Accenture announced that it has invested in Aera Technology through Accenture Ventures, a company specializing in agentic decision intelligence for enterprises. The companies are combining Aera’s decision intelligence platform with Accenture’s AI-enabled supply chain capabilities to develop AI-led, real-time decision-making solutions for complex global supply chains across industries, including consumer goods, high-tech, life sciences, mining, and oil and gas.
Many supply chains still rely on fragmented and manual processes. According to Accenture research, while 25% of companies have begun their journey toward autonomous supply chains, the median maturity across supply chain activities remains at only 16% on a scale from fully manual to fully autonomous. Accenture said this gap is limiting competitiveness and resilience during periods of disruption.
Aera’s platform combines agentic AI, a proprietary decision data model, and orchestration engines to support supply chain, procurement, finance, and operational decision-making. The platform continuously monitors changes, improves supply and demand decisions, executes actions across enterprises, and learns from outcomes to improve performance over time.
The companies said the partnership will help organizations build more resilient and agile supply chains that can detect disruptions earlier, generate recommendations, and automate many operational decisions under human oversight.
The Hershey Company is already using AI-enabled decision-making in its supply chain operations with support from Accenture and Aera Technology.
Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
KEY QUOTES:
“Today’s business environment is constantly stress-testing supply chains. The speed at which decisions are required to balance costs and services is outstripping what manual, siloed processes can sustain. Our partnership with Aera Technology will enable highly resilient, AI-enabled supply chains that can sense change before disruption hits, equip our clients’ supply chain teams with recommendations how to act, and execute many of those decisions automatically under human oversight.”
Chris McDivitt, Global Lead For Autonomous Supply Chains, Accenture
“The massive volatility in the supply chains today require AI-enabled decision-making, which we are using to identify and avoid a problem before it occurs. Accenture and Aera’s partnership is testament to where next-generation supply chains are headed, and we’re looking forward to seeing the solutions their collaboration will deliver.”
Douglas Guilherme, Global Supply Chain Senior Vice President, The Hershey Company
“The opportunity in front of us is extraordinary. Decision intelligence is enabling a new operating model where intelligent systems manage complexity at speed and scale, and people focus on strategy and performance. At Aera, we see this shift firsthand, and together with Accenture, we’re accelerating how organizations scale this capability so they can operate with greater precision, speed, and impact.”
Fred Laluyaux, Co-Founder And CEO, Aera Technology
