Accenture faced costly, fragmented video storage and lacked practical ways to find or reuse content, hindering collaboration and efficiency.
Accenture built its new Video IQ system on Azure AI Video Indexer, automating video analysis, tagging, and migration to Azure, enabling fast, AI-powered search and insights.
Accenture expects to reduce storage and operations costs, eliminate daily service issues, and empower global teams with instant access to intelligent video content.
At global professional services firm Accenture, video is the medium by which ideas travel, leadership connects, and innovation scales across its 779,000 people. The company produces approximately 140 broadcast events and over 100 post-production projects each month.
“Our goal is for everyone to use video as a regular communication tool almost as much as people use email or chat every day,” says Christopher Lemire, who leads the broadcast and production technology portfolio within Accenture's global IT organization.
Yet behind the scale was a growing challenge. Accenture had a petabyte of unmanaged video scattered across costly storage systems, without a practical way to find or reuse any of it.
"If you're part of the production team and you want to find a video that we did three weeks ago, you literally have to know what the project ID of that content is, go find the editor that worked on it, and say, ‘Hey, where did you put it?’" Lemire says. "Then you've got to find the storage someplace around the globe where that content was put."
When collaboration is a core value, this fragmented approach wouldn’t do. Hiring video analysts to manually tag and catalog content would have required five or six full-time employees and wouldn't have captured the depth of insights Accenture needed.
Solving Accenture’s video challenge would become the next step in the company’s three-year cloud transformation with Azure. The company had already virtualized its physical production switchers into its Accenture Cloud Video Platform (ACVP) on Azure, which now handles roughly 25% of live events and 60% of studio recordings. Its Virtual Post Services (VPS) system automatically deploys customized editing environments for each project. The missing piece was a way to orchestrate and search across all content.
After evaluating several options, Accenture chose to build its new Video IQ system on Azure AI Video Indexer. Video IQ will serve as the intelligence layer that connects Accenture’s entire video ecosystem. It utilizes Azure AI Video Indexer to analyze and tag every file, while Azure Data Factory orchestrates ingestion pipelines that transfer content from on-premises storage to Azure. Together, they turn raw, unstructured footage into a searchable, insight-rich library available across the company.
“We recently put this in production,” Lemire says. “We are just now populating it with content, and people are getting their first looks at it.”
Video Indexer extracts metadata automatically from Accenture's video content. It analyzes transcripts, identifies speakers through custom facial recognition models (with individual approval), creates time-coded transcripts, and uses Azure Open AI models to generate concise video summaries. The system now processes 200 to 300 clips a week, migrating them from expensive on-premises systems to cost-efficient Azure storage.
"The key that Video Indexer has given us is the insights in the video that it's been able to extract—insights that even a human wouldn't be able to do," Lemire says.
Users will soon be able to ask for highly specific content, such as the top 10 technical innovations in Asia-Pacific HR technology from the past year, and receive a video stitched together from the most relevant segments across multiple sources.
The team is currently developing an Amethyst agent—Accenture's internal chatbot-style interface based on Microsoft Copilot and Azure OpenAI—that will allow employees to search video content conversationally.
Video IQ also includes avatar-based video summaries, allowing users to watch an avatar read a summary of each video. The next phase will add translation into 23 languages, making Accenture’s media archive globally accessible.
“The key that Video Indexer has given us is the insights in the video that it's been able to extract—insights that even a human wouldn't be able to do.”
Christopher Lemire, Broadcast and Production Technology Lead, Accenture
By moving to Azure, the organization can avoid significant traditional data center costs and redirect resources toward higher-value work. Lemire notes that Azure’s storage costs are “miniscule” compared with their legacy environment.
The daily service issues that plagued the old infrastructure will also be eliminated. The team can now rebuild its Chicago data center at 30% smaller scale and is planning to build a new production control room in Bangalore entirely on Azure, with no traditional data center backend.
Perhaps most importantly, Video Indexer effectively functions as an AI librarian, providing deeper, faster, and far more accurate search than manual tagging could ever achieve.
Looking ahead, Accenture sees Video Indexer as foundational for ambitious new initiatives. Plans include building a 24/7 internal channel with targeted advertising for Accenture's solutions and products, using Video Indexer metadata to deliver personalized content to employees based on their roles and interests.
Lemire also envisions self-service AI-assisted video booths in Accenture offices where anyone can record professional-quality content with real-time AI production support.
"We see Video Indexer as an integral part of what our production process is today," Lemire says. The platform is already helping Accenture position its enterprise video services as a client offering, with Video IQ capabilities featured in recent RFI responses to major corporations.
Video IQ is an evolution that feels true to Accenture’s roots; the company’s name was inspired by the phrase ‘accelerate into the future.’ By transforming unmanaged creative output into a searchable, intelligent media ecosystem, Accenture is turning video into the next generation of workplace communication: accessible, intelligent, and ready for what’s next.
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