Good morning, Broadsheet readers! A female-founded food-tech company is valued at $170 million, Unilever is running a test salon for Black hair care products, and Accenture CEO Julie Sweet says diverse leaders are best prepared for the era of A.I. Happy Thursday!
- Era of A.I. Businesses, right now, are on the brink of transformation. The “era of A.I.” is just beginning, says Accenture chair and CEO Julie Sweet, and companies are reimagining themselves for that future. They need “the courage to change and the ability to bring people along on the journey," Sweet says.
The CEOs best prepared to guide firms into this new era are women, people of color, and LGBTQ execs—diverse leaders.
That’s because diverse leaders already know what that kind of transformation takes. “Diverse leaders have had to continuously reinvent and adapt at a personal level in their career,” Sweet says. In addition to their skills and capabilities, they’re “resilient, adaptable pioneers,” she adds.
They’re also more likely to hire diverse teams, which supports innovation. “Those two facts lend themselves to these being the leaders that can lead reinvention at an enterprise,” Sweet says.
As the CEO of Accenture, the $43-billion-in-revenue information technology and consulting giant, Sweet speaks to other CEOs frequently about how to prepare for the change A.I. will bring. That “total enterprise reinvention” includes everything from how businesses interact with customers, to how they run manufacturing plants, to how corporate workforces operate day-to-day. She advises current CEOs to prioritize hiring, nurturing, and promoting diverse talent to succeed in this new business environment.
Business leaders are relatively receptive to that guidance. After three years of earth-shaking change, from the pandemic to the Ukraine war to inflation to the rise of generative A.I., companies realize that they need leaders who “think differently.”
Accenture is part of this transformation. Earlier this month, the company announced a $3 billion commitment to A.I. It plans to double its staff focused on A.I. to 80,000. The firm is seeing “unprecedented interest” from its clients, Sweet said.
As a female CEO, Sweet falls into the category of leaders poised to succeed through that kind of reinvention. She’s Accenture’s first female CEO, and earlier in her career, she was the ninth woman to ever reach partner at a 200-year-old law firm. “The insight that comes from that—how do you think outside the box?" she reflects. "How do you be a disruptor, because you’re already a disruptor by being different than the rest?”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Fortune's newsletter for and about the world's most powerful women. Today's edition was curated by Kinsey Crowley. Subscribe here.
