Accenture's CEO says using AI is now required for promotion: It's 'how we do work'

• Accenture's CEO said AI use is now required if employees want a promotion.
• Julie Sweet dismissed the idea that tracking AI use amounts to coercion.
• Tech firms like Cisco and Amazon are also tying AI fluency to promotions.

If you work at Accenture and want to get a promotion, you'd better be using AI.

Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture, says artificial intelligence is embedded in how performance is evaluated at the consulting giant.

"Today, AI at Accenture is how we do work," Sweet said on the "Rapid Response" podcast on Tuesday. "So if you want to get promoted, you've got to do the things that we do in order to operate at Accenture."

Sweet rejected the idea that Accenture's tracking of AI use amounts to coercion.

"I don't think it's coercion in any sense of the word," she said, comparing the shift to the introduction of computers in the workplace. "These are the new tools to operate a company."

Its tracking of AI use is part of Sweet's push to make Accenture "AI-first," a strategy she said requires leaders to deeply understand what the technology can and cannot do.

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, the company's top 50 leaders received the most AI training, she said, because they needed to grasp its potential before they could transform how they delivered their services.

"I knew that if they didn't understand the power, they would not be able to help us actually transform how we're delivering our services and what our clients could use it for," she said.

Accenture has since doubled down on AI by partnering with ChatGPT last December, expanding its partnership with Anthropic a week later, cutting employees it can't retrain with AI skills, and launching a new business division focused on AI called "reinvention services" last September.

AI fluency is becoming a promotion prerequisite across tech

Accenture isn't the only major company tying AI use to career advancement.

Cisco released a report in January that found employees recommended for promotion used AI 50% more often than those who were not recommended.

And at Amazon, promotion packets in some divisions now include AI usage.

Jamie Siminoff — the Ring founder who was brought back to Amazon in 2025 to oversee its Blink, Key, and Sidewalk businesses — said last July in an internal email viewed by Business Insider that employees applying for promotion at his RBKS organization must explain how they're using AI at work.

"I would go even deeper than that," Siminoff told Business Insider last October. "We're going to promote based on AI. We're going to promote based on how you're integrating AI into your job."