Accenture’s AI agent platform cuts VPN setup time by 93%

Accenture has built the Accenture Advanced Technology Agent (AATA), an agentic AI-powered integration platform that orchestrates IT operations across the global consulting firm’s complex technology infrastructure. The platform, which earned the company a 2025 CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence, addresses the challenge of maintaining diverse technology portfolios while competing for increasingly rare technical talent.

What you should know: AATA serves as an orchestration layer between Accenture’s human workforce and technology platforms, enabling IT teams to resolve issues without filing tickets or connecting to agents.

• The platform currently operates more than 100 active agents and supports Accenture’s roughly 800,000 employees worldwide.
• Development began in 2023 with a focus on creating an agnostic, open system with agentic architecture.
• The platform supports both audio prompts and text chat embedded in collaboration tools, with cloud-based workflow automation running behind the interface.

How it works: AATA acts as an aggregation of AI agents that can be applied to IT operations as they become available, sitting above existing automation like RPA (robotic process automation), scripts, and CI/CD pipelines.

• The system crawls Accenture’s internal content resources and executes tasks based on information in the firm’s living systems.
• It leverages Accenture’s existing enterprise data fabric, which brings all company data together into common log lakes.
• The platform maintains model agnostic architecture with flexibility to swap AI models in and out to keep pace with market developments.

In plain English: Think of AATA as a smart assistant that sits between Accenture’s employees and their technology systems. Instead of employees needing to know how to operate dozens of different software tools or wait for IT support tickets, they can simply ask AATA to handle tasks using natural language. The system then coordinates with various automated processes and data sources to complete the work—much like having a highly skilled translator who speaks both human and computer language.

Impressive results: The platform has delivered significant efficiency gains in IT operations and troubleshooting.

• VPN connection configuration time dropped from 30 minutes with a skilled engineer to 2 minutes with AATA—a 93% reduction with lower error risk.
• Speed to provision and change increased by 80%.
• Agent growth rate currently runs at 15% week-on-week.

What they’re saying: Leaders emphasize the importance of process reinvention before technology implementation.

• “You need to get your business processes reinvented before you infuse technology,” says Rajendra Prasad, Accenture’s chief information and asset engineering officer. “If you have a very inefficient business process, adding very high-powered agentic tech to that inefficient process just makes your inefficiency run more efficiently.”
• “Adoption has been fantastic,” notes Steven Courtney, Accenture’s managing director of global IT, technology vision, and strategy. “We’re also finding that as people become more used to building an agent rather than using legacy techniques, things just accelerate.”

Key challenges addressed: Implementation required solving data accuracy and workforce upskilling concerns.

• Data quality emerged as the biggest operational challenge, requiring validation of enormous amounts of telemetry from infrastructure and software platforms.
• Upskilling became necessary as consuming generative AI requires teams to operate differently, though Accenture’s culture of continuous innovation helped integrate this into regular technology operations cycles.