After Infosys Topaz, Accenture announces $3 bln plan, to double AI workforce to 80,000

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Accenture plans to invest $3 billion over three years in its Data & AI practice, joining the roster of global tech services and consulting giants investing heavily in generative AI, including Indian rivals Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. Accenture also plans to double its AI workforce to 80,000. This news comes three months after the company announced 19,000 job cuts to reduce costs. Also, in this brief, India's technology minister reacts to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's allegations of bullying by the Indian government, including during the farmer protests in 2021.

Notes:

Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey has touched off another round of outrage in India, saying in a recent interview that India frequently demanded the removal of posts and accounts critical of the government, often threatening legal action against the social media platform, TechCrunch reports.

Dorsey claimed the Indian government threatened to shut down Twitter's operations, raid employees' homes, and close its offices. Twitter initially resisted such demands but eventually complied with India's new IT regulations.

India's technology minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has refuted Dorsey's statements, accusing Twitter of violating Indian laws and disregarding the country's sovereignty.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage yesterday, affecting numerous major websites in the US, including The Boston Globe and the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City. The outage disrupted the ability of news organizations to publish coverage of former President Donald Trump's court appearance in Miami. The outage has been resolved.

Accenture has announced a $3 billion investment over three years in its Data & AI practice, joining the list of global tech services and consulting giants investing heavily in generative AI, including Indian rivals Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.

Accenture also plans to double its AI workforce to 80,000 professionals through hiring, acquisitions, and training, according to a press release yesterday. This announcement comes three months after the company announced 19,000 job cuts to reduce costs.

As part of the investment, Accenture has launched a platform called AI Navigator for Enterprise. The company will also establish a Center for Advanced AI to maximize the value of generative AI and other emerging AI capabilities.

Infosys Finacle, the core banking software subsidiary of Infosys, has won a contract from Belgium's Keytrade Bank to modernize its core banking system to make the bank's operations more efficient and provide a better customer experience.

This implementation will replace the bank's legacy banking systems, Infosys said in a press release. The bank is subscribing to Finacle via a software-as-a-service model on Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Hyderabad is set to host the Second India Data Observability Conference this Friday, June 16, organized by Unravel Data, a data observability platform provider.

Researchers from Macquarie University, in collaboration with teams from Japan, the Netherlands, and Italy, have achieved a new speed record for an industry-standard optical fibre. The breakthrough was made possible by a compact glass chip developed by Macquarie University, which allows signals to be fed into the fibre's cores simultaneously with low levels of losses.