Good morning. I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. It is my pleasure to welcome all of you in the room, as well as those that are joining us via audiocast. The theme of today's conference is Innovating in the New. We have an excellent program lined up for you this morning, and I'm pleased to say that we have a number of our leaders here to share that story with you. Let me remind you of some of the matters we will discuss in today's conference, including our business outlook are forward-looking and as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in our Risk Factors heading in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other documents filed and furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
These risks and uncertainties may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied during our presentation and are not a guarantee of our actual results. As always, Accenture assumes no obligation to update any statements made in these presentations. I'd also like to remind you that we will not be providing you with an update for or making any comments related to our third-quarter fiscal 2018. Also note, during the presentations today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for our investors and our analysts. You'll be able to find materials from today's session, including a reconciliation to non-GAAP to GAAP measures posted to the Investor Relations section of our website. Once again, thank you for being here, and it is now my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Pierre Nanterme.
Thank you, Angie, and good morning, everyone. Needless to say that I'm just delighted to be here with all of you and to have the opportunity again to meet with you more personally and to have the dialogue. To be honest, speaking from my heart, I missed you a lot, these last few months, and it's just a pleasure to be here. Delighted to welcome you to our Investor and Analyst Conference. I mean, many of you mentioned that we didn't have one last year, and it's been now probably a couple of years. As we said, Accenture, it's good to have an Investor and Analyst Conference when you have something to say and something to share. I really hope and expect that you will see with all the presentations that indeed we continue to change a lot, this organization.
We have a lot to share with you, which I expect you're going to find relevant and interesting. It's absolutely fantastic to have so many of you with us today in New York, but I want as well to welcome those of you who are joining with audiocast, you will be able to participate as well to this event. I'm going to start with sharing with you a dilemma I had a few days ago. To be totally transparent and honest, I was part of the French delegation with the President Macron to meet with your President Donald Trump. I had a very perceived complex choice. Should I be in Washington with President Trump and President Macron, or should I be in New York with all of you?
It has taken probably two seconds to solve the problem. I'm just delighted to be in New York with you today and sharing what I'm absolutely passionate about, the strategy of Accenture and what it is we are doing to make this company leading in the new and leading in the marketplace. Moving to the agenda. Our theme today is Innovating in the New, and I'm pleased to be joined by several members of the Accenture leadership who will bring this to life to you. I'm sure they're going to be very passionate, convincing. They're going to drive massive energy because I know that they love their job, and they're always trying to do their best to solve for Accenture as well as solving for clients. Talking about innovation, I mean, the name of the game today is clearly about innovation.
This morning, we're going to provide an update on how we apply innovation at an amazing scale across industries and across the world, as well as anticipate the next wave of technology disruption. Now let me start with the strategy we have been executing successfully for now about five years, since 2013. A strategy we call Ambition 2020 at that time. At the time where we're starting the effort, we recognized that the technology revolution was starting to disrupt and transform companies and entire industries globally. We decided to take bold strategic actions to drive our differentiation, not only to better serve our clients, but as also to meet our objective of growth in a new digital world. Today, simply said, our strategy has three key building blocks.
First, very important, is our end-to-end business architecture aligned around distinct and highly focused businesses, which you know now very well. Accenture Strategy, Accenture Consulting, Accenture Digital, Accenture Security, Accenture Technology, and Accenture Operations. We are competing at scale in each of these businesses, and they are global leaders in their own right. From shaping strategy for the C-suite, to delivering cutting edge and leading edge solution, to running operation on behalf of our clients. Only Accenture today has the full range of capabilities in an industry context to integrate and deliver end-to-end services and commit to a tangible business outcome for our clients. This is why we build this pretty unique and powerful business architecture. Second is our very rapid and successful rotation to the new. Our definition of the new is very clear, is all about digital, cloud, and security-related services.
Our growth in the new has truly been amazing. Just three years ago in fiscal year 2015, revenues from the new were $10 billion. This year, they will be well over $20 billion, approximately 60% of total revenue. Needless to say that we've been rotating at an amazing speed, but as well as at an amazing scale. Today, we are a market leader in digital, cloud, and security. The only provider operating at scale again, end-to-end in the new. From creating digital experiences with Accenture Interactive, you will hear more about this later, to mining data to create new business models with Accenture Applied Intelligence, to reinventing manufacturing through Accenture Industry X.0 we launched recently and we will present today, to building the most effective cloud solutions, and to create cyber trust through Accenture Security. Kelly Bissell will present later on this Accenture Security.
Needless to say that in the current context, creating trust in the digital environment has become a very important agenda for the society. With these broad capabilities, Accenture is uniquely positioned to support our clients in their digital transformation journey. The third building block of our strategy is innovation, which increasingly is at the heart of everything we do every day at Accenture. We're creating quite a unique innovation architecture, which does integrate our capabilities across Research, Ventures, Labs, and Studios to pioneer new ways of collaborating with clients, co-creation, if you will, to develop and deliver disruptive innovations. Through our global network of now more than 100 world-class innovation centers around the world, we work side by side with our clients, with startups, as well as with universities every day to co-create the innovative digital solution of tomorrow.
This is a very powerful approach, and we will again elaborate on this this morning. In areas like blockchain, extended reality, and quantum computing, we are already investing and executing on what we're calling the next new technologies. You will see how we operate in our core, in what we're calling the new. We scale rapidly, and we already anticipate what we're calling the new new or the next new. Quite simply, our innovation architecture makes us extremely relevant to clients and position us to anticipate and capture future waves of growth to stay ahead of the curve in the new, which is very important for us. When all these waves are coming at speed to you, it's very important you're taking the position of the market leader. You anticipate, and you move ahead of the competition.
In addition to the investments we have made to be innovation led, as I just mentioned, we have accelerated our strategy and strengthened our differentiation by stepping up our investment in strategic acquisition, we talked a lot about it, in building assets and solution, and IP, and in hiring and developing the most relevant talent. In the last 5 years, we have deployed $5 billion in about 90 strategic acquisitions, a majority of them in the new, of course. For Accenture, and this is fundamental, acquisitions are an engine to drive organic growth by adding key capabilities that enhance our differentiation in the marketplace. We also invest about $700 million a year in research and development, and Paul Daugherty later will mention how he's leveraging these investments to anticipate the new new.
Our intellectual property is an important asset that drives differentiation and value, and we now have more than 6,000 patent and patent pending applications in areas like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, drones, virtual agents, Internet of Things, and other platforms. As a professional services company, our people ultimately make the difference in our success. I'm particularly proud of the quality and depth of our leadership across our now 7,000 managing directors. In fiscal '17, we made significant investment to even further strengthen our bench, promoting or hiring nearly 1,000 new managing directors with highly differentiated skills and expertise, especially in the new. At the same time, to ensure that all of our people remain relevant. We invested more than $900 million a year on learning and professional development, including substantial investment in re-skilling. Again, this is something we will elaborate on later in the presentation.
I feel very privileged to lead our company of now 442,000 talented people working in 53 countries around the world. I want to take this opportunity to thank each of them for bringing their unique knowledge, dedication, passion, and energy to our clients and our business each and every day. We also leverage our unique role in the technology ecosystem to bring the best solutions to clients. Accenture is the largest independent technology services provider and the leading partner of all key players. We work hard, very hard, to continually strengthen those partnerships. Over the last two years, we have expanded our relationship with all of our largest ecosystem partners, including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP. In addition, we formed a new partnership with Apple, including a dedicated iOS practice to drive innovative business solutions.
We have the right strategy of leading and innovating in the new, delivering end-to-end services supported by our investments and ecosystem partnerships. The final ingredient is our ability to deploy our services at scale in the most attractive industries and geographic markets around the world. With our broad capabilities and deep industry expertise across our 13 specialized industry group, we are well-positioned to operate at the core of our clients' businesses to deliver their most complex, mission-critical transformation program. Accenture, of course, has a large global footprint. Yet, we have a particular focus on growing our largest markets. I'm thinking about the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Spain, and Brazil, which account for about 80% of total revenue.
I'm absolutely delighted to report to you this morning that in every one of these countries, we have grown revenues in local currency at a double digit or high single digit compound annual rate for the last three fiscal year. I'm especially pleased that Accenture is now the market leader in Europe as well as in the U.S., and we are rapidly gaining market share in the growth market. At the end of the day, our goal is to better serve our clients, and the true test of the success of our strategy is the long and enduring client relationship we have built. Indeed, 98 of our 100 largest clients have been with us for at least 10 years. It's all about trust and confidence.
Today, we are proud to work with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500, including 95 of the top 100. The best evidence of our relevance, differentiation, and competitiveness is our growing roster of Diamond clients, our largest relationships with many of the world's most iconic brands. We keep adding more and more big clients, and now we have a record 175 Diamonds, compared with 138 four years ago. I would like, again, to take the opportunity to thank all of our clients for the trust and the confidence they have put in Accenture over the years. In closing, we clearly have the right strategy, and we have executed very well. Now, in my country, we would say we have executed reasonably well. I'm here in the U.S., and I can claim that we have probably executed extremely well.
We have achieved a dramatic transformation of our business while consistently meeting our financial objective, including delivering very substantial returns to our shareholders. [David] will comment on this, about our performance. For the last four fiscal years, we have grown revenues significantly faster than the market, gaining market share, delivering strong earnings per share and free cash flow, and returned $16 billion in cash to our shareholders. As you listen, and you will listen to our leaders today, I know you will feel our commitment and passion for continuing to execute our strategy to serve our clients even better and ultimately to continue to deliver growth and value for our shareholders. Now, let me introduce my friend, partner, and colleague, Omar Abbosh, our Chief Strategy Officer. This gentleman is driving all the investments that keep us relevant and differentiated in the marketplace. Over to you, Omar.
Thanks, Pierre.
Yes. Yes.
Thank you, Pierre, and good morning, everyone. As Pierre said, I'm Accenture's Chief Strategy Officer, and in that role, responsible for Accenture's strategy and executing to make it happen through driving all our investments to differentiate Accenture in the marketplace. I've been in this role now for just over three years, with a mandate, a specific mandate from Pierre to help establish our leadership in the new, and I'll get into that. We do that through specific growth strategies in each of the units of our business and aligning our investments to those growth strategies. My growth and strategy team has members in each of our operating groups and each of our business units, we work together to make sure, first and foremost, that we understand the trends in our clients' industry so we understand the sources of disruption and change in those clients' industries.
Secondly, I work very closely with Paul Daugherty, our Chief Technology & Innovation Officer, you'll hear from Paul later as well, to understand the technology trends and the emerging patterns, in combination with the industry trends, start to form a view about what the real market growth opportunities are for Accenture in the new areas that we want to pursue. Finally, we align our organic and inorganic investments against those growth areas to drive our ultimate business results. On leadership in the new, we believe you know very well what we mean when we say the new. As Pierre just said, we're very pleased with our rotation to date, expecting more than $20 billion in revenues in fiscal 2018 in the new, representing approximately 60% of our total net revenues. Those capabilities are Interactive, mobility, analytics, cloud, and s ecurity. You're familiar with those.
What we've learned is as we scale an area, the new itself evolves as well. For example, in mobility, as app mobility became pervasive across all the technology work that we do in all of Accenture, we dove deeper into the Internet of Things part of mobility, combined it with product design, with connected platforms, have come up with a new business unit that we call Industry X.0 that Mike will talk about, that is all about digital in the industrial space, serving industrial clients with all the possibilities that digital brings. Similarly, analytics, we built it to scale on data science, and algorithms. Evolving that capability to include new capabilities around machine learning and deep learning, helping our clients transform their business models with artificial intelligence in what we call Applied Intelligence, is just our next logical extension.
In future, when we discuss the new, you can expect to hear us talk about Interactive, Industry X.0, Applied Intelligence, cloud, and security. What do I mean by establishing leadership? I mean, Pierre touched on this. First and foremost, there are 3 things. Relevance, client relevance. How can we ensure that we're super relevant in these high-growth areas for our clients? We achieve this through a very deep industry and technology domain knowledge that we bring through our strategy consulting and digital teams. Secondly, it means major differentiation versus our competitors. We do that through our innovation strength, our investment agenda, and our ecosystem partnerships and relationships. Thirdly, it means scale, leading at scale. We want to be number 1 in each of the domains that we choose as a priority growth area, and we want to be able to have talent at scale.
We want to be able to deploy that best talent globally at scale. The combination of the client relevance, the differentiation, and the scale makes us incredibly competitive and allows us to compete very well in the markets that we choose so that we can lead. Underpinning all of this is our investments. Pierre asked me to elaborate a little bit more on our investment approach for us today. Our overall capital allocation approach is super disciplined, very focused on maximizing value for our shareholders. A key element of which is the investment strategy we put together for our organic and inorganic investments. As mentioned, I focus on managing our investments, firstly by working with our operating group chiefs on what we see the dynamics are in the industries, then with Paul and others on the technology patterns and emerging trends.
That helps us select the areas we want to invest in. Our investment strategy in targeting these new capabilities, we're constantly thinking about how do we build the capabilities and deepen industry domain experience and manage the right balance across the geographic mix of our portfolio. With inorganic investments, which I think you know we use as a trigger to stimulate organic growth in new areas, the way origination works when we're looking for targets and deals to make is we try really hard to work with targets ahead of time in our clients' organizations, testing the hypothesis that combining their capabilities and ours is indeed valuable for customers. We also spend an inordinate amount of time to create real alignment with the founders and the key employees around the vision and the growth plans.
It's only when we're convinced about the market relevance of the combination and the alignment of the leadership that we then proceed into our disciplined process around transacting and the whole approach led by our capital committee. This means, of course, that I work very closely with David Rowland, our CFO, on the deployment of our investment capital against our strategic priorities. We focus on the business case of each and every target to ensure that we really believe that the economics are accretive to Accenture, that there's a strong cultural fit, and that we have a very strong operating approach of how the thing will work in the market. Once the deal is done, our integration approach, again, is very disciplined. We think of it in two parts.
The back office part, again, is super detailed, and we can bring a company onto the Accenture platform in a matter of weeks if that's the right thing to do. Our primary focus, however, is on what we call the front office alignment. How will the go-to-market work? How will the services and products of the combination evolve for our clients over time? How will we, most importantly of all, manage the energy, the vision, the motivation of the founders and the key employees in the combination? In the three years after a deal is consummated, we have what we call our look back process, where we ask the deal sponsoring team to come back to the capital committee on a periodic basis, where we review our performance overall against the original economics of the business case, on cultural fit and on retention rates.
We're constantly trying very hard to learn the lessons and learn the best practices of what really works with all of the deals that we do over time and bring that back into our investment process. What we find is that this discipline holds us all to account, not just the deal teams themselves, but also all of us on the capital committee who are responsible for making the calls about whether or not we proceed on something. That discipline keeps us grounded and honest. As you can imagine, this process that I'm describing to you is continual and dynamic. We're not sort of defining a multi-year plan and then following it out that way. We're constantly adjusting to patterns and moves in the market and rapidly rethinking about how we need to position Accenture.
For example, Brian will talk about Accenture Interactive, but if we go back in time, our initial acquisitions at Accenture Interactive were around e-commerce, digital marketing, and content management. What we've evolved over time to say is, okay, experience is really important, and so design is important. We do deals around companies like Fjord, Karmarama, and Rothco or product design with Matter, or immersive reality, new ways of visualization with Mackevision. Similarly, in the analytics space, initially, we may have purchased companies with design tools like i4C, but then we go deeper in data science with OPS Rules and Gapso, and then with a wider spectrum of analytic and search technologies with Technologica and Search Technologies. As Pierre mentioned, over the last five years, we've completed 90 acquisitions, nine, zero, 90 acquisitions, and deployed about $5 billion of capital in our priority areas.
This combination of very discrete growth plans in each of our areas, combined with a strong investment agenda, is indeed what is heavily behind Accenture's recent performance, and it fuels our organic growth. On the organic side, we invest a lot organically as well, and our people are telling our offerings. In fiscal 2017, we invested $700 million in R&D, and we invested $900 million on talent and professional development. We're investing in thought leadership, in new offerings and solutions for our customers across our industry, technology, and functional practices. We invest in proprietary technology platforms and tools such as myWizard that Bhaskar will talk about in the technology space. And all of this helps us drive efficiencies in our technology and operations businesses using automation and AI.
You can be sure that each move that we make, we take our learnings, and we keep bringing them back into our entire investment and strategy formulation process to make sure that Accenture, as we scale the new, are constantly looking to evolve and think about what comes next and the next new, and Paul will describe this later. I'm really pleased today to be joined by three of our awesome leaders, three of my friends, who will talk to you about their businesses and how they're driving each of them to become number one in their areas and put color on what we mean about scaling and leading in the new. First is Brian. Brian Whipple runs Accenture Interactive.
He's been instrumental in taking this thing from inception through a massive growth phase that has made it a super successful digital agency, experience agency that Brian will describe. I remember when I very first met Brian, I thought to myself, "Okay, this guy's ditched his suit." I think he was in a baseball cap in our meeting, and I knew that he was yanking us into the modern era and things were going to be different. Over to you, Brian.
All right. Thanks, Omar. Thanks. Thanks, Omar, and thank you, Pierre. I am thrilled to be here for a few minutes to talk to you about Accenture Interactive. It has been a privilege to run that on behalf of Accenture for the last seven or eight years. I think I have been here around that long. I will get right to it. Some of you are, probably most of you, are somewhat familiar with Accenture Interactive at this point, but there have been a number of things that have happened in the last, really the last, I would say, two to three years that have dramatically changed our landscape and given birth to such a massive opportunity. I want to talk to you just a little bit about what those are.
First of all, in terms of from a digital consumer, what the experience is and what their expectations are for a company to deliver to them, it used to be that, say, if you were a retail bank, that you would want to know what the next retail bank is doing and one up them or what this other financial institution is doing. That is not the case at all right now. What a retail bank wants to know is something like, how do I create an efficient, seamless experience like Uber or like PayPal or like Amazon? These innovations in broader industry regarding a consumer's relationship with a brand have permeated everywhere. Consumer expectations are very different. That is the first thing. The second thing, that the convergence of marketing and technology has been massive and great, but it is also tremendously complicated.
Many of you have probably seen LUMAscape-like charts of all the different players, whether it be online advertising or e-commerce or personalization or a campaign. It is massively confusing for our clients, which of course creates great opportunities for folks like us to help them. Thirdly, if you remember one thing about what is different, this is what I would suggest. It used to be that brands are built through essentially push advertising. Advertising was created to create an emotive message that would resonate with someone to receive that message, and over time, if that message was delivered consistently and numerically enough times, that message would be received. That is really much less the case today.
Instead, what has happened is that brands are built through an amalgamation of where customers experience all those touch points, whether it be a website, a mobile app, an in-store experience, including television, radio, and other traditional advertising vehicles. It is an amalgamation of those touch points. Now it is the holistic experience with a particular brand and the question of, is that brand true to what they say? That is now what is defining a brand. These three things have given birth to this phenomenon in the market and have changed very much what the overall opportunity is in CMO and broader marketing landscape. That has given genesis to what Accenture Interactive is focusing on now and has focused on in the last couple of years. We are essentially an experience agency. What does that mean?
It means, yes, we focus on creative and have some of the best creative minds in the world, but we are also a very strong business consultancy and also a technology powerhouse. It is the combination of those three things that creates the experience agency that is addressing today's CMO market. This has borne significant fruit for Accenture Interactive. Some of you I've seen years ago at this conference, and we've grown up. It's a big play now. Yes, we are ranked as leaders in digital experiences in leading reports such as Gartner, Forrester, and the like. We have creative awards now, whether it be Cannes Lions or Effies and things like that, if you're familiar with such things. We have that. We, of course, have top industry relationships with the top partners, whether that be Adobe or Salesforce or SAP Hybris or IBM Watson Customer Engagement.
It's not just that. As you probably know, we've been ranked in Ad Age for the last two years as the largest and fastest-growing digital agency in the world. We now are more than 25,000 people strong in Accenture, delivering Accenture Interactive work around the globe. In FY 2017, we did about $6.5 billion in revenue for our clients. That represents a 35% year-over-year growth number over the year before, and I think most of you have seen that is fairly consistent with the years before. We're very pleased to take advantage of this market opportunity, and it's really because of that phenomenon of change in the marketplace that I described. How are we different? Let me tell you a little bit about that.
First of all, we do not enter a client relationship to integrate a specific marketing technology or a cost takeout or a process redesign. We do not enter there. We enter by defining the experience. We are experience-led. We have very large practices in commerce, in content, in design, and in marketing processes and campaigns. They are successful in their own right. However, it is the tying of them together in inventing what a new experience can be for a client's customers that really defines us. We lead with what should the new experience be to research and buy a car, to try on clothes, to pursue a financial product from the purchase of a home, things like that. We start there and start initially technology agnostic and correspond our direction with what the client needs actually are. That's one. It's very different from other players.
Secondly, this is a huge point. We do this on the shoulders of Accenture. This is incredibly significant in that it could mean logistical things like expanding in new markets in terms of real estate, in terms of legal arrangements with foreign governments. Think about it. Easier to start businesses in places like that because of the Accenture footprint. Most of all, it's really the stuff Pierre talked about. It's that Accenture is already a trusted business advisor for many of the top companies in the world. Bringing in something that may have been new to that client four or five years ago, such as Accenture Interactive, we are already trusted by their executive suite, and that, frankly, makes my job a little bit easier. Being on the shoulders of Accenture is a critical thing for us.
Third point of differentiations, I've talked about designing these experiences for our clients, you know that we build and architect these experiences, which can be global and can be very complicated. We are also in the business of running and managing these experiences for clients. That is a significant point of differentiation for Accenture Interactive. As you know, we've, in some respects, raided the market of talent, and I'm lucky to have many top talented executives come to Accenture Interactive over the last couple of years. Recently, Nikki Mendonça has come to us, and she's going to tell you on video a little bit about the managing and the run component of these customer experiences. We could roll the video, please.
The convergence of marketing and technology has created new demands from clients in the areas of data analytics, content personalization, and dynamic delivery across all consumer touch points. Clients are now looking for expert global partners who can activate, operate, and scale marketing programs that deliver increased impact and business performance. They are looking to drive more efficiency and effectiveness from their marketing investments to demonstrate the effect to both bottom and top-line financial results. For years, clients have relied on Accenture Operations for multi-year partnerships to manage aspects of their IT infrastructure, supply chain, and various business processes. The Accenture Interactive Operations team is now doing this work for many marketing clients as well. This is a naturally scalable business that fits well with the Accenture Interactive's mission to deliver the best experiences for our clients.
In effect, we are the executional engineers working side by side with the experience architects, delivering seamless brand strategy and activation every place, everywhere, every time. We focus on the speed, agility, and scale clients need in their marketing operations to compete more effectively and offer the promise of performance via agreed business outcomes through a managed service model. There are a myriad number of opportunities for Accenture in this space, I am thrilled to bring my global brand experience to such a scalable marketing offering.
Well, thank you to Nikki for that. She gave you a little flavor there for our perspective on actually managing these customer experiences intelligently for our clients. Thank you, Nikki, for that. Many of you are familiar with many of the acquisitions that Omar and Pierre referred to briefly, clearly, Accenture Interactive has been active in that space. I want to make it clear that from our perspective, we do not acquire any company for the purposes of adding revenue. That has never been nor will ever be the case and is not in our strategic roadmap to do so. We make acquisitions to spur organic growth, clearly. There are really only two circumstances in which we do this.
Number 1, we need to add a new capability, or, sometimes they're both, number 2, we need to scale an existing capability, but perhaps in a new geography. I can look at all these acquisitions, some 15 or so in the last maybe 3 years order of magnitude that we've done, and they all fit into basically the first bucket or the second bucket. The idea is to grow them organically integrated with the rest of Accenture Interactive. We are one Accenture Interactive around the globe, one global team. An example of this would be when we bought Fjord about five, nine company. They had, in 2013, about five studios, approximately 150 designers throughout the five.
Today, we are more than 1,000 designers strong in 27 studios around the globe, and they do great service design work and are often the tip of the spear for other work in Accenture Interactive and really work throughout Accenture. That's an example of how we've grown that organically. That's been a very successful play for us here at Accenture Interactive. It's been a very successful few years. I believe we're very strongly positioned. Accenture Interactive is actively involved with three-quarters of the current Fortune 100 in terms of those client relationships. We have things like the experience agency for Maserati. That's fun. We are the experience agency for the Vatican Ministry of Communications. Also fun in a different way. With things like the innovation partner for Disney StudioLAB.
I'm very fortunate that we have great people from around the globe working at Accenture Interactive on these types of things on the shoulders of Accenture, and it's been an awesome ride. Back to you, Omar.
Thanks, Brian. Thank you, Brian. You see Accenture Interactive is so successful, and we have wonderful leaders like Brian. Let me bring up our next one. Narendra Mulani runs Accenture Applied Intelligence, and this guy typically raises the IQ in any room by a few points whenever he walks in. Over to you.
Thank you, Omar. I'm sure there are no lack of high IQ and EQ folks in this room today. It's great to be here. As Omar said, I'm Narendra Mulani, the Chief Analytics Officer for Accenture. While Accenture Applied Intelligence is new, it's really been a natural evolution of the business I've helped shape since 2012. Let me start by talking a little bit about our scale, our capabilities, and some of the recognition we have in the market. Accenture's deep understanding of industries and functions, when combined with data analytics and now artificial intelligence, has created a really unique business opportunity for us. It's fueling the experiences that Brian just talked about, and it's helping us work with our clients to reimagine many of the core processes that drive their businesses today.
We call this business Applied Intelligence, and what fuels it really is the fact that we have 19,500 people focused on Applied Intelligence today, including 6,000 of them that are really deep in artificial intelligence technologies and data science. The talent goes across our mix, which is consulting, engineering, data science, and we've been able to attract many PhDs and researchers to leverage our IP, which today consists of about 900 patents in the place and has helped us build 250 apps and solutions that I'll talk about shortly. We've been recognized really over the last couple of years as a market leader in this space by the industry analyst community, by Gartner and others, for our completeness of vision, as well as the differentiation that we have been able to bring with scale in data and analytics.
You've all heard the hype around artificial intelligence, but what we see when we engage with our clients is a real hunger to apply these new capabilities to be more competitive, either to open new markets, create new revenue streams, or build new business models, and do all this with scale across the globe. I'm going to bring this to life by bucketing it in three big areas and giving you some client examples. The first area, of course, is deeper insights to drive and define new strategies. You're all aware of how competitive the retail marketplace is today. In this very competitive environment, we're helping retailers understand what drives traffic to their various channels, whether it's the store, online, or mobile.
The way we do this is by integrating today dozens of internal and external data sources, whether it's SKU data, geolocation data, web browsing data, et cetera, to be able to leverage machine learning to truly understand what's driving the patterns of traffic and help our clients define strategies that will allow them to attract traffic in an extremely targeted manner. The second area is to create more effective and targeted outcomes for our clients. Today, the ability to understand individual preferences and behaviors is allowing businesses to move from looking at markets of millions to looking at a million market of one. To be able to get to the real individual or the patient. This opportunity for us crosses across healthcare, retail, banking, and many other consumer-facing businesses.
For example, our data science team helped an online insurance client reduce churn and improve profitable growth by building an algorithm that predicted the customer lifetime value of all their current clients, as well as every potential client in their target market. After figuring out the customer lifetime value, we matched each customer with the right promotion and the right offer to attract the customer, as well as drive profitable growth. The final, but probably the largest area, is going to be providing process efficiencies at scale through artificial intelligence. This is best brought to life by one of my favorite examples, which is where we implemented an intelligent anti-money laundering and know-your-customer solution that leverages a combination of technologies, which is what applied intelligence is about. Robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and analytics as a service to help this bank increase compliance while reducing operating costs.
It helped fundamentally in two ways. It reduced costs. We took out $230 million of cost over a couple of years, but most importantly, reduced the false positives by about 60%, which really reduces human intervention, scales the process, makes it more reliable, and we really help the bank hit both their cost structure as well as improve compliance globally for them. With these examples, I want to talk about what makes us different and how we built our strategy, and we built it on three planks: solutions, talent, and platforms. As I said before, we really understand where the application of AI can make a difference, and we've built what we call intelligent industry and functional solutions, partnering with our OGs, our operating groups, as well as industries, and figured that out.
What we've done is build a set of cloud-based apps, algorithms, and data models that all come together, say in healthcare or in retail, and we call this our intelligent industry solutions. They essentially embed our IP and allow us to focus on accelerating client value. The second, and the one I'm most proud of, is our talent. Today, we have over 3,000 data scientists that are deeply versed and constantly updating their skills in machine learning and AI. Most importantly, they are organized by global centers of excellence in major application areas across our functions and industries. Finally, we have invested in what we call the Accenture Insights Platform, which is a cloud-based platform that embeds our IP in those apps and intelligent solutions.
What the platform essentially does is it takes care of the heavy lifting, data ingestion, clean, making sure the data's in the right way, applying machine learning, creating the visualization, creating workflows for apps, et cetera, so we can get to client outcomes faster and we can accelerate. AIP is our acceleration engine and allows us to scale, as you can imagine. We take all this, and just as Brian pointed out, we scale through Accenture's industry and geographic footprint. We have these intelligence solutions and apps. We've organized our talent with our five operating groups, and we have applied intelligence teams today in 34 countries. I believe we are unique in our depth and scale that creates value for our clients.
Frankly, there's no better way to bring this to life than to hear from our Chief Data Scientist, Dr. Athina Kanioura, who's going to roll on the video.
Hi, this is Athina Kanioura. I'm the Global Data Science Lead for Accenture, responsible for more than 3,000 data scientists, helping our clients transform with the power of data and insights, driving their growth agenda and operational efficiency. Across Applied Intelligence, we have more than 20 industrialized solutions that focus on specific industry problems that help our clients do things differently and at scale. Intelligent Revenue Growth solution helps our clients turn a market of million into a million markets of one, driving 1% of top-line growth to bottom-line growth by transforming the way our clients make decisions about commercial planning, portfolio rationalization, POS potential, and execution by embedding data and intelligence within their commercial processes.
For one of our big alcohol beverage clients, we have been deploying our IRG solution to drive incremental growth in promotions of the range of 25%, also allowing them to drive incremental revenue of 2%-4%. Enhancing customer care helps our clients transform customer service by deploying virtual agents, robotic process automation, content analytics, predictive analytics models, and cognitive services. We really manage to transform the way our clients optimize customer service and customer care. For a major telco client, we managed to increase customer satisfaction by more than 50% and reduce churn by 10%. With the power of technology, our ecosystem partners, and of course, our Accenture Insights Platform, my data scientists can solve for the unique problems our clients are having, because now they have the Accenture Insights Platform and the full model automation framework.
I think Athina does a great job of bringing to life how we bring platforms, our industry in-depth knowledge, and most importantly, the talent that she stands for, to bring this to life and build a new business called Accenture Applied Intelligence. Thank you, Omar. Back to you.
Sure, Narendra. Thank you. It does not take tons of imagination to see that bringing the power of data analytics and AI into our clients to help them apply intelligence to transform all their business processes is a massive market opportunity for us. Next up, and last and certainly not least, is Kelly Bissell. It has been a very big pleasure for me personally to work with Kelly on helping build up our Accenture Security business. Kelly is highly knowledgeable, highly regarded in the industry itself. More than that, Kelly is someone who cares passionately about really helping clients take on and solve cybersecurity risks. In other words, he is genuinely making a difference in helping the way the world works and lives. Kelly, over to you.
Thanks, Omar. Thank you. A little bit more than 2 years ago, we made security a strategic priority for the firm. I will tell you, this is why. As we help our clients move to that digital economy, it comes with those. Those innovations, what comes with it is risk in a different way. As companies move from maybe one business model that is a broadcast function, and they move to interactive, it brings those technology risks. Let us fast-forward to 2 years to today. We are fast approaching $2 billion in revenue for security. That is really incredible in that short amount of time. Not only that, we have more than 5,800 highly trained security practitioners that really help our clients be safe and secure. We offer the full spectrum of security services. Underpinning all that, we are growing more than 3 times the market for security.
How are we growing so fast? How are we doing this? We did a little novel approach of listening to clients, understanding their problems, and here is what it is. They are really tired of buying off-the-shelf products from vendors, having to cobble together multiple solutions that do not really interact, and then really put band-aid solutions on it. That is in even today's environment, much less helping them move to the new. What we have done is we have come together and built really three areas of focus to help us help our clients. First thing is we have disrupted the market by being global scale. We are not really a silo, we are not really an insular group, but really embedded in everything you have heard previously. With Brian's team, we get to leverage the great thinking out of Narendra's team, and that we really work as one unified team.
That is very different from other providers in the marketplace, whether it be audit groups or boutiques that are local. Not only do we work on a global scale, but we industrialize this problem. As our clients have a normal or a common 55 sort of different tool sets that they have to put together, we built a platform. We pulled the key vendors in the marketplace, integrated these things together, sprinkled some really important data analytics and machine learning around it from Narendra's team, and really started solving the problem better than the clients could ever do before. That industrialization and global scale is super important. The second thing, not every industry is the same. The risks associated with each industry is different. Here is what we have done. We have divided by industry that aligns with the rest of Accenture.
Let me give you two examples that will make this make sense. If you look at an oil and gas company, we have to really understand what happens, not at just the corporate office, but what happens at the wellhead, the refinery plant, the trading system of energy and power, and all the way to the gas pump. If you're a pharmaceutical company, the risks are totally different. It is joint ventures, drug research, clinical trials, manufacturing, distribution, all the way to the consumer. What we do in security is look at the entire value chain of the business. Makes sense, right? To understand the vulnerabilities associated with each step of the way. That's why industry really is important. Let me give you an example, a client example, of how this works.
As we help clients transform to the new. Well, I'll give you an example of the BBC. Old broadcast business, they moved to an interactive business. With that, again, comes challenges. We build in not only all the interactive business that Brian's team and so forth talked through, but how do we make it safe? How do we make it secure? This is where we get to be able to enable tens of millions of concurrent users signing on securely. We get to be able to really protect the client from all these attacks that might occur, and really keep the profile of the individual user safe, their preferences, their credit card data. This is how we enable the business to transform themselves into a new age. For me, it's pretty exciting as a security professional. That's the second thing is industry.
The third thing is around collective intelligence. It's not just the team, the 5,000 some odd security professionals working together. We don't stop there. We also team with Narendra's team to build the next generation. We have five labs around the world. We have Washington, D.C., Tel Aviv, Prague, Dublin, and India. This helps us really focus on various problems that we're going to solve, not band-aid, but truly solve in the marketplace for our clients. We also team with our integration partners, our vendor partners, to create the next generation of security tools that actually work well and better. Again, we don't stop there. We also team with security thought leaders around the world, our clients, academics, and others, to create a forum to talk through the big problems that we have.
How do we, Accenture, take these and innovate solutions that don't just solve one client, but markets of clients? That's what we're here for. It's pretty exciting that we get to be part of this solution and leverage the great power of Accenture. I think Brian said on the shoulders of Accenture. This actually makes us different in the marketplace, so that CEOs, our clients, can have confidence that as we help them move to the new, we do it safely and securely. Back to you, Omar.
Okay.
Thanks.
Thank you. There you have it. With Brian, Narendra, and Kelly, we looked at three discrete growth strategies and how we line up investments against them to help us scale the new. That's hopefully putting a bit of color onto some of the comments that we made earlier. I hinted at the beginning that Paul Daugherty, our CTIO, is my blood brother in Accenture. This guy and I, we're looking to try and understand the future of technology and what it means for Accenture. For example, in a space like artificial intelligence, Paul wrote the book. When I say he wrote the book, I mean he actually wrote the book. Hopefully, you all have a copy of that now. Paul, why don't you come on up here?
When Pierre talks about Accenture bringing biz tech to help our clients, Paul brings the tech to my biz. Two sides of the same coin. Over to you, Paul.
Thanks, Omar. It's good to follow my virtual twin, Omar, and talk about what's coming next. That was really a great story, and you can see from what Omar and the team talked about that we're clearly in a strong position to scale the new. I'm really excited to spend a little bit of time with you talking about what's next, what's coming, and what the next new looks like, and I'll do that with help from a few friends. My role as Chief Technology and Innovation Officer is to look over the horizon and look for the technologies that are going to make a difference in the future and to predict the future better and faster than anyone else can, especially our competition.
In doing that, I'm responsible for directing our technology strategy, driving our technology R&D, managing our ecosystem of technology partners, and then incubating the businesses that represent the new ways of growth that we expect to see in the marketplace. That's what I do. If you step back, though, and think about it, I'd ask you to think about one thing that really you have to keep in mind when you think about the next new, and that's the fact that we're in a very different time right now, and there is no finish line for innovation. Innovation is the new normal. We live in an amazing time marked by exponential combinatorial advances in technology, creating magical new possibilities, and the pace of change is accelerating. That's the world we live in. What does it mean for business? What does it mean for our business?
It means that you can't just innovate once and get it right. As Pierre said earlier, you can't be a fast follower. That strategy won't work. In our business, what we believe you need to do is you need to embed innovation in the culture and capability of how we operate so that we lead in the new, we invent the future, and that's really what we're setting out to do at Accenture. We do this at scale. It's important, given that we're Accenture, we need to do this at scale. You heard from Omar and Pierre what that means to do it at scale. When you think about innovation, the next new, $700 million invested each year in research and development. That's scale. A massive innovation portfolio represented by over 6,000 patents and patents pending. That's real innovation at scale.
How do you innovate at that scale, and how do you do that? I just want to walk you through how we think about it a little bit. First, innovation may seem like magic, right? You see this innovation, it seems magical, but the process that you use to do it can't be magic, it can't be a mystery, and it can't be ad hoc. You need a systematic way to drive innovation, and that's what we've done at Accenture and the way we've ingrained and embedded innovation into our business. The way we think about it, the way I think about it, I'm an engineer, so I think about formulas. I've got three parts to the formula, which may not surprise you if you follow Accenture.
We have three, and I've got three parts of the formula that really allow us to innovate in the way that I'm describing and really always anticipate the next new. The first part of the formula is the vision that we have. We have a vision of the future. We see where it's going, and we know where technology's headed. That's best represented in our Accenture Technology Vision that many of you get every year, and we distribute widely to our clients. We also use that to predict the future for ourselves. Our vision predicts and anticipates the future of business and technology and where it's going, and we're widely recognized for both the foresight and the accuracy of the vision, and this is what helps us anticipate the next new in our business. That's part one.
Part two of our formula is an industrialized approach to innovation through our innovation architecture that Pierre talked a bit about earlier. Let me elaborate on this because I think it's really important to have a better understanding of the innovation architecture. It's unique, others don't do this, and it's really hard for others to build this type of capability. Our innovation architecture starts with Accenture Research, a team of over 250 researchers, top researchers in the industry, driving groundbreaking, innovative thought leadership that makes a difference. An example of that is what Omar talked about, the book that we published recently called "Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI," representing work from Narendra's team as well as our Accenture researchers. A bestseller in artificial intelligence, positioning Accenture as the thought leader and shaper of AI as it applies to business.
That's an example of Accenture Research thought leadership. We have Accenture Ventures, which is our vehicle for harnessing all the emerging innovation that's out there in the ecosystem. We track and have relationships with over 3,000 startups that we can curate and deliver that innovation to our clients. We selectively invest strategically in some of those companies where we see an opportunity to accelerate our advantage in delivering innovation to the marketplace. We have seven Accenture labs around the world in all the innovation hotspots: Silicon Valley, Arlington, Virginia, Sophia Antipolis in France, Dublin, Bangalore, Beijing, all the innovation hotspots, and we've got a team of researchers that does applied research, and they're recognized as the leaders and luminaries in fields ranging from cybersecurity and virtual reality to AI and robotics. That's what our labs does. We have the studios, Accenture Studios, which Pierre mentioned earlier.
We work together with clients, over 50 studios that we have. We come together with clients to co-innovate and co-create and build with agility and speed. A client will come in with an idea to our studio on a Monday, work with our team, and walk out days later with a minimum viable product. That's co-creation, co-innovation at speed through our studios. Finally, we have the network of over 100 innovation centers, a unique network that allows us to bring all that innovation together, co-innovate with clients, and really do it at our clients' doorsteps. That's the innovation architecture, which was part 2. Part 3 of the innovation formula that's important to understand is the ecosystem. We have the most powerful ecosystem in our sector, and we know how to use it for our competitive advantage and for differentiation.
We're the leader and the number one provider for SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, IBM, for the big platform companies, Google, Amazon, the emerging leaders in unicorns, Splunk, Docker, Pivotal, who just did their IPO Friday. Accenture's the leader with all those. It's not enough for us, and I'm not satisfied that we're number one. That's not enough, and that's not what matters. What matters is being better and faster in the new and the next new to innovate with each one of those partners. That's what we do in the ecosystem with the unique formula we have and the relationships that we have, the earlier insights into where they're going, and an accelerated R&D that we do together with these partners to accelerate that innovation.
We put that all together into commercial constructs that are unique to Accenture, that are very hard for our competitors to match. Think about Avanade, which is a joint venture with Microsoft, that's by far, far and away, the leader in Microsoft services for the enterprise in the new and the next new. It's a unique JV with Microsoft. Think about our Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group, a joint initiative, joint investment with Amazon, the number one services provider for services on the Amazon platform to enterprise clients. That's differentiated commercial value in innovation for our clients. Those are the 3 parts of the formula. We've got the vision. We see where it's going. We've got the industrialized innovation architecture. We can make it happen. We've got the ecosystem, so we can access innovation from everywhere.
If you step back and think about what that means, just to bring it home, the way I think about Accenture and the way I think you all should think about Accenture is we are the platform, the best platform for accessing the best innovation across the tech sector. We're a platform, the best platform for enterprise tech innovation. There's no place better you can go to access the full range of everything innovative that's happening across the ecosystem, combined with deep industry insight that only Accenture can bring, combined with our own applied innovation and some of the things you've already heard about, and we'll hear about through the rest of the day. That's what Accenture is, the platform for driving innovation at scale, faster, more effectively driving value better for our clients.
If you now want to dive into some more details, when we think about the next, now we've got a lot of things that we're working on, ranging from advanced software engineering all the way through quantum computing. I can talk about a lot of things, but we're going to really single out two areas to highlight today with some friends that'll join me. The two areas of the next new that we're going to talk about are Industry X.0 and blockchain. We'll start with Industry X.0, and I'll welcome up my friend, and Mr. Digital is what we know him as. Mr. Digital, Mike Sutcliff, who's the shaper, leader, and Chief Executive of Accenture Digital. Michael, to talk to us about Industry X.0, what it means to the next new, and how we're positioning.
Thanks, Paul. Appreciate it very much.
Over to you. Thanks.
We formed Accenture Digital to find these new opportunities for Accenture and scale them. You heard Brian and Narendra talk about some of the progress we've made with Accenture Interactive and our Applied Intelligence group. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the next part that we're focused on, Industry X.0. We think it's an exciting opportunity to grow for the future. Industry X.0 can broadly be defined as the application of digital tools, and we've got a wide range of digital tools, to the areas of production, manufacturing, operations, and the next generation of product development. We think it's an exciting opportunity because it applies across industries, across industry boundaries, around the world, different markets, different geographies.
They're all struggling to see this collision of information and operations technology coming together, and how it's going to allow them to anticipate new ways to create experiences for their clients using products and value-added services around them. It's an important topic for our clients. The product life cycles are being compressed. Their long-held assumptions on how manufacturing and supply chain should operate globally are being disrupted as the manufacturing and the information technologies collide. Consumers have come to expect that the products will be smart. They'll be able to tune to the behaviors and the preferences of those individuals over time. As you can imagine, our clients have some tough issues to face as they think about what the future might look like. They're asking us to help in five ways.
First of all, they're asking for us to help them design products and services which allow them to create personalized experiences. It impacts how the products are designed, how they're used, and how companies gather information about those products and redesign the next generation over time. We've got an innovation that we're going to illustrate today with Faurecia, which is focused on imagining what the cockpit of the future looks like in an autonomous vehicle, and how that might change in the future. You'll hear a little bit more about that in a couple of moments. Secondly, clients are asking us to help them create smart, connected products and the value-added services around those products that complement them.
Some products are, in fact, already emerging to be sold as services, and that creates a huge challenge for many of our industrial clients because now they need to form closer bonds with the end consumer, and they need to understand the entire product life cycle from initial requirements through service delivery and continuous monitoring, how those behavioral characteristics are changing and consumer expectations are changing, and how they adapt the product over time, sometimes with just software updates. A great example is how we're partnering with Schneider Electric at the moment to create a digital services factory that'll build and scale new services in the areas of predictive maintenance, asset monitoring, and energy optimization. That complements their physical products.
By combining real-time analytics and a connected technology IoT platform, we're helping them anticipate what the customer needs might be, and we're reducing the time to launch new digital services by about 80%. We're having clients who are asking us to help design intelligent and adaptive production and operations capabilities. Our clients can create new efficiencies by creating new connections between humans, machines, and systems in their production environments. In fact, we can use digital twins of products and simulations of manufacturing and operations environments, and we can couple that with virtual or augmented reality to find and fix problems before a single atom is actually moved physically. We can apply artificial intelligence at a scale that humans cannot process to optimize manufacturing in real time.
These capabilities can generate substantial reductions in cost for our clients and allow them to be highly flexible and adaptive as the demands of the market continue to change. Clients are also asking us to help them with workforce transformation. They're asking how we can help humans focus on the things that they're uniquely skilled to do. Paul's book talks about how humans and machines can come together. Employees in manufacturing and operations can be enabled in real time with artificial intelligence systems that are designed to support their decisions, and they can use conversational interfaces such as Alexa and Siri to initiate actions, and they can apply extended reality technologies to change what they see and how they work.
A powerful example of this is the work that we've done with a small group at Airbus that is in the seat cabin installation process, where they've improved productivity by about 500%. What we did is we created a digitally enabled industrial-grade smart glass solution for those workers that uses contextual marking instructions to help them place where the cabin floor needs to have holes drilled into it so that the seats can be installed exactly correctly. That reduced the error rate in that process to zero and allowed them to do it incredibly quickly compared to the old processes. Finally, clients are asking us for help in creating open ecosystem of partners. Just like we think it's important for Accenture to have a powerful ecosystem, many of our clients are finding that the old days of closed proprietary manufacturing systems have fallen to the wayside.
They need to have open multi-partner systems that are collaborative, we're helping them do that. We've got a big opportunity to develop new solutions for Industry X.0, working with those ecosystem partners. Paul mentioned that our innovation architecture produces predictable results as we partner with others in the ecosystem, we're doing that with Dassault Systèmes, with GE, with Siemens, Schneider Electric, SAP, Microsoft, PTC, and many others. As you can imagine, it's a slight extension of our footprint as we're working with many of those industrial partners, we're finding that there's lots of room for improvement, we're making real progress on a rapid timeline. In addition to working with those ecosystem partners, we are using ventures and acquisitions as a way to grow this business. We've previously acquired PLM and engineering capabilities such as PCO and PRION.
We've done industrial and embedded software capabilities, like with the evopro group. More recently, we've announced the acquisition of Mackevision, which gives us digital twin and visualization capabilities, and we've made a minority investment in Upskill to help us improve the experience of workers in an Industry X.0 environment. Clients appreciate the opportunity to see this in action. We've created Industry X.0 innovation centers where we can bring this to life in 24 different innovation centers around the world. For example, we have a center focused on industrial IoT in Garching, Germany. We're now replicating that in Detroit for our U.S. business. We've got our latest connected factory, which is in Modena, the heart of the Italian motor industry, where we're demonstrating 3D printing in a real operational factory environment.
We're currently expanding our network with centers in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, to help support the growth in our Asia business. Our confidence that Accenture can be a major player in this Industry X.0 space is based on the client and industry analyst feedback. The recent reports ranked Accenture as a clear leader in Industry 4.0 and in IoT solutions in the European market. In fact, we were ranked best in class in four out of five reports across connected products, digital factory, smart energy, smart retail, and smart transport. This is a great opportunity. We see tremendous growth in front, but we know we still have lots to do. We wanted to highlight a client example, so we've asked Mary Hamilton to take you through the work with Faurecia as they're imagining what the future might look like for one of their connected products. Let's roll the video.
Hi, I'm Mary Hamilton. I lead Accenture's research and development lab in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of innovation. I also lead our Industry X.0 research. I couldn't be with you today because I'm presenting our latest research at Hannover Messe, which is ground zero for all the latest Industry X.0 innovations. Today, I want to talk to you about our unique co-innovation partnership with Faurecia, one of the world's leading automotive suppliers for seating and interiors. It all started with Faurecia's vision, which is to transform its company and its brand to improve health and wellness by reinventing the onboard experience for connected and self-driving vehicles. Faurecia turned to Accenture to help them create the Faurecia of the future. We formed a five-year co-innovation partnership that is co-sponsored by the CEO of Faurecia, Patrick Koller, and our CEO, Pierre Nanterme.
Together, Accenture and Faurecia are using an Industry X.0 approach that focuses on two areas. The first is a set of cognitive technologies to reinvent the onboard user experience and services to enhance health and wellness. The second is using digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, extended reality, blockchain, and quantum computing to quickly transform Faurecia's business overall. We did rapid prototyping using extended reality to better understand driver behavior and then feed the data we gathered into machine learning algorithms that would guide the design of the cockpit of the future. The joint solution with Faurecia and Parrot Automotive uses a multi-passenger in-vehicle Amazon Alexa personal assistant to provide personalized services to individual passengers. We integrated artificial intelligence to let passengers adjust seat positions, launch a seat massage, change climate settings, upload video-music playlists, and much more.
In summary, our partnership with Faurecia shows how Accenture is the preferred innovation partner for our clients, and we're instrumental in helping them reinvent their business and shape the future of their industry.
As you can see from Mary's video, we've got a tremendous start. It always helps to get Pierre involved with clients. He's a great guy to get out there in the middle of the action. We're excited about this business. We think we've got great capabilities, a great start, a great future ahead of us, and we're looking forward to it. Back over to you, Paul.
Fantastic. Yeah, thanks, Mike.
Thank you.
That's a really great story from Mike, and you heard from Mary as well, and I think it's evidence of that formula that I talked about earlier. You can hear it from Mike, we're shaping the market, the Industry X.0 market. We've already established a leadership position, and we're well-positioned with the foundation to scale our business as the market grows. Really, a great story and a great example of the next new. Let's move on and talk about another area of the next new that's also very important, which is blockchain. We'll move into the blockchain market. I'd like to invite up a couple of our other leaders to join me on stage here. We're fortunate to have two recognized innovators and leaders in the blockchain community here at Accenture and here with us today.
Let me just tell you a little bit about the two of them. Melanie Cutlan leads our blockchain operations. What I love about Melanie is she's not just great at talking about blockchain. Lots of people out there are talking about blockchain. Melanie really knows how to make blockchain work, and that's really important. Melanie is innovating new ways to implement and operate blockchain systems at scale, which is what's going to be important and what is important in the marketplace. We also have David Treat joining us. David is the leader of our global blockchain business, and he's been at the heart of the blockchain ecosystem since the very start. He's the founder and co-founder of a number of the important blockchain consortium organizations, and we're going to hear the story of blockchain from the two of them today.
Why don't you join me on stage, Melanie and David.
Thanks, Paul.
Thanks, Melanie.
Thanks.
Thanks, David. Take it away, Melanie, tell us about blockchain.
All right. Thank you, Paul. As you said, I am immersed in blockchain day in and day out, my role is to help our clients understand how blockchain will change their business models, how it'll help them plan for and manage the transformations that they need to undertake.
I'll start by talking about blockchain and what it is, but first, let me just clarify. We're not talking about cryptocurrencies, but the underlying technology itself, which is blockchain. Blockchain is more generally known as a distributed ledger technology. It is a profoundly disruptive technology, and it's the foundation on which the next generation of business applications will be built. At its most basic level, blockchain is a new database architecture. It maintains and records data in a way that allows multiple stakeholders to confidently and securely share access to the same data and information. It massively simplifies today's complicated, costly, and vulnerable systems. In 2018, blockchain is just beginning to hit its pivot, moving from proof of concepts to early stages of production and client projects.
We, at Accenture, are ahead of the curve and well-positioned to take even more than our share of growth as the market matures. Like the internet, blockchain will reshape businesses and likely disrupt entire industries as it takes hold. Today, blockchain is roughly where the internet was in the mid-1990s. It's difficult to estimate an early-stage market like blockchain, but our best view is that the services market is growing at a CAGR of over 71% and will reach $11 billion by 2022. These estimates are continually revised upwards, so you get a sense of the growth in this market. Blockchain will add powerful new capabilities to nearly every industry, from financial services to health, to transportation and logistics, and beyond. It'll make things like managing our health and wellbeing easier across payers and providers. Blockchain will add greater transparency, efficiency, and auditability across supply chain ecosystems.
That's what blockchain is. How is Accenture going to win in the market? We have three things as you'd expect, where we think we're differentiated in the market and uniquely positioned to lead in blockchain. First, we're shaping the market. We've been involved with blockchain since the beginning, and we're continuously introducing new innovations that are shaping this market. Using the innovation architecture that Paul talked about, we're creating and developing and scaling new innovations and inventions that will disrupt and define this market, including introducing 35 new patents in blockchain. Through our Accenture Ventures, placing early minority investments in emerging players like Digital Asset and Ripple. Second, we are leveraging the independent technology and our leadership position in the ecosystem.
We're the only ones with that independent perspective, the relationships, and the scale to combine the latest thinking, the right technologies, and the right partners to really develop cutting-edge solutions with our clients. Third, we have unparalleled industry expertise and a breadth of capabilities. Blockchain is about reinventing industries, and you need industry experience to do that. We are the only ones that have that industry experience, the deep knowledge of our clients' businesses, and the ability to manage blockchain operations. We're well-positioned in this new and emerging area to establish a leadership position, and we're ready to bring the breadth and power of Accenture together for our clients to bring those end-to-end services that our clients need to implement blockchain across the entire enterprise. That's required to unlock its full potential.
With that, we'll bring up David Treat to illustrate the work we're doing with our clients.
Thanks, Melanie. In my role in leading Accenture's blockchain business globally, I have been working with other innovators and leaders from the very beginning to shape this market. As Paul mentioned, one of our first steps was to set Accenture in the position of being a founding member of the Linux Hyperledger project, and later the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance as two of the key technical consortium driving blockchain technology forward. As Melanie mentioned, talked about our innovations and our investments in this space, I want to talk about how now we are going to turn that innovation into results and revenue for Accenture. Let me start by saying there is a ton of noise and hype in this space with daily press releases about what is going on.
The opportunities for blockchain are vast, but in reality, we are just at the beginning of what will be a large-scale transformation of how business ecosystems work, enabled by blockchain in combination with other technologies. I am going to go back to three. We are strategically focused on three key areas where we see immediate opportunity and the most value in the near term. We are going to use these three areas as a stronghold from which then we are going to expand our business. Those three areas are financial services infrastructure, supply chain, and identity. Let me walk through each one of those. In financial services infrastructure, we are focused on capital markets, payments, and insurance, where each day, $trillions worth of transactions take place across the globe. While the products, the financial instruments, have gotten much more sophisticated, the way we settle them has not. Has not really changed.
We still have to message information back and forth, reconcile, and confirm to be able to complete any transaction. It is that change that is so central to what blockchain is. A great example of this is work that we are doing with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Association of Banks in Singapore to help in their journey to modernize the Singapore financial center. Let us roll a quick video to see the opportunity here. Project Ubin is aimed at pushing the technical boundaries of distributed ledger technology.
We identify tough challenges, and we bring together the right expertise in solving them.
Project Ubin best encapsulates our collaborative and open initiatives towards building a vibrant financial technology ecosystem. ABS, together with 11 institutions, is proud to achieve the seemingly elusive harmonization of decentralization and privacy.
Phase two was focused on developing decentralized multilateral netting capabilities in a manner that preserved transactional privacy.
The main focus of this phase was to develop PoC using three DLT platforms, Quorum, Hyperledger Fabric, and R3 Corda, for domestic real-time gross settlement payments with the following objectives. Decentralized processing, privacy of transactions, settlement finality, and liquidity optimization.
The key achievement coming out of phase two that we really want to highlight is our proven gridlock resolution and liquidity saving mechanism. This has been done on a decentralized platform and achieved in a way that's unprecedented, without compromising transactional privacy. With the involvement of teams across five locations, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, France, and Latvia, we're actually the first in the world to successfully prototype real-time gross settlements using three different distributed ledger technology platforms.
Blockchain and distributed ledgers are new technologies which offer opportunities to transform industries. As real-time, open source, and trusted platforms that securely transmit data and value, they can help banks not only reduce the cost of processing payments, but also create new products and services that generate important new revenue streams. We are truly excited to see Project Ubin commence this journey to empower the future with new IT.
We look forward to working with other central banks on the use of DLT for cross-border payments and settlement.
This was an amazing experience and a great piece of work. One of the takeaways from it is that collaboration across an ecosystem, including regulators, banks, and other participants, is key to what blockchain is all about, and it's happening now. Our second area of focus is supply chain in all forms, physical and digital. We made a recent announcement with AB InBev, Accenture, and several other organizations, a consortium that has successfully tested a blockchain prototype that could eliminate the need for printed shipping documents and save the freight and logistics industry hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Our third area of focus is digital identity. We are very proud to have been the founding member of a groundbreaking public-private partnership called ID2020.
In this organization now with us are various United Nations NGOs as well as key partners like Microsoft, where we together are focused on how do we deliver effective digital identity to the more than 1 billion people in this world who don't have any, and who are effectively therefore excluded from modern society. This will be a life-changing step forward. We're taking those capabilities, and we're also applying it with our client base to focus on anti-money laundering, know your customer, GDPR right to be forgotten regulations, and issues associated with identity theft, tax fraud, and traditional client relationship management challenges. In summary, we believe that we are very well positioned to capitalize on the next new in blockchain. We're shaping the market. We're focused on key areas that will drive revenue. Most importantly, blockchain's all about what Accenture does best.
It requires the combination of deep industry, technology, and ecosystem capabilities to do it right. I have an amazing team. We're fired up to be the best of the next new. Paul, back to you.
Fantastic. It's a great story. Thanks, David. What you heard from David and Melanie, I think is another great story. I mean, simply put, blockchain is the future of business and technology architecture. You can see we're already there with the next new today, shaping and leading in that market, and you got a glimpse of where that's going and why that's important in the future. I could stand up here and talk for a lot longer the rest of the day about all the other areas of the next new we're working on, but I'm gonna get the hook soon. I'll just wrap up and really give you a few points to summarize across everything that I just talked about and the team talked about here. The first is, I'd ask you to take away this view that innovation is the new normal.
There's no finish line. You can't be a fast follower. You have to continually innovate. That's the name of the game today in business. The second point is, we've got a point of view, we've got a vision. We see the future. We can see the future, and we're anticipating the next new and making the right bets and investments today. The third point is, we've got an industrialized view on innovation, how to make this real, which is very hard to replicate. We know how to turn ideas to innovation and turn research into revenues, which is, at the end of the day, what matters. This is an exciting time. There's never been a more exciting time in technology with all the amazing possibilities.
If you look at Accenture and how we're positioned, we're in a fantastic position to continue to lead and capitalize on everything that's happening around the next new. That's the story on the next new. The next thing that's important that we need to talk about is how do we deploy the new? How do we take all this and deploy it to our industries, leveraging technology and talent and our geographies and all the other parts of Accenture? To take us into that next part of the agenda, I'm pleased to welcome my friend, Sander van 't Noordende, who's going to join us, the Chief Executive of Products and also fellow New Yorker. Although, I'd say you have more of a New Amsterdam accent.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Paul. Paul and I are buddies on the Avanade board, we know each other very well. We get to spend a lot of time in Seattle. Let me get something out of the way first. I really had no dilemma being here today. First of all, I'm Dutch, was not even invited to the state dinner. Secondly, Pierre told me to be here. Thirdly, I live about five blocks away from here, it was also clear from that perspective, I was not going to get away with a video. Now that I'm here, let's make the best of it. You've heard Omar and team talk about how we invest to lead and scale in the new. You've heard Paul, team talk about how we anticipate the next new.
Our role in products, I'm heading up products, is to work with our clients to transform at scale. To deploy at scale all the good stuff that Accenture has to offer. In products, we look after five industries. We look after consumer goods, retail, travel, life sciences and industrial. I must say at $10 billion revenues probably this year, at 12% CAGR over the past four years, it's been a pretty good ride. Some of you have asked me, "Sander, what's the secret formula there? What are you guys doing?" It's really actually quite straightforward what we are doing. First of all, we start with a clear vision inspired by Pierre and the strategy of Accenture, that is we create the new with our clients and their customers in an increasingly digital world.
Customers, be they consumers, shoppers, patients, travelers, drivers, all of them. From there, it's clear, if you want to create the new, you always have to lead with innovation. Lead with innovation and transform from there, again, at scale, to have the maximum impact on our client's business. We have a relentless client focus. In products today, we have 46 Diamond clients, each of those Diamond clients has a dedicated client account leader. This is a very senior leader in Accenture who wakes up every morning just thinking about that client, about the client's industry, about the client's agenda, about how am I going to build relationships with the client, of course, how am I, or how are we as Accenture going to make sure the clients are going to get the best of Accenture, again, for maximum impact at scale.
Third, we have to be relevant. We have to be super relevant, I would almost say. In products, it's really about four things these days, the good thing about products is that these four things, they work together in a very nice way. They reinforce each other. The first one really is our clients want to engage again with their consumer, patient, shopper, traveler in a more inspiring, digital, personalized way. Here, for instance, we're working with Carnival Cruise Line to create a totally new and different frictionless and personalized client experience on board of their ships. Second, if our clients have physical products, they want to make those products smarter, they want to make those products connected, and they want to sell them as a service. They want to reduce their time to market.
As you've heard from Mike Sutcliff, that's what we call Industry X.0. Third, to afford investments in those two main areas, the consumer engagement and the product, they need the money. The money is coming from running their business in the most efficient way possible. That is all about cost reduction, zero-based budgeting. It's about shared services in HR, procurement, finance. It's about supply chain optimization. Campbell Soup is just one of the many companies that we have helped save $ hundreds of millions to either bring to the bottom line. That's generally what you guys like. What we like is to reinvest in digital capabilities. Last but not least, to enable all that, our clients need smart and agile technologies.
For us in products, it's very much about the platforms, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, sometimes in combination with more bespoke architectures connecting to mega platforms or industry platforms. For instance, with Roche, we're helping them to bring a totally new set of digital health services to their diabetes patients, leveraging a platform that connects patients, nurses, doctors, clinics and hospitals. In summary, a very clear vision, a relentless focus on industry and client, and last but not least, I would say super relevance. That's the ingredients that we need to be successful. There's no company, I would say, better positioned with those ingredients to be successful in the marketplace. There is a but here, and you might think, "Well, what's the but?" We in products can only do this with the help of others.
That's why I'm pleased to introduce a few colleagues here on the stage, and let's start with Ellyn Shook, our Chief HR and Leadership Officer. She takes care of the diverse and deep talent that we have on board, and that they can be their best every day. Bhaskar Ghosh, who leads the most innovative tech organization in the world, and of course, Julie Sweet, our North American CEO, who brings it all together here in North America, which is our largest geographic market. Welcome.
Thank you, Sander.
Bhaskar, let's start with you.
Thank you, Sander. Let me start with, I'm delighted to be here. I cannot say like Sander, that I just live five blocks away. I live in Bangalore. I have traveled 5,000 miles, so I have to be delighted. Our technology business is on a transformation journey. Two years back, at the same gathering, we talked about our formidable delivery capability powered by our global delivery network that spans across 50-plus delivery centers, servicing clients across 120 countries with 200,000-plus highly skilled professionals. This capability was underpinned by skill, scale, depth and breadth of services, delivery quality, and top talent. Now, in last two years, we have further built on this and transformed our global delivery center network for technologies to advanced technology centers, where advanced stands for innovation, intelligence, industries, new IT, and new technology skills.
My job is to lead and transform our technology business, which includes application services and platforms. We do that by continuously innovating the core and growing in the new. Let me share some of our priorities and focus areas. Number one, intelligent automation. We are extremely proud of our enterprise automation platform, myWizard. This cloud-based, AI-powered platform is now implemented in more than 3,700 client engagements across the globe. This is driving phenomenal productivity, improving quality, and delivering speed to market. The virtual project manager in this myWizard platform is now trained with 12,000 past projects of Accenture across all technologies. This virtual project manager is now helping our human project manager, working with them side by side as a virtual coworker and helping them to take the better decisions every day. This is reducing cost, improving quality, increasing predictability, and improving productivity.
Number two, industry focus. We have around 150 studios and innovation hub, as Paul talked about earlier. We continuously co-innovate with our clients in these studios and create industry-leading technology solutions. We have recently opened an innovation hub in Bangalore, where we have 4,000-plus professionals who work across research, lab, studios, and platform. They continuously integrate the new technologies across 40-plus industries and create replicable industry-leading solution. The next, I'll talk about our focus on new IT and new technology skills. We are ensuring that our 200,000 people are going to stay relevant, stay ahead of the curve, and bring the new in the organization. We have anticipated the change and started our talent transformation journey, underpinned by re-skilling, new skilling, and cross-skilling our people. We have built world-class digital learning platform, and we have trained 165,000 people in the new technologies in just last 20 months.
Ellyn will talk more about our talent transformation strategy later. In the beginning of this fiscal, we have launched intelligent platform services to further accelerate our platform business, which includes primarily SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Last few years, our growth is primarily driven by new. In the context of technology, it is mainly custom development of various types. Now, all the ERP platforms are rotating to new. They are adopting digital, like SAP Leonardo. Our intelligent platform services brings our innovation, intelligence, and industry knowledge together and help clients to adopt digital ERP. Our platform business, as I said, which is mainly SAP, our work related to SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Workday, is around 40% of our revenue. This business is growing double digit. All the industry analysts recognize us clear leader in all of these platforms. We are not standing still.
We are aggressively investing in assets and talents related to platform to extend our lead further in the new. We are continuously co-innovating with our ecosystem partners and our client in the new, in the technologies like Salesforce Einstein or SAP Leonardo. Just last week, we have launched a new platform, Accenture Intelligent Enterprise Platform, to help companies to use advanced technologies to fast-track their transformation. This end-to-end digital platform combines Accenture's industry knowledge, our technology and tools, and SAP Model Company, creates new opportunity to drive transformation. At the closing, I feel absolutely confident that we are strongly positioned to lead in the new with the power of innovation, intelligence, industry, new IT, and new technology skills. As our numbers shows, we are continue to lead in all of the leading and emerging platforms in the coming days. Thank you.
I will hand over to Ellyn Shook, my colleague and friend, and she will talk about talent-led innovation.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ellyn.
As Chief Leadership and Human Resources Officer, I am accountable for discovering and hiring the best and most relevant talent in every dimension of our business. Believe it or not, I'm laser-focused on three priorities: building specialization at scale, attracting and growing the best leaders, and being the steward for our unique and differentiated culture of cultures. How do we really build deep specialization at scale? Well, you heard from my colleagues this morning about all the different types of talents we need in the new and the next new. That is why we're hiring 100,000 people around the globe this year. It's also essential that our people remain relevant or super relevant, as Sander said.
To do that, we have an innovative learning approach called Accenture Connected Learning. We've completely abandoned the one-size-fits-all curriculum-driven learning and moved to learning of one. All of the content is enabled real time and on demand and available to all of our people. We've built it using the latest neuroscience research to enable exactly what Bhaskar was talking about, deep learning at massive scale. Let me just give you one stat: 50 million. In the past 20 months, our people have completed 50 million self-directed learning opportunities. What I hope that demonstrates is not just access to world-class content, but the intellectual curiosity of our people in their quest to stay relevant to our clients. We also have a sophisticated career development approach called Performance Achievement.
We provide all of our people real-time, on-demand feedback that helps them unlock their potential, but also build their deep specialization. Next is leadership. Leading our 442,000 people. We've recently redefined our leadership DNA. We use it to assess our leaders, but also to develop our leaders. We use it to guide our leadership appointments and create our succession plans. We build the leadership DNA at all levels of Accenture, starting with the 7,000 managing directors. We've created immersive learning opportunities for them to accelerate innovation and specialization at a rate faster than the world is changing around us. In order to keep our leadership vibrant, we invest heavily in our pipelines, both internally and externally. I'm extraordinarily proud to say that we have promoted 700 managing directors this year. 32% are women.
We've also hired 300 managing directors from outside of Accenture, further demonstrating our ability to attract top talent. Last, and perhaps most importantly, is culture. Over the past decade, we've transformed our business and our culture to be innovation-led. We have diverse talent profiles, diverse people, and over 90 acquisitions that have formed our culture of cultures. It is a true strategic differentiator for us. You know what? It doesn't just happen. We've had to be extraordinarily intentional about creating the environment where our behaviors and beliefs, the way we grow responsible leaders, and the way we do business every single day comes to life. It's rich and vibrant. We also have common threads that unite us all.
They are our enduring core values, our code of business ethics, and our unwavering belief in inclusion and diversity, because it is our diversity that makes us smarter and more innovative. We've built our whole culture based on an aspiration to be the most truly human company in the digital age, to help our people be successful, both professionally and personally. Because in the end, we are an innovation-led business, and we must be the magnet for the best talent in order to live our purpose of improving the way the world works and lives. Thank you. I'll now hand it over to my colleague and my friend, Julie Sweet, Chief Executive of North America, who will take all of what you heard today and talk about how we bring it to life in the geographic dimension of our market. Thank you, Julie.
There isn't a senior leader at Accenture who is not very closely connected to Ellyn because of the absolute critical importance of our people and our culture of cultures to our success. We're very fortunate to have just an incredible leader. As the CEO of North America, I lead our largest market, the U.S. and Canada, which drives nearly 50% of our global revenues. Together with my outstanding leadership team and our over 50,000 incredibly skilled and talented people, my job is to bring the best of Accenture across our businesses and industries to our clients every minute of every day. Our numbers clearly demonstrate that we are leading in one of the world's most competitive markets. Over the last three fiscal years, our compound annual growth rate has been 8%, growing faster than the market and taking share.
We are ranked number 1 overall in market share and have been for the last two years, and we are leading in the new. For example, Ad Age named Accenture Interactive the largest digital agency in the U.S. and the world. According to our industry analysts, our clients believe that Accenture is the strongest firm to provide advice and strategy about the adoption of artificial intelligence and big data solutions. To stay ahead of the market, we are investing to bring innovation to the doorsteps of our clients. We are building an innovation network across all the major markets in North America. Today, we have seven innovation hubs, nine Fjord design studios, and seven advanced technology centers. Let's take a closer look at our innovation hubs. Today, they're in Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Houston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
By the end of the year, we'll have opened in Atlanta, Detroit, that's the Industry X.0 Center that Mike mentioned, and also Toronto. Each of these hubs is connected to the over 100 innovation locations around the globe, and this is how we seamlessly bring the best of our global investments and insights to our clients here on the ground in North America. These hubs also bring the industrialized approach to innovation that Paul described with the specialized needs of the market. In Houston, our hub is all about the resources industries and Industry X.0. In New York, it's customer experience across industries and the latest in financial services. In Washington, D.C., we're immersing our clients in cyber defense and inventing the government of the future. Why is this network and our relentless focus on innovation so important? Well, as Paul said, innovation has no finish line.
What we're seeing in the market is that companies are looking for partners who can help them continuously innovate. This means we must work with our clients differently and locally, whether in our hubs or their offices. In Washington, D.C. last summer, working with Marriott and the startup incubator 1776, we created the Travel Experience Incubator, which issued a challenge to the startup community to co-create unique and inventive travel experiences with Marriott and Accenture. Just this week, Marriott announced a new pilot with them entering the home-sharing market with a startup that was identified out of the Travel Experience Incubator.
In Burbank, we're working with Walt Disney Studios as the founding member and innovation partner to StudioLAB, a new R&D initiative and a physical lab on the lot of Disney Studios to create the new experience of how movies are made and experienced in the future. Now let me close by going back to what Pierre said. The true test of our relevance, differentiation, and competitiveness is our growing roster of Diamond clients. In North America, over the last three fiscal years, we have gone from 66 Diamonds to 83 Diamonds, and they include some of the most important and leading companies in the world, Walt Disney, Marriott, and companies like Anthem, DowDuPont, Morgan Stanley, and Pfizer. Our portfolio of Diamonds is balanced with Diamonds in every one of our 13 industry groups.
Now, perhaps most important, however, with the increase in Diamonds, is that this represents that we are helping our clients succeed, and it is that success that is our motivation. With that, I'll hand this over to Sander to land the plane.
Thank you very much, Julie. Thank you very much, all three of you. Wonderful job. I believe we've sort of given you some insights in how we deploy at scale in Accenture. First, we have the operating groups, it's good to see Bob Sell here, my CMT colleague, who have a relentless industry and client focus, and whose role it is to bring the best of Accenture to our clients day in, day out. As I said, in the operating groups, we would be nowhere if we wouldn't have the help of a few friends. Delivery at scale, of course, Bhaskar and the technology organization, but also Debbie with operations, Mike Sutcliff with the digital organization, and Kelly with security. We bring those guys in to deliver at scale.
Of course, Ellyn and her organization, to make sure we have the right people on board in the right diversity, deeply skilled, but maybe most importantly, helping us to create an environment in which all those people can bring their best to work every day in, day out, to have maximum impact on our clients. Then last but not least, of course, Julie and the other geographic leaders in Accenture who play a pivotal role in terms of connecting to the local markets and in terms of bringing the best of Accenture to the local market for maximum relevance and impact at scale in the local market. Thank you again, team. Pierre, I think it's back to you.
Very well done. Very well done. My friends.
Sander.
Yes. All right. I guess we have time for a few questions. I hope you enjoyed hearing from the leadership team what's going on at Accenture, how we are executing our strategy, leading in the new, innovating in what's going to come next, and how we deploy across our industries and our different geographies, and how we are bringing as well our talent to the top level. I was very impressed, personally. I'm always impressed with our leadership. I'm going to give you the latest anecdote because I just received a few minutes ago, something very special, so I can share with all of you privately. Don't tell anyone outside this group.
Yesterday, Julie represented us and Accenture at the state dinner at the White House, where Donald Trump welcomed Emmanuel Macron, our French President, and she met with, I think, the Ministry of Education as well as our president. I just received an SMS saying, "Oh, it was sad you were not with us, but we were so pleased to meet with your fantastic North America lead." I guess now they prefer Julie than me. I don't know how exactly I need to take that. This is another illustration of the role of Accenture being embedded in the communities, to be serious again. It is something we didn't really cover today, but we have a profound impact in our business communities, being part of the fabric of many geographies, but as well, all what we're doing through our corporate citizenship group, supporting our communities in many activities.
Let's open for a few questions. Let's start. Yep. You will have a mic.
Thank you, David Togut with Evercore ISI. You've stated that the new will generate $20 billion of revenue this year, just over 60% of the total, and that grew 30% in FY 2017. Bhaskar talked about what he was doing to reskill his employee base and using tools like Accenture myWizard on automation. Can you talk about what you're doing, maybe unpack the strategy to reduce the cost to serve in the core of the business that isn't growing currently?
Yes, absolutely. Excellent question indeed, because we put maximum focus in the heart of our strategy, which is about rotating to the new. The question is, what do you do with the core? Again, our point was not to play defense on the core, but to play the offense or the attack on the core, and especially with Bhaskar looking at, and Debbie as well, and all the others, on what it is we're going to do to prevent the commoditization of our core activities. To prevent the commoditization of the core activities, we decided to go big on robotic and automation. Big. Retraining our people. Especially in our delivery centers across the board, including in our BPO business and including in our technology business, we invested a lot in significantly improving the productivity of the core through robotic and automation.
We want to remain competitive. We don't exit the core. We want to be less dependent on services that would be subject to commoditization. Commoditization is a disease. It's the kind of thing we all want to prevent Accenture to be in. To avoid commoditization, you need to modernize the core and invest, robotic automation, all the nanobots we talked about in the BPO, putting the virtual agent in the code. Next time, maybe we'll be center stage to present how we reinvent Accenture Operations, because we are doing great things around operations. We are very active with the core, and we are very competitive with the core as well. Yep. Lady, we will move here. We have one question. Front row, and then the second row.
Hi, thank you for taking my question. This is Harshita Rawat from Bernstein. Can you perhaps talk about where are we in the maturity curve for digital? Are we finally at a point where you're taking share from outside of the CIO budget from other areas, such as the CMO budget at scale? At what point the new sort of becomes the baseline for IT services?
Yeah. Again, excellent question because it's giving me the opportunity indeed to cover something we maybe didn't bring to light this morning. At Accenture, we were very famous in the past for what I would call enterprise management through ERP and technology, enterprise and technology, and addressing this budget. If you want to grow, and you're seeing that these projects are somewhat flattish or might move, but you might not expect a lot from this budget. At the heart of our strategy of rotating to the new was the opportunity for Accenture to extend our relevance to other budgets, if you will. If you take, we were quite operating at the center of the organization, enterprise management, ERP technology. We decided to move to the front line and to front end the organization.
All what you heard, especially with Brian, and what we are doing with Accenture Interactive with a weapon, if you will, to be relevant to the front and addressing marketing spend, and especially working with the CMOs. Again, we moved to the front. On the other end, you heard that from Mike Sutcliff on Industry X.0, is the opportunity for us to move in what we're calling the operation in the field at the factory level, at the supply chain level. Again, we extend our reach to new budgets, which are more the industrial budget, operating budget we were not addressing before to that scale. Now we're making Accenture not only relevant in the new services, not only competitive at the core, but having significantly expanded our reach to the front and to the operation while staying a leader in what we've been doing.
To the question, where are you finding growth? We are finding growth by continuing getting market share in the core. As well, the expansion to new areas has been a significant source of growth for Accenture. Certainly Accenture Interactive, you see in leading in the new, and we're putting massive expectations on Mike, big expectation on Mike on Industry X.0 to have the same success or even surpass the success, if possible, of Accenture Interactive. That was it. Now, on the internal maturity curve, to some extent, and I will paraphrase my friend, Juan, we need to talk of maturity curves because there are many waves, and there are different points of maturity. Some of these digital services are at some level of maturity.
Certainly, what we are doing with Accenture Interactive, when you look at content management or in some website experience development or e-commerce, even if probably there's still a lot to be invented, but it's starting to be, right, Brian, reasonably high on the maturity curve, but you need to continue innovate. On the other side of the spectrum, if you take what Paul has been telling us, the blockchain is pretty low on the maturity curve, and it's more nascent. Even if we believe it's maybe not that far from prime time, especially if I believe my friend David, who is chasing me to get big money to go prime on blockchain. I ask him to be a bit patient, maybe a couple of months, but he relentlessly pushing blockchain. Blockchain is more, you see, at the beginning of the curve. Some would be probably in between.
Maybe artificial intelligence, if you look at this with Narendra , will be probably in between because some of this technology are already maturing. You can operate that client at some scale. Again, you have a next generation of artificial intelligence tools and techniques that could be better. Same in security. If you look at the shop of Kelly Bissell, there are really two activities which I think on security are going to be fundamental, is identity management and cyber threat response management. On identity management, again, we are probably quite, not at the beginning of the curve, but all the innovation around biometrics. You have a certain innovation that's going to clearly create a new revolution in the way you do identity management. Needless to say, that security and digital trust through security going to be extraordinarily important.
In term of cyber threat response, we are quite at the beginning. We made the acquisition a few years ago of FusionX. Right, Kelly? Specialized in replicating cyber attack and testing your defense. By the way, we're using FusionX to test our own defense. We're playing with all this maturity curve, and it's really the job of Paul and Omar or Omar and Paul, the virtual twins, to understand where we are. Then it's our job, especially David and I, and others, to understand where we go live and we create a business at scale, where we're still in the incubating mode, what we're doing with immersive reality, blockchain, and quantum computing. When we're going to be ready for prime time, we are going to invest. To answering your question. We had a question on the two question on the second row.
I can try to make short answers.
Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citi. Good presentation. When I look at the 90 acquisitions, and really, not really any blow-ups, making acquisitions has become a core competency. I layer in Paul's statement that innovation is not an endpoint, it's continuous. Should we continue to expect not only the pace of acquisitions, but as you get bigger, should we expect bigger acquisitions? If so, how do you maintain the culture of the company?
Yes. Should you expect that we will continue with our acquisition agenda? Yes. We will continue with the same philosophy. I think we've been very clear what has been said, we are not making acquisition to buy revenues. Not at all. We are making acquisition to acquire unique capabilities. Unique capabilities. This is exactly what we did across the patch, and I think we're being very clear. It's not about revenue, it's about capabilities. All our acquisition been small to mid-size. We are extremely thoughtful on what could be largest acquisition. My friend, David, will keep me absolutely honest on this. I'm not mentioning the very large acquisition. You know that our industry, very large acquisition, not been successful. Zero been successful. I mean, the probability are very challenging.
Now, looking at some small to mid-size acquisition with deep capabilities, yes, of course, we're going to look at it. We'll continue with pace. As you see in 2018, and I think we said that in our Q2, our pace of acquisition will be a bit slower, because we needed to absorb the one we made in [Security]. Again, we don't want to make acquisition for the sake of it. The point is to find the right nuggets. If we can't find the right nuggets that could fit our purpose, we're not going to make acquisition for the sake of just spending the capital. Yes, we will continue in a way which is going to be very thoughtful. Certainly, we're looking more in the artificial intelligence, blockchain, in the new new.
This is where we would look at and see whether there are opportunities to scale. The philosophy behind the acquisition is very clear, is to have capabilities in the new, or is to scale something we have to take the number one position. That's what we do. Maybe another one before we go to break. Yeah.
Thank you, Pierre. It's Keith Bachman. I think since Ashwin and I are sitting next to each other, we have similar questions. My question is on culture and then attrition.
Yeah.
I was struck by the information you gave, 7,000 MDs, and I think you said 1,000 from the outside. Presumably that's M&A and hiring. Clients like to hire Accenture because the consistent quality experience. Investors indeed like to invest in Accenture because of the consistency of results. With that amount of inflow, if you will, of new people, how do you ensure the culture? The second part of the question is, when you think about the 90 acquisitions, what has been the attrition rate for that group of individuals relative to Accenture's total?
I'm going to start with the last one. Very low. Very low. Right, Ellyn? I mean, the attrition on acquisition been very low. I can point to the first part because you have the same question around the culture and so forth. We need to be sure that I'm passionate about this. I think that being passionate about many things. On this one, I'm passionate, and I have a point of view, which Because sometimes you're passionate, but you don't have any point of view, which is pretty useless. The point of view is there have been probably in the past some confusion between culture and values. When companies said, there have been the wave of the one. The one Accenture, the one X, the Y, Z, the one culture. Terribly wrong.
I think indeed, the way we are looking at it is we are segregating values. The values for me is the set of principles where you will never compromise on. That should be quite universal. Indeed, our values are global, are the set of principles which are the intangible you will never compromise. Inclusion and diversity, respect for individual, ethics, compliance, are a set of principles. Cultures, very different. Cultures is what's making a group or a subgroup unique. Of course, there are going to be multiple cultures in the world, starting from a geographic standpoint. France is very different from the culture in New Jersey, right, Bob?
Yes.
There.
How are you?
However, I like Bob. It's different. On culture, that's why we developed this concept of culture of cultures. We have set of values which are absolutely intangible. Then you have the culture of cultures to accommodate the groups coming in. This is what we did with Fjord. When you mention of Fjord, very different designers. Not only we have kept their culture, we have kept their way of working. They have all developed a kind of way of working around the kitchen. This is where they are creating. We are giving them a kitchen, so they can work around. They have their own style and their own culture, and we kept the name on the case of Fjord. This is our philosophy, and it's been working for us very well.
We're moving very far from what has been created maybe 20 years ago around this concept of one, which we believe at Accenture is profoundly wrong. Maybe the last one? Right, Angie, the last one? We will have another session. We'll answer all the questions. All of them.
Hi, it's Brian Essex from Morgan Stanley. Thank you for squeezing me in. Maybe if I can indirectly put Ellyn on the spot to follow up to that last topic. I have three things.
You could work at Accenture.
Okay. Maybe as you build out your global delivery workforce, what are the key challenges that you face in maintaining, improving revenue per head, cost per head? What are the key KPIs that you focus on? Maybe the softball part of it is, I guess maybe you addressed it a little bit, but advantages of being at Accenture as you pursue those efforts.
Yeah, maybe just in two minutes, could you talk about the power of three, David?
Yeah.
What we're calling the power of three. It's another three.
I'll share with Angie. Yeah. Just very briefly, this is something that we focus on, as you would imagine, quite a bit in our organization. We talk about this concept of a power of three, which I put in front of our management team periodically. Really the most important thing, with the power of three, is that it starts with an always on, kind of relentless, continuous, every hour of every day focus on value versus volume-driven growth. One of the things that we're trying to ingrain in the culture of our management team is that, for all of the good things about our strategy, at the end of the day, we want our strategy to drive value.
As opposed to having a business that only grows through volume, meaning we add heads, more hours, more payroll, we want a business that grows the top line, more by delivering value in the form of higher revenue per head than volume alone. That's very much a theme in the way we manage and drive and incent and reward our leaders. That relates to the second of the power of three, which is the relationship between payroll growth and revenue growth that we manage very carefully. The third element of the power of three is looking at the related metrics of that, which is revenue per head and payroll per head, and always understanding that relationship. This is a very core part of how we drive our economics.
We're going to be live at 11 with David, here it's the webcast and so forth. We have a big audience. Why don't we take a 10-minute break? I know it's a bit short, but 10 minutes, we hear from David, we will open up for all your questions. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, following the break, please return to your seat for a prompt restart at 11:00 A.M. Thank you.
About to restart. Please silence your mobile devices at this time. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Accenture Chairman and CEO, Pierre Nanterme.
All right. Thanks a lot for coming back. I welcome as well the people who will now listen to us on the webcast. We're going to move to. I know many of you, of course, you love talking about the strategy, but now you would like to get the numbers, and how they do align with what we discussed this morning. It's my pleasure, privilege, to introduce, I mean, David Rowland, our CFO. David, for me, is more than a CFO. He's certainly the person I'm talking on a daily basis. He's much more than a CFO. I think I said that to that audience as well. Because for a CFO to be effective, you need to be a strategist.
I think with David, we are blessed to have a leader who is as strong in numbers and in strategy because at the end of the day, our finance strategy is a key enabler of the strategy, especially when it comes to investments and connecting the dots around the multiple returns we need to get right, the return to our people, the return to our shareholders as well, and the return to our clients. David is keeping us honest with all of this. I'm sure what I'm going to say now that David is the best CFO of our industry, and we will not trade David against anyone else in that industry. Over to you, David.
All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you as always. Just listening to Pierre make those very kind comments, I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that I think Pierre and I have set a great standard for a Frenchman and an American that have just an outstanding relationship. I just happened to turn on the news last night, and in today's world, I won't tell you which news station, because no matter what I say, it would offend someone. I turned on the generic news station, and I have to say that our two presidents, I think, are setting a new standard. We will have to raise our game.
Whatever that means.
At any rate. Good morning to everyone. It's always nice to see so many of you in person, and we really do appreciate the time that you've invested this morning to learn more about the Accenture story. I was reflecting with several people on what you've heard so far. Of course, the feedback has really been outstanding. I think as the comments support that our leadership team has really just done an outstanding job showcasing the Accenture business and really bringing to life the key elements of our strategy, our distinct position in the marketplace, our unique capabilities, all of which come together in a super powerful way to drive value for all of our stakeholders.
I hope as well that you felt the energy, the excitement, the optimism of our leaders, who I think share my view certainly that there's never been a better time, never been a more exciting time to be at Accenture. I know we all feel very fortunate to be part of this organization at this time and this place. For the next 15 minutes or so, what I want to do is build on what you've heard so far and to talk about how our strategy will continue to translate into an attractive value proposition for our shareholders. First, by briefly reflecting on, if not even celebrating perhaps, all that we've accomplished from a value standpoint over the last three to four years.
Secondly, talking about our view of how the enduring nature of our shareholder value model will continue over the next horizon and will continue to serve our shareholders very well. As context, and really anchoring back to some of the comments that Pierre made earlier, I want to start by again, just briefly reflecting on all that we have done over the last several years to really transform our business to what it is today. As I think about where we've been and what we've accomplished, I think our I&A Day themes over that period serve as a good illustration of all that we have done to position Accenture as a leader in the new.
It's interesting to think back to where we were in October of 2013, our fiscal 2014, when some of you will remember that the theme of the day, certainly KC McClure will remember, that the theme of the day was capturing new ways of growth. For the first time at that meeting, we introduced our intent to be the leader in digital services as a key element of our growth strategy. We featured Accenture Interactive, a younger version of Brian Whipple, to really illustrate our digital strategy that was in its earlier stages to illustrate it in action. We began to quantify our digital revenues, which were estimated to be, believe it or not, $5 billion in 2014. Two years later, in October of 2015, we had evolved our strategy and market positioning to be even more expansive.
We introduced for the first time the concept of the new. For the first time, we quantified our revenues in the new, which we estimated to be $10 billion or about one-third of our revenue in 2015. Ultimately for fiscal 2016, we reported an estimated $13.5 billion in revenue, which represented 40% of our business. Here we are today, having again evolved the new to now include Accenture Interactive, Accenture Applied Intelligence, Accenture Industry X.0, as you heard this morning, also including cloud and security, which continues to evolve and already anticipating, innovating, investing, and scaling in the next waves of the new. For fiscal 2018, we estimate that our business in the new will have grown to roughly, and let me give you the exact number, $23 billion in fiscal 2018, again, representing about 60% of our revenues this fiscal year.
It really is a tremendous story of a market leader with the right vision, the courage to change, and most importantly, the know-how to massively transform our business to be even stronger and a more relevant leader in the marketplace. What we're most proud of is that we've done all of that while delivering very strong financial results. I think many of you know that the foundation of our strategy has always been to create a growth engine that consistently drives growth faster than the market, allowing us to take share and to extend our position as a leader. If you look at this period from 2014-2017, the execution of our strategy yielded a 9% growth CAGR, which was extremely well-balanced across the dimensions of our business.
During that same period, we expanded our operating margins up by 50 basis points, while at the same time creating significant headroom in our P&L to invest at scale in our business and our people. We delivered an EPS CAGR of 9% during that same period, absent the FX headwind, which is about 4%, our EPS CAGR would have been even stronger. With strong growth in income, industry-leading DSOs and our capital-light model, we generated over $17 billion in operating cash flow, returning $16 billion to shareholders via repurchases and dividends, with dividends growing also at a 9% CAGR. While at the same time, as we mentioned several times this morning, investing significantly to acquire critical skills and capabilities in high-growth areas of our business. It was roughly a little over $4 billion over the timeframe on this slide.
If you go back five years, that's the roughly $5 billion number invested in acquisitions that both Pierre and Omar referenced. We did this while outperforming the market in two important areas. Again, we delivered on our strategic imperative to grow faster than the market, roughly three times the rate of growth in the market, and the clear leader in market share gained, and all in the most attractive and strategic areas of the market. We did this in perfect alignment with our growth model objectives with roughly 7% organic growth and 2% inorganic growth. Or to say it differently, over 75% of our growth coming from organic. Most importantly, to all of our shareholders, all of this resulted in a three-year total return to shareholder CAGR of 20%, which outperformed the S&P and the S&P IT sector index.
As we look at 2018, as those of you heard on our earnings call just a few weeks ago, the story continues. This year, as we believe we're positioned to deliver another very strong year. We're positioned to deliver strong top-line growth again, well above the rate of growth in the market. Growth again, that will be incredibly well-balanced across the dimensions of our business, providing further evidence of the durability and the resiliency of our growth model. We expect to deliver double-digit EPS growth with operating margin, which again, is going to be consistent with fiscal 2017, which allows us the capacity to significantly invest in our business and our people, to secure our long-term market leadership. We expect to generate strong cash flow while returning at least $4.3 billion to our shareholders via repurchases and dividends.
As I mentioned earlier, not to belabor this slide, we do all of this again with extending our overall leadership in the new. Let me say again, $23 billion is the approximate number of where we think we will land this year. The point is with the scale and differentiation to lead in each of the three components of the new, as we also talked about this morning. Of course, everything you heard this morning was the illustration of how we do this and the magic and the secret sauce for how we make this happen. At Accenture, as proud as we are of all that we've accomplished in recent years, we are laser-focused on the future and continuing to drive our business to generate significant value for all of our stakeholders.
As we look to the future, an important message that I want to convey is that we believe our three overarching imperatives for driving value will be as relevant and achievable in the future as they have been in the past. As we continue to evolve our strategy to stay ahead of our competitors and to position ourselves to be the leader of today and tomorrow, we do so with the intent to create an economic engine that, guess what, does three things. First, continues to drive market-leading growth above the rate of growth in the market. Secondly, to drive strong earnings growth, including continued modest margin expansion while investing at scale in our business and our people.
Thirdly, driving strong cash flow in excess of net income while we invest in our business and return to our shareholders, guided by a smart, consistent, and disciplined capital allocation model. Let me talk briefly about why we think each of these three imperatives is achievable as we look to the future. At Accenture, and I think this is well understood, we are obsessed with growing faster than the market and taking shares. It's at the heart of our strategy. It's in our DNA. We focus on growing profitably faster than the market. As we evolve our strategy and our business, we will continue to be focused on that in the future as much as we have been to date. In this morning's session, there were many illustrations of our growth strategy in action and some insight on how it will evolve.
In summary, there are really five distinct components of Accenture's growth model, in this case, we refer to it as three plus two, which we believe will allow us to sustain market-leading growth in the future. First, we will continue to benefit from our unique market footprint that includes scale and leadership in the world's largest and most critical geographic markets and industries. We have a model, we've built a business where we have scale and leadership where it matters most. Across these markets, as Pierre referenced, we have an enviable client portfolio anchored by 175 Diamond clients representing the world's largest and most iconic companies.
Second, we're highly unique in our end-to-end service model, where we have the scale to compete as a leader in each of our businesses, covering the full spectrum of services from strategy and consulting to technology and to operations, all grounded in industry differentiation across the spectrum. Third, as I think is well understood, certainly at this point in time, both internally and externally, we're highly differentiated in digital cloud and security-related services, while at the same time already identifying, investing, and scaling to be a leader in the next evolution of the new. We intend to be the perpetual leader in the evolving new. Fourth, we have unmatched capabilities. We highlighted some of those earlier today, but certainly, it includes the scale and depth of our industry functional and technical skills, as well as the strength of our relationships and our unique position in the ecosystem.
Fifth, we have the commitment, the capacity, and the know-how to innovate and invest to lead in the most strategic and highest growth markets. If you think about it, we believe these five elements of our growth model in aggregate represent the essence of what differentiates Accenture in the marketplace, and this is what positions us extremely well for market-leading growth in the future. Moving to our second imperative, strong earnings growth with sustainable margin expansion. For years now, we've talked about our relentless focus on driving strong earnings growth underpinned by consistent modest margin expansion, while at the same time creating the financial headroom to invest significantly in our business and our people.
Given some of the recent dialogue on margins, I want to be clear that we are delivering significantly higher levels of improvement in our underlying margins, which is what has allowed us, both this year in the first half of the year, as well as if you look out over the past two or three years, which is what has allowed us to increase the level of investment in our business. We are delivering on that objective, including in the first half of this year in significantly expanding our underlying margins. Looking forward, we will continue to be guided by this objective, and at the highest level, our efforts are again focused on five primary drivers. First, as we continue to rotate our business to the new and higher-value services, we're laser-focused on driving more value and stronger economics from this part of our business.
Some of the comments that I made earlier in answering the question alluded to that. We believe this represents a significant opportunity for us, given the strategic and critical nature of these services to our clients and our highly differentiated capabilities and skills to meet those needs. Second, as we anticipate that our business will be in a permanent state of rotating and leading in the evolving new, there will always be an important part of our business which will be at a more mature point in the life cycle. In today's context, we talk about certain parts of application services in our core business as an example. Our intent, Pierre referenced this as well, is to perpetually disrupt, modernize, and where appropriate, automate our core services to ensure that they are highly competitive in the marketplace and that we're profitable in that part of our business.
In doing so, we expect the core business to be an important contributor to our strong profitability and margin expansion. Third, we're clearly a talent-led business, where labor costs are the largest component of our cost structure. As we continue our journey of executing our highly differentiated and tailored talent strategy for each part of our business, we'll continue to carefully structure our total rewards and engineer our overall labor cost profile to support the profit objectives of our business going forward. Among others, Ellyn and I have a responsibility to work across all of our business leaders to make sure that we deliver on that objective. As a team, we are engaged in that daily, I can assure you.
Fourth, as you know well by now, Accenture has a diverse portfolio of businesses, we remain committed to continuously evaluating our portfolio for both a strategic and financial perspective to ensure that it's fully optimized. We refer to that as economy of scope in our business. We've demonstrated our willingness to both enter new businesses and exit existing businesses in support of our strategic and financial objectives, we will continue that discipline as we move forward as part of our profit model. Finally, just as we do to our clients every day, we've made significant investments to digitize Accenture to accelerate and improve our own operational efficiency. We're committed to Accenture being a showcase credential where we can demonstrate to our clients that we embrace leading technology and leading operational practices to ensure that our business operates with maximum efficiency.
Looking forward, we believe each of these five areas offers significant opportunity, in aggregate, they support our belief that we'll continue to drive strong profitability with modest margin expansion while creating continued headroom in our P&L to invest in our business. The third pillar of our shareholder value model relates to strong cash flow and smart and disciplined capital allocation. The message here is quite clear in that the drivers of our cash flow and our strategy for capital allocation will remain intact. We don't expect any significant changes as we move forward. While cash flow can ebb and flow due to certain factors, very often timing related, we believe we continue to have a business that has the capacity to generate free cash flow in excess of net income.
We remain committed to our capital allocation strategy, first by investing in our business up to 25% of our operating cash flow and acquisitions. Second, continuing to return excess cash to our shareholders, where we expect dividends to grow roughly in line with income growth and the dollar amount of repurchases to remain relatively stable in the next few years. This has been a strength of our business in the past, and it will certainly be a strength for our business as we continue to move forward. In summary, we hope this morning's session has reinforced your understanding of how truly special and distinctive Accenture is in the marketplace. There's no doubt that we are a market leader of today, uniquely positioned and highly differentiated.
Hopefully, this morning, we've illustrated and demonstrated that we are extremely well-positioned to be the market leader of tomorrow, always innovating and investing to be relevant in the future. Through my comments, we certainly believe that we have an enduring model for shareholder value creation and one that will serve our shareholders extremely well in the future. With that said, I'll invite Pierre to rejoin me on the stage and we will continue the Q&A.
Thank you. Very good. Now we have time for questions. Let's get started. Maybe we're going to move from left to right, because here we have a few. Let's-
Hi, Joe Foresi from Cantor. You mentioned underlying margins are expanding. Can you give us some idea of what you mean by underlying margins, and what's the core business margins versus digital margins, and what's your expectations for expansion?
First of all, let me talk about, for purposes of this, what do we mean when we talk about investments to then think about underlying margins absent those investments. At a high level, there's four things that we think about in investments. We first think about the money that we spend largely as organic investments on offerings and assets. The second category of investment includes elements of our talent investments. It's training and certain types of hiring that we do predominantly at the MD level. Iconic hires as an example, which we really categorize as a talent investment. Third would be the P&L absorption of the acquisitions that underpin our inorganic growth. That's really the acquisitions over the trailing four quarters, the P&L flow-through from those acquisitions. Fourth would be targeted client investments that we make in a very controlled and disciplined way.
I will say, just as a point, that that is, if anything, a narrow view of investments. In fact, there are other things that if you talked about investments more broadly, like innovation centers, digital studios, labs, et cetera, that we don't even include in that number. In that context, to get to your question, some of you will remember at the last I&A Day, I was asked the same question maybe by you. I threw out the number of 100 basis points. At that time, our margins were expanding in the zone of about 100 basis points or more. What I would tell you is that if you look at the two years since then, even if you look at the first half of this year, the underlying margins, so the margins absent those categories and investments, have continued to expand in that same zone.
Just as an illustrative model again, our mental framework has an illustrative example, is that let's say we target expanding our underlying margins by 100 basis points. We have on average generated about 15 basis points of margin expansion if you look at our history. Really what we're doing is creating 85 basis points of capacity to invest in those four areas that I called out. Yep, next one.
It's Bryan Keane, Deutsche Bank. Just wanted to follow up on automation. How much of your business today is automated, and how much will it be in five years as this continues to roll out? Is automation only a cost, or can it also help drive revenue?
Yeah. When you look at the automation and that might be good maybe, Debbie, you illustrate how you're using automation to drive more productivity because I think that's going to bring that to life.
We've used automation, whether it's RPA, AI, in combination, right, and advanced analytics to drive our operations, differentiation, and business. There you are. With that, if you look across the last three years, we've automated 38,000 roles. We haven't had to let anybody go because we keep growing our business to help other clients go on that journey. For us, it's expanding our business because it's very attractive for clients to bring their operations to us because we're making the investment to be able to combine these different types of automations to really drive a different way of running your operations. It's been great for our growth, and we continue to grow very strongly in the operations space.
Yeah.
We haven't had to let anyone go.
So-
Continue to grow?
Does what? The automation?
Yeah. I mean, the numbers are going to double.
They're going to continue to grow. I mean, is it going to be exponential? No. We're taking on new work from clients. It comes in highly manual, highly paper-based, and we take it from that, and we completely transform it. Right? We don't just create productivity savings for our clients, but we also create opportunities to grow their top line. We talked about marketing operations, right, which is definitely targeting revenue and sales for our clients. Being able to bring that experience that Brian described to life in the day-to-day way they operate, because it's every place along the value chain that you touch or interact with your key stakeholders that have to have that experience.
That often is in many of the operations, sort of whether it's sales operations or product operations, the product support piece, it all has to be consistent to bring that experience to life. We view that as definitely an uplift for our clients in terms of revenue.
Thank you. The next one. We're moving down the road a bit. Yep.
Hi. Jason Kupferberg from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Appreciate the increased clarity on the margins. I thought that was very helpful. I wanted to actually ask a question about the competitive landscape, and if you can maybe take us through some pieces of that. Obviously, Accenture is a share gainer. We all appreciate that. You do have the former Big Four out there. Seems like they've gotten reengaged in recent years in parts of the market. Perhaps even on the technology and implementation side, as opposed to just high-end consulting. What are you seeing there as well as from some of the higher-end consultancies, the McKinsey of the world, and then the multinationals.
Yep
The Indian-centric firms. We'd love to hear what's been changing from your point of view.
Yes. It's going to give me the opportunity to share with you our view of the end-to-end, and indeed, why we build this business architecture we have. We are competing against multiple fronts, as you said. On one hand, you have the strategic pure players and the Big Four. They are more on the strat consultancy part of the business. What I would call Accenture Strategy and Accenture Consulting, they would be in that space. The IPPs or Indian pure players are indeed more coming from the other side of the spectrum. I think they would be more the friends of Debbie and Bhaskar on a daily basis. In term of operations, BPO, application outsourcing, system integration, much less, of course, in the strategy and in the consulting landscape. You will have the multinationals. The multinational might be competing a bit more.
I mean, very few, I don't know any multinational really having a strategy pure player as we created with Accenture Strategy. Would be more on the consulting system integration and application outsourcing. You could see they would be competing in some part of our business. Indeed, we're claiming that today we are the only one, I believe, with this business architecture, from strategy to consulting, to digital, to technology, to Operations, and to Security. I didn't mention digital, because digital is an interesting beast. That's why we put Mike in charge of managing this beast and understanding what's going on. Because here, dynamic is, of course, very different. The best friends of Brian would be certainly the holding agencies, right? But as well, some of the coming multinationals coming in this place of this digital marketing company. Here, it's another set of competitors.
The fact that indeed we extended our reach to the CMOs has opened a new front with these holding companies, against which now we are competing. Brian numbers strong double digits are demonstrating that our formula is very powerful compared to this set of competitors. If you move to Accenture Applied Intelligence with Narendra, you're going to see another set of competitors, some of the multinational or the big players, and then a more niche and specialized player. Industry X.0, we'll see. There is not yet any established leader, probably, except us. I'm not mentioning that with arrogance, but it's just playing with this idea that we want to be the first mover. By being the first mover, we capturing more of the market. We'll see on Industry X.0 who going to play in that game, but maybe. This is the dynamic.
Needless to say, that they all rally to digital. When I'm reading all your papers on the competition now, they're all talking about what we talking about. Digital, blockchain, da, da. It's the game. There is no monopoly of the long game. That's why we were very pleased to have this Investor & Analyst Day is say, okay, you can talk or you can do things. You have a story or you have the capabilities. Indeed, there is no monopoly on storytelling. All our focus is building differentiated capabilities as unique scale. Having this end-to-end, which is making us pretty unique in the marketplace, from the boardroom to all this digital, and then with the industrial strengths in term of technology and Operations. We decided to have that scope on purpose. It's a very demanding scope.
Very much.
David mentioned economy of scope, which is our new obsession, how you manage the portfolio being end-to-end to be highly differentiated in the marketplace. Without having a scope, you can't manage or you can't support from an investment standpoint. Today, our scope and end-to-end is playing in our favor for, and that going to be the end of this long answer. Clients, they want people like us to commit on an outcome, to commit on the results. Our hypothesis is, if you cover only a part of this value chain, you are not credible to commit on an outcome. That is the logic behind these businesses we built, is the credibility to commit on the results. And when we're talking with our clients, this is what they want. Put skin in the game. Take a commitment on the result, on the cost base, or on the revenues.
It's more and more the natural discussion with clients. If you're covering only a piece of the service, you don't have any credibility to commit on an outcome. Yeah, we moving. Here, we have one. Here, we're going to move a bit, we'll go right. We do left and right. We'll take all questions.
Thanks. It's Jamie at Susquehanna. Thanks again for doing this I&A Day again. I wanted a clarification on something Bhaskar had said earlier. I think he had said, I may have misheard, that 40% of the company's revenue is digital ERP. If I'm misquoting that, I apologize. If I did, if you could rephrase it, if you could help us map which business dimensions stated that the ERP is tracking to, that would be helpful. Thank you.
Can you clarify the comment, you meant?
What I said, the 40% of our revenue comes from platform business, and platform business is SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Workday, broadly this.
Didn't you say that was growing double digits?
That is growing double digit.
Okay.
Yeah.
I think those were both new, at least new to me.
Yeah, we had not communicated that previously, that is new information.
And then-
Which we did in-
intelligence?
Bhaskar didn't go off script when we were doing that intelligence.
Yeah.
intentionally.
Good try.
Then the dimension part, where does that show up in terms of the reported revenue?
Well, I would say all of our Essentially, it's broad-based in terms of our operating groups and geographies. Do you mean from a strategy consulting app services operations? You want to comment on that?
I may not have the exact breakup of the different areas, but it will include all of our service lines, starting from Strategy to Application Services, to Operations, to everything.
It is a driver of Strategy and Consulting growth. I believe I'm correct, that if you look at Strategy and Consulting.
In the platform business, it is growing at a consistent rate with the overall. It's a double-digit grower for Strategy and Consulting, and certainly, it would be for Application Services.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay, let's take another one from the left. We move right, because I see some impatience on the right.
Hi. Thanks. Bryan Bergin. As you embed more technology and platforms and IP into your delivery, can you just talk about how that affects the fundamental financial model for you from a sense of margin and also a sense from revenue visibility?
Yeah, pivot.
Yeah. As we embed technology and IP?
Yeah, your own IP.
Yeah
not necessarily the platforms you spoke.
Yeah. I would say that, when you say technology, certainly you're talking about things like automation. You're saying we use automation as an example in our delivery models, et cetera. Our position, as I mentioned in my prepared comments, is that everything in the New, because of its very nature, in terms of the strategic priority to our clients, the fact that very often there's a scarcity of skills and capability in the marketplace that can do it at scale for the large companies as we do. We expect for everything that we do in the New, including the technology infusion, et cetera, to be accretive to our profitability. We're focused on driving the right value for our business and our shareholders for all of our services in the New, which we can do and still deliver significant value to our shareholders.
Yeah. We mentioned our portfolio of patent to patent pending, it is our goal as well to monetize our patent in a way that's going to be creating more value for the firm.
Yep. You got Rod.
Yep
here.
Hey, guys. Hey. Rod Bourgeois with DeepDive. I have a question over here, Pierre.
Yeah. Rod.
Great. I want to hone in on the industry-wide margin trend. As you guys know, IBM's margin in services has been high teens, and it's now single digits. Infosys just guided down on their next year's margin outlook. We have some pricing data that doesn't look so good, particularly in some of the traditional segments like application maintenance, and some of the other areas. I guess my question really is, are you seeing an industry-wide margin challenge that's built up over the last few years, or do you think this is just idiosyncratic things at some of your major competitors? Because you also had a margin disappointment last quarter. It is interesting that IBM, Infosys, some of the other large Indian firms, and Accenture have all recently had some margin challenges. Is that an industry trend or just a coincidence?
Yeah. I'm going to start answering this. The market is very competitive. Let's put it that way. It's attractive, but very competitive. Now, when you look at the margin, you have different situations. Situation number 1 might be you're too much exposed to commodity services. If you're too much exposed on commodity services, the pricing are going down every year. At some point in time, it does impact the margin. Our response on this has been robotic and automation, but it does have the limits. Some are overexposed, I would say, to commodity services. Scenario number 2 would be you invest. I've seen some like us or some of our competitors, where you're investing to rotate to your destination, to the new. Many competitors announced that they want to go digital. They're going to make, more or less emulating our story a bit.
Some are in the wrong place or others are investing to get out of the wrong place and to get to the right place. I think this is what it is in a context where the market is extremely competitive. If you want to keep the price stable or more or moving up, you need indeed to bring extraordinarily deep differentiation. This is what we do. I think that's the way I would look across the board. For us, we pivot to the new. We, I think, communicated that our margin in the new are on balance better than the margin on the core. We announced that. We need to continue that pivot and through all the ladies and gentlemen you heard this morning, getting unique, differentiated talent, asset, and solutions.
When you're working with Narendra and you're bringing the best business scientists, and we have how many we have now?
3,000.
3,000 business scientists to work on top-level algorithm to solve for fraud or for churn or other things, you can have value. The more you're getting to the mass commoditized services, the more complex it is. It depends on your portfolio of business. That's why in 2012, we decided to pivot our portfolio to be less exposed to commoditization.
Pierre, just a quick follow-up. Is your biggest challenge to margin expansion going forward the competitive environment, or is it just keeping that capacity to be able to invest in the new? In other words, what's your biggest challenge to being able to achieve margin expansion in future years?
First, David, been very clear. We are expanding our margin, and you mentioned 100 basis points.
Yeah.
We are generously expanding our margin. Now, you can say, 100 basis points, and you give 10-20 in average, because we are reinvesting 80%-85% of this 100 basis points in the business. I think this is this balance we want to keep. At Accenture, we are expanding our margin. We are expanding our margin significantly, and I'm taking that as a proof point of the rotation to higher value services. We reinvest in the business because job not get done, and we need to invest in the next generation, but we are expanding the margin. Yes. Here in the front and here.
Ashwin Shirvaikar, Citi. Two-part question. I was really struggling to get to three parts, but maybe I'm not good enough for Accenture. The first part of it is just going back to the margin comment, the gross versus net. As you become more and more of a digital enterprise yourself and apply all these things, does that gap between the 100 basis points gross and giving us 15 basis points, does that shrink so that you can maybe down the road deliver 30-50 instead of 10-30? The revenue question, the second question is really, as digital becomes bigger, and you talked about maturity curves, do you re-accelerate your growth down the road because your portfolio is growing faster? Or do you, as you hit maturity curves, your growth remains the same on a bigger base?
Maybe the last one, then I will let you comment the margin, because you love that so much. We're growing high single double digits. We are pretty much full steam on growth, and we're pleased with that. From an organic standpoint, we're growing three times the market minimum. The expectation is being met. We want to grow more than the market. When it's three times the organic growth, it is very good. What we believe is indeed with our strategy, with the next wave of growth, with the launch of Industry X.0, with the launch of Accenture Interactive Operations or Intelligent Marketing Operations, we mentioned with Nikki. I think we believe that we have the potential to continue growing in more than the market and in the zone we are setting every year. Plus, there are other markets to explore.
I'm thinking about China as an illustration, where I believe there is a great potential. All what we're doing in South America, outside Brazil, where we see a good potential in Colombia, in Mexico, in other places. There are markets where we could expand as well. When I look at the new business we could launch, plus the market we could develop, plus the market share we could develop in our current markets, thinking about in the U.S., in Germany, I think we still have the possibility to improve our market share. I'm not over-concerned by the growth. I think as we said, the point for us is to extract the value out of that growth so we can reinvest in the business with the appropriate return to our people and to our shareholders. That's the equation.
The big focus is going to be put on value. The growth, and again, we need always to be cautious on this. You never know what might happen, but I think we have found a good formula for growing. Now we need to extract the value and reinvest in the business and continue the good story. Yeah. Frontal row, and then moving here and there.
Hi, this is Michael Vogel from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. One more question. Very few retailers are doing well worldwide despite spending a lot of money on interactive services from Accenture. Just what I was wondering is, are any of the retailers starting to lose faith in that money they're spending? Is there any risk to the new brand promise overall for Accenture?
I don't know where-
Sander.
Sander, Mr. Retail.
Yeah.
What's happening in retail?
Well, I mean, what's happening in retail? The real question is here, what does it take to be successful? Big question on the table for many retailers, what is our real purpose here in retail? Because think about the old model. The value proposition was really I put lots of stuff in one place, people go there and they buy it. Well, that model is sort of under a lot of pressure. Retailers need to take a step back and say, "What do I really want to be in life? What is my value proposition to my customers?" With Brian, we're working on what's the experience to the consumer, to the shopper that we want to give. That's a very important question that retailers need to answer. If you don't answer that question, look Toys 'R' Us , you're going to be in trouble.
The next thing that you need to be successful is scale, because you're competing against the best in the world. Think Amazon, think Alibaba. You got to be big to invest and to really have a mindset on investments, because that's the other issue that many retailers are grappling with is they grew up in a model where they say, "We open 10 new stores, we're going to get growth." Today, the 10 new stores are not necessarily bringing growth. Today, you need to invest in digital capabilities to be successful. What's your purpose, and how are we going to invest to maximize our consumer experience? Those are sort of the three big questions that retailers need to answer, and it's a matter of survival for some of them.
Yeah.
Some of them will invest, some of them won't, and some of them won't survive.
Yeah. It's definitely a vertical under massive pressure when you look at it. Maybe the last two questions. Yeah. Here. Here and here, and then we will wrap up.
Mo Ramani from KeyBanc. In your emerging areas, blockchain and AI, are you following a similar strategy of working with external product companies, or are your foundational capabilities changing? Follow-up to that is, given that these technologies drive significant levels of efficiency, how are you ensuring that you are able to retain and grow your revenue base?
Okay. Right. I've been working with the David, you want to maybe comment on how we work with the ecosystem? This is, for us, a natural act, so maybe you could elaborate.
Our ecosystem position in blockchain is actually our biggest strength. It's what's leading us to win the most of our work. The Project Ubin example that we showed a video from was the first time ever that a side-by-side build on 3 of the leading platforms was done against the same functional scope. There was a ton of confusion in the market as to, I have one platform company telling me that their product's fantastic because of this, and the other one's showing me the same metric and saying they're fantastic, but they look wildly different. This was the first time that through using us as an independent party has developed the deep relationships, sometimes through minor investments and sometimes through alliances, certainly through our focus on building the proper ecosystem.
We're the only trusted party that's independent that has all the relationships with the leading platforms that can do that kind of comparison. We've been heavily investing into that ecosystem. It includes a huge focus on the startup community, a huge focus on our traditional technology partners in Microsoft and IBM and AWS and Intel and HPE, as well as the academic community and the technical consortium that I mentioned. Linux, Hyperledger, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, et cetera. Our ecosystem's actually one of our primary differentiators and the reason that we're winning an outsized share of the work.
It's been for a long time. I remember when I started 35 years ago. Working with the ecosystem of the ERP is, for us, just a natural act. It's not by chance that we are number 1 with, we mentioned SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, Amazon Web Services, and many others. With probably all the ecosystem partners. We are totally independent. We are totally technology agnostic. It's part of us. When there is a technology, we're looking at the technology in our job. We are a massive translator of how this technology going to impact the industries. And when. For our clients, they have this question. They're going to impact our business? Yes. Okay, but when? Today? Tomorrow? On your second question on, all these technologies are easy to implement.
We are doing now in two weeks what been taking two years before. Your business going to shrink massively. I will answer your question with the famous quote of Mark Twain, we certainly all know, "The rumor of my death are highly exaggerated." I'm taking that because Software as a Service is plug-and-play. Many providers are explaining to their clients that they don't need people like us anymore. That's their job because they want to get our margin in their product, in their sell. Software as a Service, you don't need system integration. It's going to be super simple, super smooth. You take your plug, you put the whole thing, and the magic is happening. Blockchain, certainly the same. They go, "Oh, blockchain, highly decentralized, easy.
You're putting that, couple of weeks, you're done, life is good." The answer is, we're still there, the reality is growing our revenues with these new players, whatever they are, blockchain, whatever they are, Salesforce, whatever they are, Workday, or all these companies, or even now the SAP HANA and all the others. Maybe because we are working for giants. Indeed, there might be a market, maybe a big market, where implementation might be done maybe faster, and in a way, which is going to be easier. For the big giants, our 175 big giants we're working with, the level of overall integration is remaining intact because the SI piece maybe may be a bit small, a bit.
The rest, which is process transformation, which is change management, which is integration in the rest of the platforms, because you need to integrate your solution with the rest, is still requiring a significant effort. I think you had this question, Paul, on a regular basis on that fate. How much cannibalization? The reality is we've seen zip, we continue to grow. We'll see whether they're going to be one day the magic technology plug-and-play. When we will come here and say, "Okay, guys, it's end over." "It's our last I&A Day." I don't think so. We'll be back soon on this, showing more growth. Maybe a final one To make sure there is no Yeah, here. This gentleman has been raising his hand for quite a while. Don't want to frustrate anyone.
James Schneider from Goldman Sachs. Thanks for fitting me in. I was wondering if you maybe comment on the relationship between your shorter-term consulting integration work and your longer-term outsourcing work. Maybe you've clearly done a great job of taking digital work on the consulting side and moving into the profitable core over time. Can you just talk to the relationship between the margins in the shorter-term consulting work and the outsourcing work historically, and whether you expect that relationship to change over time given some of the commoditization pressures that you mentioned earlier?
It's a broad question, it's hard to. Really, you would have to get into more specificity to really give a good answer to that. In general, I would say that our expectation is that our strategy and consulting margins really, let's say, lead the margins of the business. Clearly, that is the expectation for that part of the business. Having said that, application services, as an example, is a very profitable business, as is operations. We really look at. We've talked about this concept of fit for purpose, which means really understanding the market-relevant economics for each part of the business, recognizing that the market-relevant economics are different for each. What we drive ourselves to is a view of always being at or better, really better than what we judge to be the market economics for that part of the business.
That's what our business group chief executives, working with our operating group chief executives focus on. In operations, we look at Debbie's business in operations context, and what she's constantly doing is driving the strategy to achieve a financial outcome that is strong profitability in the context of the operations marketplace. That's how we drive the business.
Okay. Time to wrap up. Right, NG?
Yep.
We want to be very mindful about your time. Thanks a lot for coming this morning. I really hope that you find this session extremely helpful for all of you in understanding where we are. I'm not going to summarize the element of the strategy, but the key element you heard this morning is, in 2011, 2012, we embark Accenture. I mean, obviously, leadership team embark Accenture in certainly the most significant transformation of the Accenture history to rotate to the new. We are now in 2018, and I guess we can declare we have reached a destination. Maybe it's not the final one, but we reached the destination that indeed we can declare we have rotated 60% of our revenue to the new. We can declare there is a new Accenture today on this stage.
It is not the Accenture you might have known before, or it's not. I've seen that in an analyst. One of you wrote something like, "It's not your father's Accenture," right? It's not your father's Accenture. We are now the new Accenture, 60% of our revenue in the new. I think the second message is innovation, first-mover advantage, and really capturing the next wave of growth and anticipating. I think that's the other big message we are doing at Accenture. You'll see how we're doing that, but we believe it's absolutely prominent. The third big message is we are extending our reach and relevance across the value chain of our clients.
Now we are relevant not only in enterprise management and technology, but we are relevant in all the marketing operations at the front, and we're going to be relevant in all the operational services at the core of the operations of our clients. You see with Faurecia, we contribute to build cars. Who would have believed that Accenture would build cars? We are now at least the cockpit of the car in autonomous car. We have significantly expanded. We are addressing a much bigger budget and spending of our clients, as well as being more relevant with them on their opportunities and challenges. Next, end-to-end. We build an architecture of businesses which is second to none, where we are relevant from the boardroom and the executive committee to the technology, and as well to the way you operate on behalf of clients. Finally, talent.
I think we have 445,000 people, but the reality is we have 445,000 talented people. All the job Ellyn been doing is this concept of specialization at scale. We want to be highly specialized by our businesses and having the best people, the best business scientists, the best people for Brian, and all the others in all our distinct businesses. It's all about specialization. We need to drive that specialization at an amazing scale. 3,000 business scientists, not 200, not 20. 3,000 growing. You've seen that now Accenture Interactive, you mentioned we are what, 20,000? 25. 25,000 people. This is what we're thinking when scale. Under Kelly Bissell leadership, now we're going to hit the $2 billion, and last year Accenture Security been growing 70%. Right, Kelly? Right. He's a good guy, Kelly. He arrived two years ago, 70%.
We're going to keep him on board. He's a very good guy. We love him a lot. All this talent value proposition is extremely important. What I would say is the deployment leverage we have across the different industries and the different markets. We're putting all of this together, and at the end of it, I really would like, in front of all of you, really to thank the leadership team of Accenture, the people here, and all the others who are not there. Because at the end of the day, it's a team sport. What we have at Accenture is an extraordinarily aligned, cohesive team of leaders. They're all the best-in-class in their categories, but what's setting them apart is their unique ability, with a true friendship and camaraderie, to collaborate.
Because at the end of the day, all these businesses should be synergistic, and you can't be successful on your own. It's all about combining the capability in a geography for an industry, and we need all these people to cooperate seamlessly and being extraordinarily aligned to our strategy. For me, it is just a privilege to be their team captain. You see they like cracking jokes on me, so maybe I'm going to reveal the joke on the three, because it did pan out across the board, all three. Yes, I'm a bit obsessed by the threes, so I'm going to give you a bit. Every time I'm presenting, okay, there are three things. Three things, and so forth. When I ask them to present, they come with threes. Some, when they come with fours, they come here with three, and so forth.
The three has become the way for us of structure our thinking. It does work with three or six, because it's twice three. Three, six, nine is the way you present things. Everything in middle would be a huge problem for our brain to understand. Especially mine. Thanks for joking for all this morning on the three. Thank you very much. I like working with you a lot, and I would like to thank all of you for the trust and confidence you're putting in our company, our investors or the analysts who are supporting us, challenging us, asking tough questions. I encourage all of you to continue asking the toughest possible questions so they could answer them. It's been a pleasure to be with you this morning. All the best, and take care. Safe travel back, and talk to you very soon.