Latest news with #BaijuShah
Time of India
15-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
WPP appoints Baiju Shah as Global CEO of AKQA
WPP has named Baiju Shah as the new Global CEO of AKQA , its design and innovation agency . Shah joins from Accenture Song , where he most recently served as Global Chief Strategy Officer. His appointment aligns with WPP's broader ambition to combine creativity with capabilities in AI, data, and technology. He takes charge at a time when clients are looking to harness rapid cultural change and advances in AI as business opportunities. His background in creativity, strategy, technology, and AI is expected to help guide AKQA into its next chapter. His appointment reinforces AKQA's focus on global creative innovation, with an emphasis on building products, services, and experiences that inspire, drive growth, and deliver meaningful impact for people, brands, and society. Over a career spanning 25 years, Shah has worked with leading global brands to enhance customer relevance and business performance. As a co-founder of Accenture Song (formerly Accenture Interactive), he helped shape the creative division's vision, growth strategy, acquisitions, and offerings while serving as Global Chief Strategy Officer and Senior Managing Director. He also led the company's efforts to integrate AI across its creative services, managing global teams that used emerging technologies to help clients innovate responsibly and stay ahead of change. Shah co-led Fjord, Accenture Song's design and innovation consultancy, growing it into 35 global studios and positioning it as an industry leader. He also played a central role in acquiring several creative and design firms, expanding Accenture Song's capabilities and reach. His arrival follows a series of leadership appointments to the agency's Global Executive Committee, marking a new phase of collaboration and innovation. A recent highlight for AKQA was winning the 2025 Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Innovation, a recognition of its pioneering work in the creative space. Mark Read, CEO of WPP, said: 'I am delighted to welcome Baiju Shah as the new leader for AKQA, and excited to see how he will redefine what a modern creative company can deliver for clients. Over the past two decades, he has demonstrated that he is one of our industry's leaders in bringing strategy, creativity and emerging technology together. I know Baiju's arrival will bring even further momentum to the business. "I would also like to thank Stephan Pretorius for stepping in as AKQA's Interim Chair over the past eight months. His steady leadership and deep understanding of AKQA's business have been key in guiding the team through this important period of transition and in setting the stage for its future success.' Baiju Shah, Global CEO of AKQA, said: 'AKQA has always stood for iconic, creative innovation. I'm honoured to join a company whose heritage is not just history, but a foundation for what comes next. As AI and cultural shifts transform how business operates and how creativity itself is practised, we have a remarkable opportunity to create work that shapes how people live and connect. AKQA is uniquely equipped for this moment, combining craft, technology, and a deep understanding of people and culture. "This is about more than creative output. It's about achieving meaningful growth, setting new standards for innovation, and proving that imagination remains the most powerful force for building futures worth living in. I'm excited to lead AKQA into its next chapter, honouring our legacy while reimagining what an agency can be. AKQA will serve as a testing ground for the innovative and responsible use of AI, acting as pioneers for our clients, for WPP, and the future.' Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at WPP, said: 'It's been a privilege to act as Interim Chair of AKQA and work alongside such a talented and committed global team. I'm incredibly proud of what we've achieved together during this period of transition. Baiju is the perfect choice to lead AKQA, and I look forward to supporting him as we continue to shape the future of our industry.'
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Accenture Invests in and Collaborates with AI-Powered Agentic Prediction Engine Aaru
Simulating human behavior to reinvent how businesses make decisions NEW YORK, March 04, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today announced that Accenture Ventures has invested in Aaru, creators of the leading AI-powered prediction engine that simulates consumer behavior and preferences, driving stronger customer experiences, new growth opportunities and speed-to-market. As part of this collaboration, Accenture Song intends to integrate Lumen—Aaru's flagship model for the private sector—into its AI products and services across new product development, marketing, customer strategy, and customer service. Aaru's unique approach to prediction uses multi-agent AI systems to create simulations of human behavior with greater precision based on proprietary and public data sources. Rather than relying on approaches that do not scale well and often face bias, such as time-intensive surveys, focus groups, and research experiments, Aaru's platform simulates any customer audience to deliver predictions of behavior in a matter of minutes. Accenture's investment will help Aaru accelerate its growth and expand its capabilities to meet the increasing demand for AI-driven data and analytics. In addition, Baiju Shah, chief strategy officer of Accenture Song, will become a strategic advisor to Aaru as the business continues to scale. "With 85% of CMOs saying it's more difficult than ever to stay relevant, the widening gap between what companies offer and what customers expect has created an urgency to innovate," said Shah. "Anticipating customers and uncovering new growth opportunities using AI-powered agents is now a strategic edge for businesses and brands. Using Aaru, our creatives and strategists will be able to more accurately simulate entire audiences in a matter of minutes, unlocking customer insights where we couldn't before. This is a period of incredibly exciting change, where platforms like Aaru will reinvent how we design and deliver products, services, and marketing campaigns." "Current methods of understanding customers are often limited by issues like sampling bias, data access, self-reporting bias, and scalability problems—not to mention the time taken to gather and analyze this data," said Cameron Fink, chief executive officer of Aaru. "Simulation is an incredibly powerful tool and will be the differentiator between companies that lead the market and those that fall behind in the AI age. Partnering with Accenture will accelerate the deployment of our prediction technology and unlock the full potential of Aaru across a wide range of industries." Aaru is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures' Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program focused on working with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. This announcement highlights Accenture's ongoing investment in data and AI capabilities to help clients grow their business and sustain relevance with customers, with previous investments in Cresta, a company that has developed an AI-powered platform designed for contact centers, Martian, a technology company that has built a large language model (LLM) router, and Writer, a generative AI-powered platform that helps enterprises create and shape content. About Accenture Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world's leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 799,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world's leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at Accenture Song accelerates growth and value for our clients through sustained customer relevance. Our capabilities span ideation to execution: growth, product and experience design; technology and experience platforms; creative, media and marketing strategy; and campaign, commerce transformation content and channel orchestration. With strong client relationships and deep industry expertise, we help our clients operate at the speed of life through the unlimited potential of imagination, technology and intelligence. About Aaru Aaru operates at the bleeding edge of predictive intelligence, using language models to simulate and impact human behaviour at scale. By generating and deploying orchestrated instances of artificial intelligence that mirror humans, called agents, Aaru models entire populations with unprecedented accuracy. You can ask agents any question, forecasting the world's events in minutes. Our partners work with us for many reasons: they leverage Aaru to refine strategy in an uncertain geopolitical climate, cut new product innovation timelines from months to minutes, and to deploy marketing campaigns that win in an era where consumers have never been harder to understand. We provide organizations with invaluable foresight, empowering them to anticipate outcomes and proactively make the right decisions at the right time, every time. Welcome to the new age of decision dominance––visit us at Copyright © 2025 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture and its logo are registered trademarks of Accenture. View source version on Contacts Rosie Milton-SchönemannAccenture Song+44 7769 Julie BenninkAccenture+1 312 693 Sign in to access your portfolio
