'Everything you do will be replicated by a computer'

Marc Carrel-Billiard, who recently visited India, serves as a senior managing director at Accenture. He heads Accenture Technology Innovation, the R&D Labs, Accenture Strategic Growth Initiatives, Accenture Studios and Accenture Ventures. In his 25-year tenure at the company, he has pioneered technology, particularly in voice recognition, knowledge-based systems, and neural networks.

- Leslie D'Monte

In an interview, Carrel-Billiard shared his views on how business leaders can harness scientific advancements and technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI, quantum computing, blockchain, metaverse, and digital twins, and India’s role in these domains. Edited excerpts:

What has been Accenture’s broad vision while dealing with emerging technologies?

As we spelt out in our Technology Vision 2023 report, there’s a revolution at every level. While companies already have a technology strategy to manage their information (IT) and operational technology (OT, which is about physical or hardware systems), the strategy needs to encompass science tech (ST), too, if enterprises want to leverage the new reality over the next 5-10 years.

Many companies are using tools such as RPA (robotic process automation) for automation work and claiming to do AI. But next generation of AI is about generalizing AI, which explores how a new category of AI, spurred on by foundation models and large language models (LLMs), is used by companies. We are also looking at multi-sensorial next-generation metaverse that is not just about vision and audio, but also haptics. One key focus area of the metaverse, will be industrial digital twins (digital replicas of physical systems).

But, how do you capture the rapid pace of evolving technologies?