Accenture reported its first-quarter fiscal 2026 results, driven by strong deal bookings and steady revenue growth, even as margins came under pressure from business optimisation costs, according to the company’s earnings filing.
The IT services major posted new bookings of $20.9 billion, up 12% year-on-year in dollar terms, including $2.2 billion in advanced AI bookings.
The company beat Wall Street’s quarterly expectations. The revenue for the quarter rose 6% to $18.7 billion.
Manager services and consulting businesses led the growth, with revenue increasing by 8% and 4%, respectively.
The company signed 33 deals with quarterly bookings exceeding $100 million, reflecting sustained enterprise demand for large transformation programmes
Accenture chair and CEO Julie Sweet said, “We delivered revenue growth of 5% in local currency, at the top of our guided range, while continuing to gain market share. We also strengthened our leadership in advanced AI and deepened our ecosystem partnerships to help clients realise value.”
The CEO stated the results show the company’s strategy to be the preferred reinvention partner for clients.
By geography, EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and Asia Pacific delivered stronger growth than the Americas in local currency terms, while industry-wise, financial services led with 14% revenue growth, followed by communications, media and technology at 9%.
Accenture’s GAAP operating margin declined to 15.3%, down from 16.7% a year earlier, reflecting $308 million in business optimisation costs, primarily related to employee severance.
Accenture GAAP refers to the company’s financial results prepared under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), the standard accounting rules mandated by US regulators.
On an adjusted basis, operating margin expanded 30 basis points to 17.0%.
It generated free cash flow of $1.5 billion during the quarter and returned $3.3 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
For the full fiscal year 2026, Accenture reaffirmed its revenue growth guidance of 2%–5% in local currency, or 3%–6% excluding the impact of its US federal business, and raised its GAAP operating margin outlook to 15.2%–15.4%.
The company now expects GAAP EPS in the $13.12–$13.50 range.
Accenture employs approximately 7.84 lakh people globally and continues to position itself as a large-scale reinvention and AI services partner for enterprises amid ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty.
Earlier this month, Accenture expanded its partnership with Anthropic, launching a multi-year initiative to train around 30,000 employees on Claude and embed the model across enterprise environments.
It partnered with OpenAI the same month to push enterprise AI deeper into large companies, starting with Accenture’s own workforce.
The company also partnered with Snowflake to push global enterprises to accelerate AI and data-driven reinvention.
The Ireland-based IT consulting giant reported $69.7 billion in revenue last year, a 7% increase from the previous year.
Yet, alongside the growth, the company signalled caution. It warned of slowing momentum, announced job cuts, and noted that the anticipated boom from Artificial Intelligence is not living up to the hype.
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