Accenture Interactive has created a project for the Swedish energy company, Stockholm Exergi, that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle elderly loneliness. Following medical research into elderly health, Accenture Interactive discovered that loneliness accelerated health problems including depression and early-stage dementia in the elderly. To combat this, it created a project titled'Memory Lane' that uses a voice assistant combined with conversational artificial intelligence to capture stories for future generations. Using Google Voice Assistant, 'Memory Lane' invites someone who is lonely to tell their life story. Once captures, the discussion is then instantly converted into both a physical book and a podcast.

To improve customer experiences, brands are increasingly turning to data to give them insights and direction. Some of the benefits include helping brands personalize the customer experience. This creates a more enjoyable and memorable moment for customers. In return, they can become repeat customers. Plus, they may tell others about their (hopefully) great experience.

Accenture Interactive is often pointed to as one of the major consultancy arms stepping onto marketing turf typically owned by ad agencies, and the latest news suggests the shop might be edging further into the ad tech business as well. While the streaming tool appears to be early days, the descriptions of its use cases point to how marketers might leverage AI technology past simple customer service and e-commerce tools like chatbots or solutions largely used for data-crunching and insights like IBM's Watson or Salesforce's Einstein. As video and streaming video, in particular, become growing focus areas for more marketers, the programmatic AI feature showcases how brand content might be more regionally tailored and targeted at relevant audiences in an efficient way. Accenture's product combines automatic semantic analysis with human insights and moderation to offer brand safety and provide contextual relevance, Alex Naressi, managing director of Accenture Interactive's research and development unit, told Digiday. Accenture isn't alone in looking to AI to craft more relevant advertising campaigns and product placement.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's Second Quarter Fiscal 2017 Earnings Conference Call. During today's conference all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Thank you, Shannon and thanks everyone for joining us today on our second quarter fiscal 2017 earnings announcement. As Shannon just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Pierre Nanterme, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Rowland, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the News Release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Pierre will begin with an overview of our results. David will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet for the second quarter. Pierre will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before David provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2017. We will then take your questions before Pierre provides a wrap up at the end of the call. As a reminder, when we discuss revenues during today's call, we're talking about revenues before reimbursements or net revenues. Some of the matters we'll discuss on the call, including our business outlook are forward-looking and as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's News Release and discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call.