Accenture's headcount-based consulting model is being cannibalized by AI pure-plays, and it is hard to win in AI when the entire model is selling human labor. Bookings of $19.3B came in below last year's $19.7B, and the stock is making new 52-week lows. Headcount reductions look inevitable across the industry. x.com 

Accenture's surge on claims that AI is helping the business overlooks how hard it was straining for revenue. Just a few months ago it effectively asked employees to defer vacation so they could bill more hours in Q4 and pull revenue forward. x.com 

Accenture and Wolters Kluwer benefit massively from cheaper AI tokens and margin gains as they deploy AI. Their knowledge costs rank among the highest relative to COGS, but regulatory capture, reputation and sticky customers keep revenue broadly intact. Neither shows clear signs of slowing growth; Accenture guided to high-single-digit revenue growth from 2029. Despite enormous terminal-value compression, an unwinding AI-infrastructure trade could bring a sizeable rerating if fundamentals hold. … Show more

Accenture's rising acquisition spending raises concern about shareholder value as its return on invested capital falls. ROIC dropped from about 113% to 25% while debt tripled in two years to $13.4 billion, exceeding cash for the first time. Revenue grew 6% and operating margin held near 15-16%; 25% is still a very good return and net debt is close to zero. AI's potential to reshape consulting remains a worry. x.com 

AI's threat to incumbent tech makes SpaceX the preferred investment for the next decade. AI has begun taking business from Google, with Amazon and Apple next; Microsoft's 27% workforce reduction program signals desperation. x.com 

Accenture looks undervalued because the market seems to have decided AI kills consulting, while it could be the big winner as companies need AI implemented at scale. Q2 bookings hit a record $22.1B, AI bookings nearly doubled to $2.2B and FCF guidance rose to $10.8-11.5B. It has 85,000 dedicated AI staff, and unlike McKinsey it builds, runs and maintains AI, yet trades at 14x earnings, cheaper than Coca-Cola. This could be very wrong, but it looks interesting at these levels. x.com  x.com  x.com 

AI is going to kill Salesforce, Adobe and Netflix, whether the AI is American or not. Beyond the narrative, the question is their underlying growth prospects, and one firsthand workplace already uses only homegrown AI tools and essentially no SaaS products. x.com  x.com 

The 'SaaSpocalypse' narrative is wrong because AI makes replacing enterprise software more expensive, not cheaper, leaving beaten-down SaaS stocks at once-in-a-lifetime entry levels. Replicating ServiceNow would take some 40,000 engineers to match 20 years of code, and even AI coding would raise costs, since tokens are not free and model labs lack the capacity to be enterprises' database layer. LLMs are pattern recognizers that can fail catastrophically on new problems. x.com  x.com 

IT services firms such as Accenture and Capgemini should benefit because AI makes many marginal use cases economical, raising the number of people needed, and IT services have the bodies. AI does not excuse users from technical expertise such as knowing Diffie-Hellman key exchange or what O(n log n) means. @desmondjywee counters that some giants may burn cash to maintain the illusion of growth while new competitors emerge. x.com 

Pegasystems faces a clear-cut AI bear case because AI coding attacks the custom-software problem its low-code platform was built to solve. AI tools are especially good at code migration, so customers with legacy apps stuck on Pega could cheaply move off. CX startups like Sierra and Decagon and AI-plus-engineering firms compete for parts of its business, and no AI traction is disclosed. Sticky, slow-moving, regulated customers may give it time to adjust, as it did from on-prem to cloud. x.com  … Show more