The AI Organization

AI Hero: Athina

Athina’s fondest memories are of her time as a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, in the UK. She had just moved there from Greece, where she grew up, thanks to a scholarship. Athina still remembers how the university dean encouraged her to lecture as she worked on her PhD. Teaching is a powerful approach to learning. It makes you simplify concepts and try to make them interesting—and you get new perspectives from the students. Fifteen years later, now as the global head of AI at Accenture leading a team of 20,000 professionals, Athina still applies that same approach.

Athina joined Accenture to build its analytics capability, which then evolved to AI. As the only woman in the leadership team when she started, she describes that situation as a culture shock. Athina had felt extremely comfortable at university as a young female foreigner, where she taught postgraduate classes to students who in some cases were twice her age—but the open and collaborative nature of academia was very different from the private sector.

Athina was determined to shape her AI team at Accenture with the same culture she had experienced at university. First, she removed the hierarchical structure usually found in software integrators. Every analyst and every consultant had opportunities to present to leadership, because ideas and knowledge can come from anybody and anywhere. Removing hierarchical channels allows those ideas and that knowledge to flow directly to the leadership team, ...