FEW COMPANIES have gone through a more vigorous digital transformation than Accenture. The professional services firm now derives 60% of its nearly $37 billion in revenue from its digital, cloud, and security businesses--up from 32% about three years ago. The bet has paid off: Since Nanterme became boss in January 2011, Accenture has delivered a total return to shareholders of more than 300%. Fortune sat down with the 58-year-old Frenchman in the spring to learn where he thinks business is headed next. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Chairman and CEO Pierre Nanterme tells Forbes how his global consulting firm discovered that being a "fast follower" suddenly became fatally slow in the age of A.I. and cloud. Q: Describe your 35 years at Accenture, because I think talking about that will be an interesting way of describing what's happened to the global economy and the Information Technology backbone of the global economy during that time. Nanterme: Accenture has changed a lot during that time, probably undergoing a new wave that drove significant changes to the business every ten years. We evolved from management consulting to systems integration and technology. Ten years after that came a new wave--outsourcing. Indeed, each reinvention of Accenture was based on the new technology waves that occurred.

Global IT services major Accenture said it has started seeing industrialisation of digital technology services such as cloud, analytics, cyber security. The company, which claims to have 60 per cent of the new deal bookings in digital cloud and cyber security, has started seeing a shift from the proof of concept (PoC) stage for digital technology-based services. Accenture said its new order book in the first quarter of 2018 (ended on November 30) stood at $10 billion. "Indeed, we see a shift of the budget to the digital technology at large...We are moving from what i would qualify in last couple of years proliferation of the PoC and now we are moving to the industrialisation of the deployment of the digital capabilities and of course it is creating strong demands," Pierre Nanterme, Chairman and chief executive officer, Accenture, told analysts in a call. IT services players across the global such as Accenture, IBM, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro witness an increasing demand for service delivery using technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning.