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The steady decline in business profitability across multiple industries threatens to erode future investment, innovation and shareholder value. Fortunately, a new factor of production—artificial intelligence (AI)—is emerging that can help kick-start profitability.

Following an earlier Accenture Research study into the impact of AI on 12 developed economies, we assessed the effect of AI within 16 industries. Our research shows AI has the potential to boost rates of profitability by an average of 38 percentage points and could lead to an economic boost of US$14 trillion in additional gross value added (GVA) by 2035.

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How AI will reverse falling profit growth

How AI will reverse falling profit growth

AI can reverse the cycle of low profitability across industries through three channels:


Whether enhancing the production chain with improvements to supply chain management or streamlining the sales process, AI offers huge advantages over traditional automation.


Workers can delegate low value-added tasks to AI and be more productive in their main tasks. AI can also help businesses maximize their asset utilization rates.


By accelerating the development of new products, AI helps to increase innovation, eliminate redundant costs and generate new revenue streams to increase profitability.

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The impact of AI in your industry

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AI has the potential to markedly increase industry growth. Information and Communication, Manufacturing and Financial Services are the three sectors that will benefit most from the application of AI.

AI Steady State

Annual growth rates in 2035 of gross value added (a close approximation of GDP), comparing baseline growth in 2035 to an artificial intelligence scenario where AI has been absorbed into the economy.
Source: Accenture and Frontier Economics

AI offers unprecedented profitability opportunities. For example, manufacturing has a forecast share-of-profit increase of 39 percent due to AI-powered systems whose ability to learn, adapt and evolve over time can eliminate faulty machines and idle equipment.


Accommodation & Food Services


Wholesale & Retail


Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing

Social Services

Transportation & Storage


Other Services

Financial Services

Public Services

Arts, Entertainment & Recreation

Professional Services

Information & Communication


Percentage increase in industry profits with AI, compared to expected baseline profit levels in 2035.
Source: Accenture and Frontier Economics

What's Next?

Eight AI strategies to lead in the new


To help organizations prepare their AI strategies to lead in the new, consider how to:

your people

  • AI strategy and leadership from the top of the company is critical to attaining value from AI.
  • Reinvent the CHRO role to manage humans and supervise AI.
  • Adapt learning and training to fully exploit the combination of human and machine intelligence.
  • Appoint a chief data supply officer to construct an integrated, end-to-end data supply chain.

your business

  • Create an open AI culture to cultivate trust, openness and transparency that supports human and machine relationships.
  • Step beyond automation strategies to use self-learning and self-governing machines for competitive advantage.
  • Combine crowdsourced data in the cloud with AI capabilities to create new and disruptive business opportunities.
  • Build new financial metrics to properly assess the “Return on AI”.



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