Lan Guan

Company: AccentureTitle: Chief AI OfficerIndustry: Professional servicesNotable in 2024: Guan led the fastest growth in an emerging technology in Accenture's history, booking $3 billion in generative AI-related business for the firm.

It may seem like every headline in enterprise tech over the past few years has been about generative AI, but enterprise adoption doesn't match the hype, at least not yet. Accenture data shows that just over a third (36%) of executives say their organizations have already scaled gen AI internally, and even less (13%) say the efforts have achieved significant impacts.

Companies have a host of concerns, whether it's the financial costs, or energy costs, or the lack of a clear return on investment, or the lack of trust in AI among employees. Then there's the sheer amount of data internally that will need to be cleaned up and structured to get them further along the way on their AI journey, as consultants like to say.

That's where Lan Guan comes in. As chief AI officer at Accenture, a newly created post at the consulting giant which she assumed in September 2023, the goal is to bring the AI training and value equation to executives and employees both internally and externally.

Accenture, which has nearly 800,000 employees in over 120 countries, invested $3 billion in AI in 2023 and set the goal of within three years having 80,000 of its workers hyper-skilled on gen AI, a combination of reskilling and new talent recruiting, up from 40,000 currently, according to an estimate Guan provided to CNBC.

Alongside Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, Guan has been the chief AI evangelist for the company, which serves more than 9,000 clients, and whose AI partnerships include Adobe, Alibaba, Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM RedHat, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Salesforce, among many other top names in tech.

Guan brings an academic background in computer science and economics to the effort, with an MBA in computational engineering from the University of Michigan and a PhD in quantitative econometrics from Wayne State University. She's also been granted ten patents related to AI concepts.

"Success with generative A.I. requires equal attention on people and training as it does on technology," Guan told Fortune. That training isn't just for the people creating the AI models or applications, but across the entire organization where working processes are being transformed. Tens of thousands of workers, company by company, beyond Accenture are going through the AI learning process. In August, S&P Global announced that its 35,000 global employees would work with Accenture on AI upskilling.

"An AI-ready workforce that can effectively deploy and scale the technology simply does not exist today — it must be created," Guan said in a deal announcement.

She told CNBC for an interview after being selected as a 2025 Changemaker that she thinks of her role as empowering her "to help millions of people to access AI, millions of business to get value out of their AI investment."

ESPN, Best Buy, BMW and Mondelez are among the companies integrating gen AI into their businesses with Accenture.

Most companies are still learning which functions can be fully automated to boost productivity and drive economic gains, but also how to build trust with their employee base. Guan is confident that as the cognition of large language models continues to improve, workers will find their way with AI rather than be left behind by it. "Every human and business leader will be armed with a squad of digital agents. ... Humans and machines in the future will work together very cohesively," she said in an interview with NYSE Live.

For a company like Accenture, working in the white-collar field and across corporate clients, there's both evolution and self-preservation at work in getting there early. "Every knowledge worker's role in an organization will have this co-pilot, running behind the scenes," Guan said during a MIT Technology Review podcast appearance.

But Guan sees a much broader set of professions and industries where it's her job to help usher in the AI age. Manufacturing processes will continue to move in the direction of smart factories; e-commerce companies will want to create "ultra-personalized experiences" to meet customer tastes and trends. Animal health and agricultural companies are rapidly exploring AI for greater understanding of animals.

The older the industry, the more AI opportunity there may be laying dormant today. "I personally was intrigued by the amount of data that is sitting around in what I call asset-heavy industries," she told the MIT podcast. "I think from a data standpoint, there's just an enormous amount of value in these traditional industries, which is truly underutilized."

The bet she is asking every client to make is that if you build the AI power, the opportunity you can't see today will come, and it will be greater than the existing opportunity. "Regardless of what industries you are in, if you become very good at mastering, harnessing the power of this kind, AI is going to create new demand. Because now your products are getting better, you are able to provide a better experience to your customer, your pricing is going to get optimized."