Accenture Federal’s new CEO eyes AI-driven transformation during Trump 2.0
![“This administration is going to come in with technical experts and it's critically important to make sure our clients are ready for those conversations," says Ron Ash, CEO, Accenture Federal Services.](https://cdn.nextgov.com/media/img/cd/2025/01/16/RonAshWT2025016-1/860x394.jpg?1737062836)
“This administration is going to come in with technical experts and it's critically important to make sure our clients are ready for those conversations," says Ron Ash, CEO, Accenture Federal Services. Accenture
Ron Ash sees agencies as having opportunities ahead to modernize legacy systems and improve efficiency by harnessing the power of new tools like agentic artificial intelligence.
Ron Ash is not tasked with a turnaround job or leading a wholesale change of Accenture's U.S. federal subsidiary as its new chief executive.
Ash is following the seven-year tenure of John Goodman, who led Accenture Federal Services through a period of growth and wins of positions at all Cabinet-level agencies.
Instead, Ash will lead AFS into the second Trump administration and an era that many see as potentially being transformative with a focus on modernization and efficiency across government.
He worked as chief operating officer at AFS for two years before he became CEO on Sept. 1.
Ash sees three areas as ripe for disruption early in the Trump administration – legacy systems modernization, call centers and the roll out of agentic AI, an artificial intelligence tool that enables automation.
“One of the things we are doing is sitting down with our account teams to prepare their value stories but also plan the future of their programs,” Ash told us. “This administration is going to come in with technical experts and it's critically important to make sure our clients are ready for those conversations.”
Ash said agencies will need to be able to explain the technical side of their operations, such as which cloud they picked and the native services they are using, but also the value they are delivering to the mission.
“We have a couple programs that by this summer are going to eliminate mainframes and move to the cloud,” Ash said. “That's right in the wheelhouse of what the administration wants to see. But absent data, they might not know that. We have to give our customers, the data so they can defend their programs and support their missions.”
Given the Trump administration’s focus on modernization and efficiency, Ash said he expects a wave of activity there over the next year.
“This will significantly change the way the government serves its mission,” he said.
Ash said he is pushing his teams to bring customers solutions that can generate a return on investment within 12-to 18 months. That approach is common in Accenture’s commercial business.
“We have to have that same mindset. We need to be able to pay that money back with what we’re doing,” Ash said.
He expects opportunities around eliminating technical debt such as moving customers off of mainframe computers and onto the cloud.
For an unnamed customer, Ash said AFS is moving a system off a mainframe using the Assembler language and onto a more modern platform. They created a generative AI tool called GenWizard for the code translation.
“Think about all the legacy systems that are out there and being able to quickly modernize them and get them onto the cloud and the generative AI and agentic AI wave can happen,” he said.
Ash said that call centers are among the low hanging fruit of the coming wave modernization. That is where he expects to see early use of agentic AI, a technique that applies artificial intelligence to enable more automation.
“Call centers are probably the easiest place to bring that in because you have decades of data that you can read into your models,” he said.
For the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office, AFS integrated 13 legacy websites into a single platform by using cloud, AI and automation. It also includes an virtual assistant called Aidan that can answer questions and conduct transactions.
“Think about the amount of time that can save not just for citizens but for the department as well,” Ash said.
Aidan, an agentic AI tool, is also constantly learning and being trained.
“We keep adding skills to Aidan and think we should be able to get up to 90% of all inbound calls being handled by Aidan,” he said.
Accenture is also using agentic AI internally to automate more of its back-office systems.
“Bringing our experiences really helps differentiate how we go to market,” he said.
For agentic AI to gain momentum, agencies need to decouple their organizations so they can move horizontally to solve problems. The next step would be AI agents working with other AI agents across agencies.
A key requirement for making this happen is that agencies need to continue restructuring their data.
“Getting your digital core strong is the most important thing to happen right now,” Ash said. “That means structuring your data in a way that tools can access it and understand what the data is and have context.”
AFS has gathered many of its ideas on how to modernize the government into a new report, A Federal Leader’s Guide to Reinvention. AFS' approach to the market and the opportunities would be the same, regardless of the new administration, he said.
“it’s tied more to the moment we are in technologically, but what’s great about what’s happening with the administration is that they’re on board too,” Ash said. “The government wants to do this too and the administration appears to be very focused on making it happen.”