Accenture reported fiscal fourth-quarter results before the opening bell on October 1, and the stock was indicated up 19% premarket, a sharp reversal for a name that had spent most of the year getting punished on fears that AI would hollow out its consulting business.
What did Accenture report for its fiscal fourth quarter?
Accenture posted GAAP earnings of $3.29 per share, beating consensus by $0.11, on revenue of $18.7 billion, up 6.3% year over year and roughly $660 million above forecasts. New bookings for the quarter came in at $22.2 billion, a 4% increase in U.S. dollar terms.
Why did the stock jump in premarket trading?
Two things landed at once. The earnings beat itself, and a newly announced AI safety partnership with Anthropic. Shares were indicated up 19% in premarket trading, building on a stock that had already closed at $182.80 on September 30, up more than 3% that session on earnings anticipation.
What's inside the Anthropic AI safety partnership?
Accenture's Faculty unit, the AI-safety specialist it acquired, will embed evaluators directly inside Anthropic to red-team models, run alignment checks, and verify safety commitments as new systems are trained. Both companies are committing at least $1 billion each over five years. The arrangement is not exclusive. Anthropic has said it plans to add more evaluator partners in the coming weeks, tied to a broader push from its leadership to pace frontier AI development rather than race through it unchecked.
How big were Accenture's AI-related bookings this year?
Full-year bookings hit a record $84.5 billion, with a record 141 quarterly client bookings worth $100 million or more. Bookings tied to key AI and data partners, a list that includes Anthropic, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Databricks, Snowflake, Mistral AI, and Google's Gemini team, are on track to more than double versus fiscal 2025.
Why was the stock down so much heading into this report?
Accenture had one of the roughest years in the S&P 500 up to this point. Shares fell a record 20% in a single day on June 18 after new bookings dropped 2% and management flagged AI eating into consulting and managed-services demand, leaving the stock down more than 50% for the year at that low. The same AI that crushed the stock in June is now showing up as a bookings line item large enough to move premarket trading.
What's the guidance for fiscal 2027?
Accenture guided fiscal 2027 revenue growth of 3% to 6% in local currency and adjusted diluted EPS of $14.39 to $14.81, building on full-year fiscal 2026 adjusted diluted EPS that landed near $13.78 to $13.90, itself 7% to 8% growth over the prior year.
The read here isn't that AI stopped being a threat to consulting revenue. It's that Accenture found a way to get paid on both sides of the trade, selling AI transformation work with one hand and AI safety evaluation with the other. Whether that balance holds past this one quarter is the thing to watch into fiscal 2027.
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