Accenture’s Julie Sweet Asks Staff to Delay Vacations for Q4

Accenture chief executive Julie Sweet has asked employees to carry unused vacation days into the new fiscal year rather than take time off before August ends, according to an internal memo reviewed by multiple outlets this week.

The one-time exception applies to leave that would normally expire, giving staff more room to keep working through the company’s final push toward its fiscal year-end on August 31.

In the memo, Sweet told employees that shareholders are counting on the firm to deliver a strong quarter, and asked teams to look for new ways to close business, whether the deals are small, large or what she called mega.

The message lands at a sensitive moment for the consulting giant. Accenture has faced weaker bookings and a softer revenue forecast in recent quarters, with investors increasingly nervous about how generative AI tools might shrink demand for the kind of staff-heavy consulting projects that have long been the firm’s bread and butter.

Sweet has spent much of the past year restructuring the company around AI services rather than traditional headcount-driven work. She described the overhaul to Fortune in April as the hardest transformation of her career, saying it meant retraining tens of thousands of workers whose old roles no longer matched client demand.

The vacation carryover is a small gesture, but it signals how much weight the final weeks of August carry internally. Accenture employs roughly 770,000 people across 120 countries, and a single quarter’s sales push at that scale can move the needle on its full-year numbers.

Rival consulting firms are watching Accenture’s AI transition closely, since its size makes it something of a bellwether for how fast large professional services firms can shift their business model without shedding clients in the process.

Sweet has not said whether the carryover policy will repeat next year. For now, the message to Accenture’s global workforce is straightforward: close what you can before the books shut on August 31, and the extra vacation days will still be there in September.