Technology services provider Accenture is the latest company to ramp up its artificial intelligence business, announcing Tuesday that it will invest US$3 billion over the next three years and double its AI-related staff to accommodate scorching hot demand.

Dublin, Ireland-based Accenture said it aims to have 80,000 AI-related staff to help create “industry-specific solutions that will help our clients harness AI’s full potential to reshape their strategy, technology, and ways of working, driving innovation, and value responsibly and faster than ever before”.

Accenture joins a growing list of technology companies racing to take advantage of a broader interest from businesses looking for new AI tools that can analyse data, help make decisions, and potentially replace some tasks currently performed by human workers. Much of the interest is on “generative AI” tools, such as ChatGPT, that can produce works of writing on command, as well as images, computer code and other media.

Late in May, Nvidia joined the exclusive club of companies with a $1-trillion market capitalisation as the chipmaker reaped benefits from the growing use of AI. But it was the company’s projections for sales of US$11 billion in the current quarter — a 64 per cent jump from the previous year’s quarter — that excited Wall Street.

Oracle soared to an all-time high Tuesday after it posted record annual sales and said AI companies are flocking to its cloud and infrastructure services, the latter of which grew 63 per cent in 2023.

Salesforce, which owns the business communications platform Slack, introduced its “AI Cloud” on Monday, which it says will enable its sales staff and marketers to quickly generate personalised communications specifically targeted to their customers’ needs.

Accenture has 738,000 employees serving clients in more than 120 countries.