NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 24, 2025--
Accenture (NYSE: ACN) is launching new capabilities, accelerators and training to help organizations build and scale generative AI solutions and agents that enhance the impact of the integrations of Google Cloud’s Gemini models and Salesforce’s Agentforce, announced today.
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As a leading transformation partner for both Google Cloud and Salesforce, Accenture will help clients capitalize on this strategic moment with packaged accelerators to drive growth and reinvent business workflows and customer experiences in the agentic era.
The industry- and function-specific accelerators leverage Accenture’s understanding of customer processes, extensive data and AI engineering skills, and expansive industry and functional experience from across the Accenture and Google Cloud joint generative AI Center of Excellence and the Accenture Salesforce hub for generative AI. The accelerators will help drive more robust and intelligent AI-driven processes by harnessing real-time data insights to help identify operational efficiencies and empower organizations to deliver more personalized and impactful customer experiences faster than ever before.
“Accenture is doubling down to bring its extensive ecosystem and customer domain capabilities and deep AI engineering skills together with the collective innovations from Google Cloud and Salesforce to accelerate value for our clients,” said Lan Guan, chief AI officer, Accenture. "By leveraging assets across Accenture’s Google and Salesforce business groups, our new accelerator services will help organizations drive new levels of productivity and growth in the next frontier of agentic AI.”
Accenture’s accelerators will help organizations quickly adopt new product integrations in areas such as customer care. By combining Salesforce’s Agentforce with Google Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities, customer care can be reinvented by empowering humans to deliver more proactive, personalized, and efficient customer experiences across the customer’s preferred method of interaction like video, text, and voice in multiple languages. Accenture accelerators help enable predictive issue resolution, dynamic knowledge base suggestions and tailored customer offers. Customer care representatives can also receive AI-powered assistance in multiple languages, automated case summarization and sentiment analysis. These customer interactions can be managed through voice, conversational AI chatbots, omnichannel orchestration and automated follow-ups, driving new levels of efficiency.
For example, in the healthcare industry, personalized patient care and optimized payer services can be enabled with Accenture’s health document AI accelerator. This accelerator uses Google Cloud’s MedLM model and Vertex AI to interpret medical data from various sources—like imaging and test results—which Salesforce’s Agentforce can then surface directly to care providers to enable them to quickly provide tailored and seamless patient experiences.
“Enterprise customers will be able to deploy many of their most critical Salesforce applications on Google Cloud’s secure, AI-optimized infrastructure,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, president, Global Partner Organization, Google Cloud. “Through our partnership with Accenture, customers will have access to the resources needed to successfully enhance Salesforce workflows with Google Cloud’s entire technology stack, including AI agents, Gemini models, Vertex AI, BigQuery, and more.”
"Our open and extensible platform provides customers the choice and flexibility to use their own applications and LLM models. With Salesforce’s major partnership expansion with Google, customers can build AI agents in our agentic AI platform, Agentforce, and use Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities to handle more complex tasks,” said Jim Steele, president, Global Strategic Customers & Partners at Salesforce. “Accenture’s accelerators will make it even easier for customers across the globe to take advantage of these powerful capabilities."
Google Cloud and Salesforce technology training and learning services will be made available through Accenture LearnVantage, providing tailored upskilling programs, ecosystem certification services, and managed services for a client’s own learning capabilities.
About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 799,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at accenture.com.
Accenture is launching new capabilities, accelerators and training to help organizations build and scale generative AI solutions and agents that enhance the impact of the integrations of Google Cloud’s Gemini models and Salesforce’s Agentforce, announced today. (Graphic: Business Wire)
BRUSSELS (AP) — European Union leaders worked into the night on Thursday, seeking to reassure Belgium that they would provide guarantees to protect it from Russian retaliation if it backs a massive loan for Ukraine. Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy meanwhile pleaded for a quick decision to keep Ukraine afloat in the new year.
At a summit in Brussels with high stakes for both the EU and Ukraine, leaders of the 27-nation bloc discussed how best to use tens of billions of euros in frozen Russian assets to underwrite a loan to meet Ukraine’s military and financial needs over the next two years.
The bulk of the assets — some 193 billion euros ($227 billion) as of September — are held in the Brussels-based financial clearing house Euroclear. Russia’s Central Bank launched a lawsuit against Euroclear last week.
“Give me a parachute and we’ll all jump together,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever told lawmakers ahead of the summit. “If we have confidence in the parachute that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Belgium fears that Russia will strike back and wants the bloc to borrow the money on international markets. It says frozen assets held in other European countries should be thrown into the pot as well, and that its partners should guarantee that Euroclear will have the funds it needs should it come under legal attack.
An estimated 25 billion euros ($29 billion) in Russian assets are frozen in banks and financial institutions in other EU countries, including France, Germany and Luxembourg.
The Russian Central Bank's lawsuit ramped up pressure on Belgium and its EU partners ahead of the summit.
The “reparations loan” plan would see the EU lend 90 billion euros ($106 billion) to Ukraine. Countries like the United Kingdom, which said Thursday it is prepared to share the risk, as well as Canada and Norway would help make up any shortfall.
Russia's claim to the assets would still stand, but the assets would remain locked away at least until the Kremlin ends its war on Ukraine and pays for the massive damage it caused.
In mapping out the loan plan, the European Commission set up safeguards to protect Belgium, but De Wever remained unconvinced and EU envoys were working late on Thursday to address his concerns.
Soon after arriving in Brussels, the Ukrainian president sat down with the Belgian prime minister to make his case for freeing up the frozen funds. The war-ravaged country is at risk of bankruptcy and needs new money by spring.
“Ukraine has the right to this money because Russia is destroying us, and to use these assets against these attacks is absolutely just,'' Zelenskyy told a news conference.
In an appeal to Belgian citizens who share their leader's worries about retaliation, Zelenskyy said: “One can fear certain legal steps in courts from the Russian Federation, but it’s not as scary as when Russia is at your borders.''
“So while Ukraine is defending Europe, you must help Ukraine,” he said.
Whatever method they use, the leaders have pledged to meet most of Ukraine's needs in 2026 and 2027. The International Monetary Fund estimates that would amount to 137 billion euros ($160 billion).
“We have to find a solution today," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters. EU Council President António Costa, who is chairing the meeting, vowed to keep leaders negotiating until an agreement is reached, even if it takes days.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said it was a case of sending "either money today or blood tomorrow" to help Ukraine.
If enough countries object, the plan could be blocked. There is no majority support for a plan B of raising the funds on international markets, although that too was being discussed at the summit.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that he hopes Belgium's concerns can be addressed.
"The reactions of the Russian president in recent hours show how necessary this is. In my view, this is indeed the only option. We are basically faced with the choice of using European debt or Russian assets for Ukraine, and my opinion is clear: We must use the Russian assets.”
Hungary and Slovakia oppose a reparations loan. Apart from Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy and Malta are also undecided.
“I would not like a European Union in war," said Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who sees himself as a peacemaker. He’s also Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in Europe. “To give money means war.”
Orbán described the loan plan as a “dead end.''
The outcome of the summit has significant ramifications for Europe's place in negotiations to end the war. The United States wants assurances that the Europeans are intent on supporting Ukraine financially and backing it militarily — even as negotiations to end the war drag on without substantial results.
The loan plan in particular also poses important challenges to the way the bloc goes about its business. Should a two-thirds majority of EU leaders decide to impose the scheme on Belgium, which has most to lose, the impact on decision-making in Europe would be profound.
The EU depends on consensus, and finding voting majorities and avoiding vetoes in the future could become infinitely more complex if one of the EU's founding members is forced to weather an attack on its interests by its very own partners.
De Wever too must weigh whether the cost of holding out against a majority is worth the hit his government's credibility would take in Europe.
Whatever is decided, the process does not end at this summit. Legal experts would have to convert any political deal into a workable agreement, and some national parliaments may have to weigh in before the loan money could start flowing to Ukraine.
Associated Press writers Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.
From left, Portugal's Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, European Council President Antonio Costa, French President Emmanuel Macron and Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban during a round table meeting at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
European Council President Antonio Costa, center right, speaks with Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, center left, during a round table meeting at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Belgium's Prime Minister Bart De Wever, center, speaks with from left, Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, Netherland's Prime Minister Dick Schoof, Luxembourg's Prime Minister Luc Frieden and Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk during a round table meeting at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks with the media as he arrives for the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, right, arrives for the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana)
Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, center, is greeted as she arrives for a round table meeting on migration at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Olivier Hoslet, Pool Photo via AP)
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, right, and Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz, left, attend a round table meeting on migration at the EU Summit in Brussels, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Olivier Hoslet, Pool Photo via AP)
FILE - A view of the headquarters of Euroclear in Brussels, on Oct. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, File)
