Global professional services major Accenture has acquired Byte Prophecy, an automated insights and big data company based in Ahmedabad in Gujarat. The move is clearly aimed at gearing up to meet the growing demand for enterprise-scale artificial intelligence (AI) and digital analytics solutions in the Asia Pacific region. The financial details of the deal, with which Accenture fortifies AI know-how, have not been disclosed.

In the last few years, several global technology firms are seen taking aggressive acquisition routes to boost their AI and Digital Analytics capabilities, which demonstrates how valuable data has become for organizations to understand consumer preferences and expectations to grow and compete.

Accenture is no exception either. Under its Applied Intelligence unit, the global consulting giant has taken rapid strides recently in its bid to capitalize on the AI opportunity. It has made several acquisitions in Australia (Analytics8), Spain (Pragsis Bidoop), North America (Clarity Insights), and the UK (Mudano) to enhance its tech-portfolio that helps clients scale up AI capabilities in these markets.

The acquisition of Byte is further testimony to the industry-wide adoption of analytics-based solutions. Through Byte Prophecy buyout, Accenture will add about 50 data science and data engineering experts to its Applied Intelligence team, with a focus on insight automation. The buyout will further strengthen the existing consulting and technology capabilities of Accenture, which help clients in areas such as data foundations and advanced analytics.

Byte Prophecy was founded in 2011, and has worked closely with Accenture Ventures since 2018 on open innovation efforts. It has collaborated and co-innovated with Accenture and its clients in Asia Pacific on advanced data and analytics projects.

An area of growing focus

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations have no option but to continue to follow social distancing and remote working norms unabatedly. With most of the consumers and employees spending much of their time online for work and leisure, getting insights from advanced analytics and artificial intelligence has become even more important to gauge customer priorities and ensure business continuity.

Forward-looking enterprises are looking for intelligent analytics and AI applications to make business decisions and diversify the product offerings to support business continuity. Accenture’s massive focus on these domains enables it to support customers in taking effective business decisions by unifying big data from multiple sources and offer actionable insights. Notably, only in its 2019 fiscal year, Accenture invested nearly US$1.2 billion on 33 acquisitions globally to acquire critical skills and capabilities in strategic, high-growth areas of the market. With these acquisitions, Accenture fortifies AI know-how and other digital consulting skillsets. These would help it get more deals to meet new-age digital needs of the organizations.

The post-pandemic world is expected to be quite different and AI driven big data insights could help businesses reduce costs and make processes more robust. “Across industries, decision making has become more complex, and businesses are increasingly relying on advanced analytics and AI to ensure insight driven, rapid decision making. Beyond advanced technology capabilities, Accenture brings our clients a co-innovation mindset, and in Byte Prophecy we found a partner with the right mix of technology and consulting skills, and a client-centric innovation culture,” said Piyush N. Singh, Accenture’s market unit lead for India and sales lead for growth markets in the official press release that announced the acquisition.

Along with Accenture, tech-behemoths like IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Capgemini, Adobe Systems, Google, Dell, and Cognizant are entering into M&A and research to expand their data-driven digital transformation offerings.