Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has invested in Within, an artificial-intelligence platform company that maps and automates business processes, the firm said Monday.
The investment was made through Accenture Ventures, Accenture's venture-capital arm. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Within's platform is designed to track how employees work across multiple applications and capture undocumented processes, handoffs and exceptions. The company calls the compiled output its "Work Brain," and says it covers finance, HR, sales, marketing, customer service, IT, supply chain, procurement and commercial operations. The platform operates on what Within describes as a private, sovereign architecture built for data-privacy and security requirements.
Jason Dess, Accenture's industry and process reinvention lead, said one of the most persistent challenges in AI transformation is that organizations often lack a clear picture of their starting point—the actual processes, the exceptions and how work flows through their teams.
Andrew Antos, Within's CEO and co-founder, said AI transformation works best when there is a system of record for work that provides visibility into what to automate and the ability to verify that agents are performing tasks correctly.
David Benjamin, executive VP and chief commercial officer at Blackbaud, said Within revealed "the real process, not the one on the diagram—the hidden workarounds, the manual steps, the informal patches our people had built to get the job done."
Accenture also published survey findings from more than 3,000 C-suite leaders showing that 82% are increasing investment in AI. However, only 23% report achieving widespread business value from the technology, down from 32% earlier this year.
