apply AI in your job. You will need to learn how to use AI as a copilot that can help you write code better," Agarwal said. "There are new jobs being created, like, you know, AI, engineers, AI analysts. And many of them will replace the more traditional programmers."
UT Austin Computer Science professor Peter Stone believes we will need to "ramp up" how we educate people in the field to keep up with the ever-changing world of AI tools like ChatGPT.
"It's going to be really important for teachers and all educators to be familiar with the tools and what they can do and then shape lesson plans around you know being able to teach students how to use them correctly and responsibly," Stone said.
Agarwal said upskilling will need to happen on a mass level.
"A billion people around the world need to be upskilled and very quickly," Agarwal said. "And it's so much harder to hire new people."
Agarwal believes it is much easier for a company to upskill its workers than to lay them off and hire completely new people, so constantly learning and updating your skills will be essential to staying competitive in the market.
"We're in the new world where we have to continue upskilling and reskilling just to stay current. If we don't do that, we become stagnant, the future is going to be very bleak," Agarwal said. "So my one piece of advice to people would be to become lifelong and continuous learners."
According to Accenture, the investment into AI will take place over three years.
You can read more about Accenture's investment in AI on the company's website.
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