Accenture SL

My dad, I would say, was one step removed from the military.

He worked for a firm called, uh, Arthur Andersen before it became Andersen Consulting and, and Accenture.

And, um, they moved us around a lot, so I went to three high schools.

I pretty much hated my parents for that, but I've forgiven them because it actually taught me, Alex, it taught me how to meet people.

I actually have to take you back to actually my transition, you know, out of being a history major.

And I did have a sojourn in the consulting world before going to grad school in political science, and that was actually as a, um, you know, systems consultant for what was way back then called Andersen Consulting and is now Accenture.

And they took me, the history major from Johns Hopkins, and pulled up the little coding school bus and sent me off and, um, taught me how to program.

And so I learned how to program, and I worked on the conversion of state tax systems, you know, from the old world to a slightly more modern mainframe world.

And this is one of the biggest things with AI that, you know, a well-documented, you know, tendency to be sycophantic, to tell you how great you are, how smart you are.

That's exactly the wrong thing when it's coming to, you know, comes to building a trustworthy system.

You know, one of the things that we've built is, and going back to my Andersen Consulting days, how do you take, you know, data in different formats, very messy formats, you know, how do you take the chicken scrawl on someone's, you know, handwritten tax form and put it in a system and the pathways to doing that? Normalizing data is exceptionally important and very difficult, and you have to be able to say, "Well, these two things don't match.

These don't go together." And so what we've built is a system that can take data from anywhere, not just those that are collected on TruDot, but those are collected, you know, by any system, by any methodology.

Well, um, you know, I, yeah, I'll, I'll go through my history and, um, just briefly and into how we got here and how that picture is hanging on the wall.

Um, my background, I worked at Andersen Consulting for eight years, um, this is before they were, uh, public.

Um, and, uh, basically Andersen Consulting is now Accenture.

And, you know, my role was in technology.

We would go out to clients and we would say, "This is how you adopt a change, uh, and this is the technology," that sounds deep in the tech.