There were over 30,000 mentions of AI on earnings calls by the end of 2023 as C-suite leaders gird for a ‘massive technology shift’

Good morning. AI is certainly top of mind for CEOs and CFOs at the largest U.S. public companies, and now there’s a detailed timeline to show how quickly it began dominating conversations.

Since the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, a form of generative AI, mentions of the tech on earnings calls have skyrocketed, according to Accenture’s new Technology Vision 2024 report. In Q1 2022, there were approximately 500 mentions, and by Q3 2023, there were more than 30,000. Accenture Research conducted an analysis of more than 70,000 S&P Global earnings transcripts across 10,452 companies from January 2022 to September 2023.

Courtesy of Accenture

There’s a reason why you’re hearing so much about AI and generative AI, according to Accenture: It’s going to reinvent business as we know it.

Yusuf Tayob, group chief executive of Accenture Operation, shared with me his assessment: “2024 will be the year we’ll see larger, scaled enterprise application of generative AI, as leading companies look to effectively manage the reinvention required by this massive technology shift."

Where AI once focused more on the automation of routine tasks, there’s been a shift toward changing how we approach work. Technology like generative AI is “rapidly democratizing” specialized knowledge work previously “reserved for the highly trained or deep-pocketed,” according to the report.

Accenture shared with me CFO-specific data from its report: Among the 375 finance chiefs surveyed, 97% agreed that making technology more human will expand opportunities in every industry—and the same percentage said generative AI would force their organization to modernize its tech architecture. Also, more than a third (39%) of CFOs anticipate that over the next three years generative AI chatbots will lead to a transformational change in their organization’s business processes.

With potential productivity enhancements across nearly a thousand different types of jobs, Accenture noted in the report, we're heading toward a future where more employees have jobs that require AI than jobs that don't.

And CFOs get this. Katie Rooney, global CFO and COO of Alight Solutions, anticipates that AI will play “an even more crucial role” in shaping the future of work and employee experience in 2024, she recently told me. “For organizations," Rooney said, "developing strategies to define the right priorities and assemble the right teams for effective transformation will be critical."

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com