ORLANDO, Florida – Probability of a recession next year is on the rise, but that doesn’t mean companies should stop spending on technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said during her keynote at this week's Gartner IT Symposium 2022 in Orlando.

Sweet said “all roads lead to technology” when it comes to how leaders should handle economic uncertainty. Training employees from top to bottom and investing in technologies that bring value to business is the right approach. Sweet claims Accenture spends a billion dollars each year training its employees on critical up-and-coming technologies.

“We just believe at our core that technology is critical for every person at Accenture,” she said, adding, “If I need to learn it, my team needs to learn it.”

Sweet anticipates the metaverse will be the most disruptive technology over the next five years. She explained that some industries wasted time and resources experimenting on past technology trends that were only relevant to specific sectors – like blockchain – but the metaverse is different and will traverse all industries.

“The metaverse is going to be as profoundly impactful as digital,” Sweet said, explaining that while the metaverse is still in its early days, the technology will fundamentally “change how we work.”

The industrial metaverse is already providing digital twins to digitize managing operations in field settings, she noted. Companies like Accenture are using their own metaverses for virtual onboarding and training, as well as for meetings and collaboration, which she said is in part due to hybrid work but also to cost cutting.

Accenture's enterprise metaverse, known as the "Nth Floor," is the largest use of the metaverse in the private sector so far, according to Sweet.

She also imagines a future where virtual experience and products permeate traditional commerce and retail spaces.

“A lot of companies are talking about it,” she said. “The consumer-based industries, they don't want this to be like e-commerce in the way that many companies, you know, missed it.”

Gartner analysts during the event's opening keynote said one of three areas that CIOs should focus on for “sustainable growth in turbulent times” is aggressive investment in AI. They noted that employees need tools and technologies that empower them and increase the impact of their work, and that AI can increase that impact by extending an employee's reach, range, and capabilities.

Sweet said she also believes AI will be the second most disruptive technology in the next five years, but only if it is able to reach its full potential, which won’t happen until “companies figure out data.”

Instead of rebuilding legacy data architectures, organizations in the past pursued “a lot of point solutions, a lot of data experiments, because it was really expensive,” Sweet explained. “And also you didn't have the will to say, hey, I'm gonna really re-platform and create the right data architecture.”

As industries have seen the move to the cloud, what has to happen around data has become clearer, she said. “We start to see major companies really taking on building data platforms.”

Along with better data management and storage comes the ability to unlock AI at scale, Sweet added. “What is yet to be unlocked at scale is the here-and-now potential of AI because it needs clean data at scale and many companies are still in the early stages of that.”