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Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps organizations across the world build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services — creating tangible value at speed and scale. Technology is at the core of change today, and Accenture is helping drive that change with strong ecosystem relationships.

Accenture delivers tangible outcomes because of its broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Accenture Song. These capabilities, together with its culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable Accenture to help its clients succeed and build trusted, lasting relationships. Sean Burke, Strategy and Innovation Lead for Accenture’s non-profit and social impact practice, took some time to talk with us about Accenture, the value it provides clients, and the future of AgeTech. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Can you tell us about Accenture, and its non-profit and social impact practice group in particular? 

Accenture is a global professional services company; our purpose is to help our clients deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. Working with our clients to do so, we help our clients become the next best version of themselves.  

The Non-profit practice in Accenture is part of our Health and Public Service industry group, which serves non-profits and purpose-driven organizations in the social and environmental impact space seeking to solve complex societal or organizational problems and address unmet human needs. We work alongside non-profits, social enterprises, startups like those in the AgeTech Collaborative™, large corporate organizations and government organizations to focus on solving the same problems together. That’s where a lot of our innovation around things like technology and impact come together across non-profits and other industries in shared ecosystems and value chains. 

What kinds of services and value do you offer? 

We provide what we call 360-degree value to our clients. For example, AARP is a client of ours that we support and deliver value across many different elements, including providing our own consulting technology services to AARP as a leading organization, including supporting AARP’s own innovation journey. 

To that end, at CES this year, we had the opportunity to showcase our work in technology and impact during AARP’s panel discussion around the metaverse, and we were able to provide some insight into where we’re seeing the metaverse going in the future and how it relates to AgeTech. 

Part of this is Accenture Ventures, which is all about bringing organizations together around shared problems and determining how they can best bring their own resources, capabilities and value to the table to solve problems and create greater value together. 

As we connect with others within the Collaborative, we see how they can support or be connected with our existing ventures and startups, with the intention of building a startup ecosystem that brings disruptive, innovative new technologies and business models to the industry. We come alongside our clients to either bring new ideas to the table or to nurture potential partnerships with larger companies for different joint ventures. 

You mentioned the metaverse, and you’ve co-authored a blog post on the metaverse for our blog. Can you tell us about how Accenture views the role of the metaverse in this space? 

Going back to Accenture’s purpose — to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity — the metaverse is a prime example of an opportunity to deliver on this promise. When we think about innovation, we don’t usually start with the technology. The process starts with defining a problem we’re trying to solve, or as our Innovation team says, “Seeking to meet an unmet human need.” That’s where human ingenuity begins — identifying these problems, then finding partners who have a shared purpose, and solving that problem together by bringing together shared resources and capabilities for greater value. 

So we’re not a “hammer looking for a nail” in terms of starting with the metaverse or AI in mind, then asking what problems it can solve. Rather, we start defining a problem — for example, “How might we address loneliness in the aging population?” Then we engage with those closest to the problem — the aging population and their caregivers — to understand how best to solve that problem. It’s at that point that things like the metaverse or AI might come to mind as ways that technology can meet that need and do so more efficiently, and at scale.  

So what is the metaverse? 

As we outlined in the blog, it’s helpful to start by clarifying what it is not. For example, it is not just virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) or gaming; nor is it fully formed or developed. It's a constantly evolving space, which is what’s so unique and exciting about the unprecedented pace of technological innovation right now. Accenture sees the metaverse as an evolution of the internet that enables users to move beyond “browsing” to “participating/inhabiting” in a persistent, shared experience spanning the spectrum from our real world to the fully virtual world — and everything in between. As an evolution of the internet, the metaverse is an unfolding and expanding continuum where our digital lives are becoming more deeply integrated with our everyday realities. We frame the metaverse as a continuum, building on existing technologies such as the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT), and it will converge with technologies like blockchain, generative AI, edge compute and extended reality — to name just a few.  

What’s exciting about the metaverse is how it’s disrupting AgeTech in ways that go back to our purpose — delivering on the promise of technology and human ingenuity — alongside a growing ecosystem of our clients, technology alliances and start-up venture partners. For example, we can enable the aging population to experience things that they might not otherwise be able to, given whatever limitations they might have: They can connect with others or have new experiences in a virtual metaverse setting. Medical professionals being able to leverage augmented reality to provide improved health care and an improved patient experience is another example of how the metaverse is providing improvement to AgeTech. 

What do you think the world of AgeTech will look like a decade from now? 

Given the enormous needs, there is enormous market opportunity. AgeTech is good for the global economy and society. So, as the ecosystem of AgeTech grows, it will evolve to be more of an ecosystem of “ageless tech.” Because of the immense shift in the aging population, in the next 10 years the market will be so great and the problems that need solving will be so clear and paramount, that the proliferation of solutions and technology and support for that population will be normalized, and AgeTech as we know it today won’t need to be such a particular focus. 

To a degree, it’s similar to how other demographics who have been historically underserved or underrepresented have become the subjects of particular focus to improve their lives. 

In other words, there will no longer be “AgeTech,” it will all just be “tech.” 

I’ll answer that with a “Yes, and ….” 

It's "yes" in that it’s similar to the trend in the design process in the last decade or so around making tech accessible for people with disabilities. Rather than focusing on “accessible tech,” the idea has been to design everything you’re working on with accessibility and inclusivity in mind. So there isn’t this separate space of “disability and accessibility.”  

Already there are a lot of ways that this is being extended to the aging population, and hopefully most, if not all, tech will already be accessibly and inclusively designed in ways that support the aging population, and AgeTech will no longer have its own distinction. 

So, hopefully, there will be enough evolution in society, business and technology that those groups will become less of a distinction on the whole because we will no longer need to think about them differently, and will serve them more naturally.

My answer is a "Yes, and ..." because there will always be unique needs and problems that need solving for the aging population specifically, so there will also be continued opportunities for innovation in how to serve the unique needs of the aging population. 

If I were a startup or other participant in the AgeTech Collaborative™ and I was interested in working with you, how could I engage you? 

You could always reach out over LinkedIn, [message him directly on the ATC Platform], or go to Accenture’s non-profit page directly. Ultimately, given Accenture’s purpose and focus, we’re looking to collaborate with others who are united in a shared purpose to solve complex problems and meet unmet human needs together to deliver greater value. We are eager to either help them do so, or connect organizations with one another that are seeking to do that in new ways. 

A lot of these AgeTech companies and their customers are really the ones who are closest to some of the problems we’re all trying to solve, and they’re bringing the disruption and innovation that our company, clients and community need. As Accenture seeks to support that, we welcome those who have a similar purpose and seek to deliver on this promise together.