The Jensen Quality Growth Investment Team Sells Position in Accenture (ACN)
November 2025
Company Overview
Accenture (ticker: ACN) is a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, serving clients across more than 120 countries with a workforce of nearly 800,000 people. Accenture’s end markets are diversified across sectors, including communications, media, technology, financial services, and healthcare.
Investment Thesis and What Led Us to Sell
Accenture has been a bellwether over the past three decades as a best-in-class technology and systems implementation partner across major CRM and cloud migrations, among other strategic shifts. Our thesis for Accenture was based on their core business fundamentals’ alignment with key tenets of the Quality Growth Strategy’s investment selection process:
- Competitive Advantages: Accenture benefits from economies of scope, relationship-based switching costs, and process power leveraging unique internal capabilities spanning management consulting and business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
- Earnings Stability: Accenture has delivered consistent topline and earnings growth over various market environments, driven by durable demand for its consulting and BPO services.
- Valuation: Accenture offers significant breadth, depth, and geographic scale for companies to leverage its consulting and outsourcing capabilities across cloud, IT security, supply chain, transformational change management, and AI transition initiatives.
The Jensen Quality Growth Investment Team has been reducing the Strategy’s exposure to Accenture over the past year as we reexamined our thesis to reflect how AI transformation may impact their core businesses. Additionally, recent reported results and outlook have corroborated identified risks to the business over the long-term, particularly related to AI-specific headwinds to Accenture’s business.
While it remains a quality company, Accenture’s exposure to meaningful AI risk drove the Investment Team’s decisions to reduce and ultimately sell the position, with sale proceeds allocated toward companies with more attractive risk-adjusted return opportunities and improving growth prospects and competitive advantage profiles.
Outlook
Our near-term outlook is somewhat tempered by a slowing macro economy and lower demand for outsourcing and consulting services, partially offset by ongoing cloud and SAP implementations.
Longer-term, our outlook is more challenged due to new realities amidst the AI implementation cycle. First, Accenture has and will continue to implement AI into its own workflow, making itself more efficient, which pressures billable hours necessary to complete a given project. Second, AI implementation does not require the same intensity as prior major technology shifts, like cloud and CRM, with less demand for Accenture’s implementation services. Third, the barriers to entry across IT verticals are lower in the age of AI, which may increase competition across Accenture’s end markets. Finally, we believe a shift to outcome-based contracts may be increasingly necessary, which could prove challenging given Accenture’s entrenched business model centered on billable hours.
Strategy holdings are subject to change and should not be considered recommendations to buy or sell any security. Please click here for a listing of the Quality Growth Strategy’s current holdings.
The company discussion is solely intended to illustrate the application of our investment approach and is not to be considered a recommendation by Jensen. The specific security identified is taken from a representative accounts of the Jensen Quality Growth Strategy and does not represent all of the securities purchased and sold for the Strategy. Our views expressed herein are subject to change and should not be construed as a recommendation or offer to buy or sell any security and are not designed or intended as a basis or determination for making any investment decision for any security. Our discussions should not be construed as an indication that an investment in a security has been or will be profitable, or that the investment recommendations or decisions we make in the future will be profitable or will equal the investment performance of any security discussed herein.
Certain information contained in this material represents or is based upon forward-looking statements, which can be identified by the use of terminology such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “target,” “project,” “estimate,” “intend,” “continue” or “believe” or the negatives thereof or other variations thereon or comparable terminology. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events or results or the actual performance of a client account may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in such forward-looking statements.
This information is current as of the date of this material and is subject to change at any time, based on market and other conditions.
Jensen Investment Management, Inc., is an investment adviser registered under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. Registration with the SEC does not imply any level of skill or training. Although taken from reliable sources, Jensen cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information received from third parties.
© 2025 Jensen Investment Management
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