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Reinventing the Fortune 500
with generative AI
With the might of Accenture’s artificial intelligence savvy, the iconic list is ready for its close-up.
The recent boom of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured global attention and sparked a wave of creativity across business and society alike. Over the next three to five years, this technology will only continue to transform enterprises and industries, with 97% of executives reporting that generative AI will play a major role in their strategies. This proliferation of AI in business is fueling bigger and bolder reinvention and driving opportunities for productivity, innovation, decision-making, and growth. With this, Fortune Media and Accenture, a leader in generative AI, saw an opportunity to accelerate reinvention of Fortune’s iconic flagship ranking—the Fortune 500—in honor of its 70th anniversary. Together, they created an innovative generative AI tool that will enable users to draw on decades of in-house data to showcase how generative AI can bring incredible value to business.
In May 1955, Fortune published its inaugural Fortune 500 list—a ranking of American companies that gives readers insight into the size and power of the country’s most successful businesses. Over the course of the list’s history, more than 1,800 American businesses have been featured on the ranking. And over the past 70 years, global readers have visited Fortune archives to explore what has bolstered each of the featured companies’ success through accompanying articles, videos, and events.
The History: A scorecard for success in big business
1.
Maintaining the Fortune 500 database is a day-to-day, year-round project. Each year, the ranking process begins with intensive periods of data collection between January and March. It’s an arduous practice that involves data mining and combing through complicated spreadsheets.
For decades, business leaders, analysts, investors, and even current job seekers have been able to access the database of insights through a downloadable spreadsheet that contains company information, such as total revenues, profits, assets, stockholders’ equity, market value, and number of employees. The spreadsheet, full of 70 years of insights, became too cumbersome for any human to sort through. This abundance of data makes the Fortune 500 and Global 500 prime candidates for generative AI.
“The Fortune 500 list has become the gold standard of corporate rankings. It’s an iconic list that people view as the blueprint of what U.S. business is.” —Scott DeCarlo, Vice President, Research, and List Editor, Fortune
1. The History
2. The Partnership
3. The Product
4. The Impact
From the very beginning of their journey together, the Fortune and Accenture teams kept the user front and center. They began with extensive research into different types of potential users and how the product could best serve them.
Above all, it was critical that the product upheld the journalistic standards for which Fortune is known. Accenture Song, the company’s tech-powered creative group, brought together technical experts, creative technologists, and leaders in the AI field to work alongside the editors and technology team at Fortune and bring the data to life. The collective crew of more than 60 people leveraged their expertise to co-create a solution that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with LLMs—both in terms of knowledge generation and creation, as well as customized graphs and charts.
Generative AI will transform the way users interact with Fortune archival data
of data on thousands of companies
online articles on Fortune.com
articles from Fortune magazine
video transcripts from Fortune
conferences and news stories
The Fortune Analytics LLM has been trained on a wealth of unconventional data accumulated over decades of journalism—articles behind paywalls, print articles, video transcripts, Fortune rankings—as well as Fortune’s extensive business insights from the Fortune 1000 and Global 500 lists. After users input a query, the Large Language Models generate responses that most generative AI users are familiar with. But, the Fortune Analytics LLM goes even further, with the ability to generate charts to answer quantitative questions about the Fortune 1000 and Global 500 data.
“We are showcasing all the different ways generative AI can be used. It can drive efficiency. It can boost productivity. And ultimately, it can reinvent business models.”
—Lan Guan, Chief AI Officer, Accenture
How Fortune and Accenture teams came together to reinvent the Fortune 500.
Step 1
Define the vision and develop the problem-solving frameworks and processes.
Build the pipeline from model training to data processing and prototype testing.
Step 2
Optimize through training iterations, evaluation, and testing.
Step 3
“We could have just showcased the finished product, but we want people to learn from how we got here and the innovation that happened along the way. We want everyone to be made better by this project.” —David Droga, CEO, Accenture Song
At the end of 2023, 81% of companies said that generative AI was one of the main levers for reinvention moving forward, which means we are only just starting to see how generative AI will revolutionize work and workflows. Fortune Analytics is merely one example of how this technology can power business transformation and create competitive advantage in the age of AI. And for Fortune and Accenture, this is only the beginning.
Before Fortune Analytics, much of the Fortune 500 and supporting data was very difficult to access, due to disparate archives and outdated technology. By creating new experiences for the Fortune customer using generative AI, Accenture and Fortune are not only creating new ways to leverage this technology for the future, but also the way users can interact with business insights.
Learn more about Reinvented with Accenture.
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DECADES
100,000+
30,000+
20,000+
3.
The Product: Unlocking the value of Fortune data
4.
The Impact: Transforming business with AI
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
The power of partnership
Listen to leadership from Accenture and Fortune speak on bringing their shared vision to life.
For Fortune, Accenture was the obvious partner for this project—the company is a longtime collaborator, whose bring-to-market solutions, insights, and guidance already played a critical role inside the companies on the Fortune 500. For Accenture, at the forefront of finding the potential of—and implementing—generative AI technology and the ways in which it can accelerate economic value, drive business growth, and create more meaningful work, being able to train an LLM on Fortune’s wealth of trusted data offered a groundbreaking opportunity.
In the summer of 2023, Fortune and Accenture leaders met at Accenture’s offices in New York City to discuss how to deepen their partnership. And a new idea was born: How could the companies come together to harness the power of AI to help people engage with the iconic Fortune 500 list in a never-been-done-before way? Over the course of 10 months, the teams planned, collaborated, built, and iterated, ultimately creating Fortune Analytics: a custom AI-powered large language model (LLM) trained on decades of articles, video transcripts, and Fortune 500 and Global 500 data.
2.
The Partnership: A dynamic duo
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
A mission to revolutionize AI Listen to leadership from Accenture and Fortune speak on how this product will help reinvent business.
Reinventing the Fortune 500 with generative AI
With the might of Accenture’s artificial intelligence savvy, the iconic list is ready for its close-up.
The recent boom of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured global attention and sparked a wave of creativity across business and society alike. Over the next three to five years, this technology will only continue to transform enterprises and industries, with 97% of executives reporting that generative AI will play a major role in their strategies. This proliferation of AI in business is fueling bigger and bolder reinvention and driving opportunities for productivity, innovation, decision-making, and growth. With this, Fortune Media and Accenture, a leader in generative AI, saw an opportunity to accelerate reinvention of Fortune’s iconic flagship ranking—the Fortune 500—in honor of its 70th anniversary. Together, they created an innovative generative AI tool that will enable users to draw on decades of in-house data to showcase how generative AI can bring incredible value to business.
“The Fortune 500 list has become the gold standard of corporate rankings. It’s an iconic list that people view as the blueprint of what U.S. business is.”
—Scott DeCarlo, Vice President, Research, and List Editor, Fortune
Maintaining the Fortune 500 database is a day-to-day, year-round project. Each year, the ranking process begins with intensive periods of data collection between January and March. It’s an arduous practice that involves data mining and combing through complicated spreadsheets.
For decades, business leaders, analysts, investors, and even current job seekers have been able to access the database of insights through a downloadable spreadsheet that contains company information, such as total revenues, profits, assets, stockholders’ equity, market value, and number of employees. The spreadsheet, full of 70 years of insights, became too cumbersome for any human to sort through. This abundance of data makes the Fortune 500 and Global 500 prime candidates for generative AI.
For Fortune, Accenture was the obvious partner for this project—the company is a longtime collaborator, whose bring-to-market solutions, insights, and guidance already played a critical role inside the companies on the Fortune 500. For Accenture, at the forefront of finding the potential of—and implementing—generative AI technology and the ways in which it can accelerate economic value, drive business growth, and create more meaningful work, being able to train an LLM on Fortune’s wealth of trusted data offered a groundbreaking opportunity.
For more information on Fortune Analytics, visit
Fortune.com/analytics.
—Lan Guan, Chief AI Officer, Accenture
“We are showcasing all the different ways generative AI can be used. It can drive efficiency. It can boost productivity. And ultimately, it can reinvent business models.”
—Lan Guan, Chief AI Officer, Accenture
—David Droga, CEO, Accenture Song
“We could have just showcased the finished product, but we want people to learn from how we got here and the innovation that happened along the way. We want everyone to be made better by this project.”
4. The Impact
3. TheProduct
2. ThePartnership
1. The History
4. The Impact
3. TheProduct
2. ThePartnership
1. The History
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
The power of partnership
Listen to leadership from Accenture and Fortune speak on bringing their shared vision to life.
Listen to leadership from Accenture and Fortune speak on how this product will help reinvent business.
A mission to revolutionize AI
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
4. The Impact
3. The Product
2. The Partnership
1. The History
The History: A scorecard for success in big business
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70
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The Product: Unlocking the value of Fortune data
1.
2.
3.
4.
The Impact: Transforming business with AI
The Product: Unlocking the value of Fortune data
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