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Accenture has started calling its nearly 800,000 employees “reinventors”, as the consultancy overhauls itself to adapt to the explosion of artificial intelligence and advises companies adopting the technology.
The label has already been used by chief executive Julie Sweet and the New York-listed group is pushing to have the term adopted more widely, according to people at the firm.
The term “reinventors” was born from a mammoth reorganisation announced by the consultancy in June, which united its strategy, consulting, creative, technology and operations units into a single business called “Reinvention Services”.
The rollout of the neologism follows a long tradition of corporate jargon to describe employees, including Disney’s “imagineers” and Amazon’s “ninja coders”.
Accenture has said its ambition is to be clients’ “reinvention partner of choice” by helping them to adopt AI tools.
On a September earnings call, Sweet referred to employees as “reinventors” multiple times as she discussed the reorganisation.
She also warned that more staff would be asked to leave if they could not be retrained for the age of AI amid more sluggish demand for consulting projects.
The consultancy has built a trial version of its internal human resources website in which staff are labelled “reinventors” rather than “workers”, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The company has a history of creating its own corporate language. Its name, intended as a derivative of “accent on the future”, was ridiculed when it was adopted in 2001 after the business, Andersen Consulting, broke ties with accounting group Arthur Andersen and was forced to change its name. The rebrand was reported to have cost $100mn.
Accenture’s market capitalisation surged to more than $260bn during a boom in demand for consulting services following the Covid-19 pandemic, but has since fallen to about $150bn as the sector faces a growth slowdown.
“Jargon is used in the consulting world to signal expertise or relevance without having to invest in underlying competencies and knowledge . . .[or make] boring or staid jobs or processes appear to be novel and exciting,” said André Spicer, executive dean and professor of organisational behaviour at the Bayes Business School and author of Business Bullshit.
He warned that while jargon can occasionally boost an organisation’s image and its confidence internally, it also “increas[es] confusion, undermining trust and fostering a sense of corporate absurdity”.
Big Four accounting firm PwC in 2002 briefly rebranded its consulting division as “Monday” but the name was dropped when IBM bought the unit. PwC pointed out in a statement at the time that its unusual new name is “a real word”, seen by some commentators as a dig at Accenture.
Deborah Cameron, former professor of language and communication at Oxford university, said that using terms for staff that are “so out of step with what most people think your business is” risked attracting “incomprehension or ridicule”.
The term “reinventors might be getting into that territory”, she said. “Will clients, or the public at large, know what they’re supposed to be reinventing? Will employees themselves . . . feel OK saying they’re reinventors, or will they find that obscure, pretentious and silly?”
Accenture declined to comment.