I Don't Know

 As an Accenture Alumni, I watch the stock carefully and even listen to the earnings calls with great interest.  Sadly today the stock dropped 18% and year to date cut in half (actually >50%).  The market is punishing Accenture's lower bookings, revenue below mid-point guidance and general pessimism for this sector based on AI expectations.

Today in the Vistage Alumni (we call it Vistage Vets) monthly meeting, K.W. stated that AI hallucinates about 30% of the time. When I asked Copilot today it cites studies saying 60% incorrect answers on some news citation queries, 17-34 % in legal research tools, and up to 31% in real-world interactions, rising to approximately 60% in complex domains.  K.W seems to be correct!

So how does this get corrected and will it take Accenture expertise and digital data cleansing tools or does recursive self improvement just naturally improve this bad batting average?  Copilot weighed in on that question also;

✅ Bottom line

• Consulting-scale engineering (like Accenture): necessary for real-world reliability
• Recursive self-improvement: helpful but limited
• True solution: a layered system combining
• better models
• grounding mechanisms
• verification processes
• human oversight

Interesting concept is that AI is not rewarded for honesty (or punished for errors) and the models don't know when to say "I don't know".  

And as to whether Accenture stock will recover from all this pessimism........  "I don't know"