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Accenture FY 4Q26: Bookings Recovery and Full-Year Revenue Above Guidance Point to Sustained AI Transformation Demand; OT Security Platform Now in Market

Lars Goransson — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Revenue was $18.7 billion for the quarter, up 7%. By type of work, Consulting was up 7% to $9.3 billion, and Managed Services was up 7% to $9.4 billion. For the full fiscal year, revenue was $74.2 billion, up 5%, with Consulting up 3% to $36.9 billion and the faster-growing Managed Services up 6% to $37.3 billion. With acquisitions contributing an estimated 2 percentage points of full-year growth, organic growth was approximately 3%. Accenture estimates that its U.S. federal business reduced full-year growth by approximately 1 percentage point.
All three geographic markets grew 7% in the quarter. Communications, Media & Technology led the industry groups with 11% growth, followed by Health & Public Service (9%), Financial Services (6%), Resources (6%), and Products (4%).
GAAP operating margin for the quarter was 15.3%, 20 basis points above adjusted operating margin a year earlier, and gross margin was 32.0%, up 10 basis points. GAAP diluted EPS rose 46% to $3.29. Full-year adjusted EPS was $13.97, up 8%. Free cash flow was $2.8 billion for the quarter, down from $3.8 billion, and $11.6 billion for the year. Days services outstanding rose to 50 from 47.
New bookings were $22.2 billion, up 5%, with a book to bill of 1.2 (Consulting 1.0, Managed Services 1.4). Managed Services bookings of $12.8 billion were a record. The quarter included 37 clients with bookings above $100 million, bringing the full-year count to a record 141, 12 more than in fiscal 2025. Full-year bookings were $84.5 billion, up 3%, with a book to bill of 1.1.
Head count rose approximately 5% to 814,000. Fixed-price work, including outcome-based contracts, now accounts for more than 65% of bookings. Accenture said revenue per person increased in fiscal 2026 and that it expects to keep hiring in fiscal 2027, at a lower rate in part because of AI, including at entry level.
Fiscal 2027 outlook: revenue growth of 3–6% in local currency, including 2–2.5 percentage points from acquisitions; operating margin of 15.9–16.1% (10–30 basis points over FY26 adjusted); and diluted EPS of $14.39–14.81. Accenture will hold an Investor Day on October 14.

IDC Market Glance: Consumer AI, 3Q26

Tom Mainelli — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Glance maps the consumer AI ecosystem across four layers: foundation models, AI hardware, AI interfaces and platforms, and AI-native applications, giving executives and product teams a current-state view of how the market is structured and where they fit competitively. IDC’s take is that AI assistants are becoming the front door for discovery and shopping; on-device AI is reshaping everyday workflows across PCs, phones, and wearables; AI companions are emerging as a distinct segment beyond productivity; and memory shortages are creating a cost floor that will slow access to affordable AI devices.

IDC Survey Spotlight: How Is AI-Generated Code Share Changing Across Industry Verticals?

Arnal Dayaratna — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey Spotlight examines the share of AI-generated code in production applications across industry verticals. The key finding is that AI-generated code has become pervasive across every industry vertical surveyed and is not concentrated in technology and professional services. The growth in AI-generated code share is expansive and diffuse, with every industry vertical posting meaningful gains between the two survey periods. The pace and breadth of this growth underscores the need for enterprises to adopt tooling and practices that support code review, quality assurance, and governance of AI-generated code at scale. Data is derived from IDC's Low-Code and AI Agent Builder Technologies Survey, 2026, which surveyed 768 developers worldwide.

IDC Survey: The Customer Is Already Buying — What Large Energy Consumers Want from Their Energy Supplier

Gaia Gallotti, Roberta Bigliani — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey presents results from IDC's 2026 Worldwide Energy Transition Survey, curated specifically for the energy supplier and energy retailer audience across both regulated and liberalized energy markets. The survey covers 1,135 large organizations in 17 countries across manufacturing, buildings and facilities, transportation and logistics, construction, retail, and datacenters, measuring investment direction, drivers, commercial models, external partnerships, and the outcomes these organizations have achieved from their energy transition initiatives.

Rather than repeating IDC's existing buyer-facing and vendor-facing readouts of this data, this presentation isolates the questions and segment cuts that speak directly to what a supplier or retailer should sell, to whom, and on what commercial terms, covering the buying signal, the commercial models customers already use, and where the largest unmet opportunity and proven payoff sit.

Two customer segments, datacenters and transportation and logistics, are called out individually wherever their behavior diverges meaningfully from the full base of large energy consumers.

IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Tech Buyer Presentation provides an overview of the results from IDC’s 2026 CX CSAT Awards. This award program recognizes the leading CX vendors in each application market that receive the highest customer satisfaction scores based on IDC’s CX Path Survey.

IDC’s CX Path Survey is a global survey of over 2,500 organizations across all geographic regions and company sizes, where customers are asked to rate their vendor on more than 30 different customer satisfaction metrics.

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide AI-Enabled Customer Experience Strategies and Services, 2026

Douglas Hayward — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the AI-enabled customer experience strategies and services market. It includes an overview of the current market landscape, a CX services and technology buyer perspective, a market outlook, and IDC’s advice for services and technology providers.

“CX is in transition. CMOs and CIOs must balance cost-efficiency with empathy at scale, just as GenAI and agentic AI are transforming customer journeys in unexpected ways. AI projects are moving from pilot to production, but they’ve yet to achieve enterprise scale and meet their revenue and cost-reduction promises. CX services and tech vendors that succeed in 2027 will be the ones that combine big-picture strategy with granular on-the-ground execution, using traditional consulting and implementation best practices to help clients plan and execute bold, quantified, enterprise-wide transformation programs that deliver what they promise,” says Douglas Hayward, senior research director, IDC.

Market Analysis Perspective: Worldwide Asset Life-Cycle Management Applications, 2026

Brian O'Rourke — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Analysis Perspective provides insight into the current and future state of the asset life-cycle management applications market. It includes an overview of the current market landscape, a technology buyer perspective, a market outlook, and IDC’s advice for technology suppliers/service providers.

“Generative AI is now table stakes in asset life-cycle management (ALM) applications, while attention has turned to introducing agentic AI use cases in a world of economic and political uncertainty. The next stage of ALM growth will be determined by the ability to manage workflows with agents and assistants embedded in enterprise applications, as well as third-party and custom-built AI solutions.” — Brian O’Rourke, research manager, Enterprise Asset Management and Smart Facilities

Market Forecast: China AI Data Infrastructure Forecast, 2026–2030

Nan Wang — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC presentation provides the five-year forecast for the China AI data infrastructure market and delivers insight into the drivers and inhibitors of growth.

"GenAI and AI agents are driving a structural transformation of China's data infrastructure landscape, shifting the bottleneck in AI adoption for organizations from large models to the building of trustworthy and usable AI-ready data," says Nan Wang, research manager, Enterprise Software Research, IDC China. "IDC predicts that the three major submarkets — AI data intelligence, AI data management platforms (DMPs), and AI data services — will generate significant new demand, which is not simply an incremental iteration of traditional data software. Vendors need to abandon the approach of retrofitting with external components and instead build AI-native capabilities and establish a closed loop across data management, data intelligence, and AI agent consumption. At the same time, organizations should prioritize long-term data asset development."

Miro Agrees to Be Acquired by Bending Spoons for $1.4 Billion: The Follow-Up

Wayne Kurtzman, Melinda-Carol Ballou — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Bending Spoons SpA (Nasdaq: BSP) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion. Miro, a leader in the visual collaboration market, brings another level of engaging modalities to a company on an interesting buying spree. This document examines what the Miro acquisition brings to Bending Spoons and the possible outcomes. This document also analyzes the details of the acquisition offer and another recent, related Bending Spoons acquisition with Airtable (for $1.255 billion), which closed on September 4, 2026. These two acquisitions within a month offer augmented potential for the combined organizations to position Bending Spoons with Intelligent Collaborative Workspace (ICW) offerings, assuming effective coordination and execution.

Talent Is the Bottleneck: Understanding Why Demand Is Not the Constraint on Services — Insights from IDC's North America Infrastructure Channels Council Pulse Survey

Danielle Ibran — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation examines why talent is currently the key growth driver within services. It explores why managed services have surpassed systems integration as the channel's core business, what's fueling widespread consensus on margin and incentive restructuring, and where partners identify the best opportunities to grow alongside vendors amid increasing direct-delivery competition.

This presentation highlights infrastructure partners benefiting from strong tailwinds. The convergence of demand for cloud, managed services, and AI creates a compelling growth narrative. The main challenge isn't market interest but delivery capacity.