Accenture’s latest earnings reveal that while AI is helping win more deals, it is also reducing the effort required, potentially slowing overall growth in the IT services sector, including in India. Check out the key insights from the industry expert Motilal Oswal.
Accenture reported revenue of $18 billion for the second quarter of 2026, up 4% year-on-year in constant currency terms. That places the result near the upper end of the guidance range of 1% to 5%.
Motilal Oswal noted that managed services revenue grew 5% year-on-year in constant currency while consulting services grew 3%. The firm upgraded the lower end of its full-year revenue growth guidance from 2% to 3%, taking the range to 3- 5% in constant currency terms.
Total bookings came in at $22.1 billion, up 6% year-on-year. Outsourcing bookings reached $10.78 billion, while consulting bookings were higher at $11.33 billion.
The book-to-bill ratio held steady at 1.2 times, consistent with the average over the past four quarters. The company also said it expects bookings from emerging artificial intelligence and data ecosystem partners to double year-on-year in fiscal year 2026.
“Accenture reported outsourcing bookings of $10.78 billion, up 3.3% YoY, while consulting bookings were up 8.2% YoY at $11.33b,” Motilal Oswal said.
Accenture acknowledged on its earnings call that foundational work in artificial intelligence is picking up, but the brokerage firm argues this is not yet sufficient to drive meaningful acceleration.
They point to a data point showing that 49.7% of all tool calls made to Claude, Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model, are directed at software engineering tasks. Back-office automation is a distant second at 9.1%. The implication- software engineering is the primary area where AI impact is being seen, which puts significant pressure on the traditional headcount-based model that many Indian technology firms still rely upon.
“While Accenture noted that foundational work in AI is picking up, we believe this is currently not sufficient to drive the acceleration in demand we were anticipating earlier,” Motilal Oswal said.
Accenture’s second-quarter results confirm that global technology spending has not collapsed, but it has also not accelerated in the way the market hoped artificial intelligence would trigger.