Google Cloud, Accenture Launch Unit to Put AI Engineers On-Site with Customers

Google Cloud and Accenture are the latest companies to bet that forward-deployed engineers are key to unlocking business value from generative AI.

The two companies have formed Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group, a new unit at the professional-services firm aimed at helping customers deploy Google Cloud’s agentic AI platform.

As part of the arrangement, Google Cloud will help train up to 1,000 Accenture forward deployed engineers, or FDEs, who will work with clients on-site to plan and build AI applications on the Gemini Enterprise platform. The group will also include other experts from Accenture who will help scale FDE solutions and a small group of Google Cloud FDEs for limited engagements with top-tier customers.

“There’s a need for experts who can go and do these [things] for customers,” said Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian.

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It’s the latest in a series of bets made by AI companies that embedding their technologists directly inside customers’ offices—a business model initially popularized by Palantir’s “forward-deployed engineers”—is the best way for enterprises to achieve meaningful returns on their AI investments.

“Clients want clear value and they’re stuck,” said Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.

Companies today are looking for growth, investment capacity and real impact on their bottom line, Sweet said. “We promised AI can do that. And they’re like, ‘We get it, except it’s not happening, help us make it happen.’”

Nearly four years after the debut of ChatGPT, the ROI on enterprise adoption continues to be hit-or-miss, driven in part by companies’ struggles to integrate AI tools into corporate systems and customize them for specific business needs.

On a deeper level, said Kurian, companies also struggle with understanding how their business processes can be redesigned with AI, and how to make organizational and labor changes as a result of that redesign.

The new group is designed to help with that, he said.

Before the formalization of this new group, Sweet said Accenture already had FDEs. The company has typically deployed one or multiple “pods” into an organization. Those pods contain not only FDEs, responsible for building actual solutions, but also industry, process and data experts, who work both with the company’s internal IT department as well as, increasingly, with functional heads, like chief financial officers.

If the customer is looking for a large-scale transformation—like reinventing its finance group around AI—the Accenture pod starts by identifying which processes AI can actually reinvent and the order in which they should be tackled.

With one client, for example, the pod started with a use case around automating invoice processing.

Over eight to 12 weeks, the pod mapped the business process, integrated the appropriate company data, built an agentic AI solution that was fully ready to scale across the company, and created a road map for how to scale it. FDEs typically then pass the project on to other Accenture counterparts to handle the actual scaling.

Accenture and Google Cloud said the new group represents a significant investment, although they declined to comment on specific financials.

The Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group enters a crowded market as tech companies, spending trillions on the infrastructure needed to power the AI boom, are under pressure to speed up adoption.

Earlier this year, OpenAI launched OpenAI Deployment Co., a stand-alone services firm. Anthropic also has an FDE offering it calls its Applied AI team. And Microsoft and Amazon Web Services too in recent months have made announcements around their own FDE programs.

At the same time, questions have risen over the ability of traditional service providers, including Accenture, to provide the right level of expertise.

Sweet said Accenture’s established position in the market is actually part of its edge here. “You have to know: How do you actually deploy a system in a big company?”