Accenture set to launch a new regional outlet in Ballarat

Accenture is establishing a new regional outlet in Ballarat, which will launch in May with more than 100 initial recruits and plans to grow that number through local IT skills-training.
Speaking with The Australian, Accenture’s A/NZ tech boss Matt Coates said the move was motivated by the growing demand for onshore support, driven in part by the boom in GenAI amid tightening data sovereignty laws.
In launching its first regional hub in Ballarat, Accenture follows in the footsteps of Ernst & Young, which set up a services delivery centre locally in mid-2022 that was expected at the time to generate 200 new jobs over three years.
“The biggest revolution of our time is the shift to generative AI, with it completely disrupting all the ways our clients do things,” Coates said. “There’s a lot of opportunities for our clients that they’re seeing from that and they’re coming to us for help. Ballarat is a great growth story and an opportunity for folks that are living in the region to get involved with this global shift.”
Accenture’s new office – which will be based in Federation University’s Ballarat Technology Park alongside EY’s hub – will kick off operations from May with more than 100 staff in place, including some potential tree-changers from the firm’s Melbourne city office. Thereafter, Accenture will look to ramp up its numbers through local skills training in conjunction with Federation.
According to the report, the hub will support Accenture’s public and private sector clients with managed services in areas such as finance, human resources and marketing, along with application development and other IT services leveraging advanced technologies including Gen AI. As it stands, Accenture has offices in every mainland state and territory capital bar Darwin.
“We’ll be doing the same sort of work in Ballarat that we do across Australia and New Zealand,” Coates told The Australian. “The uniqueness here is we’re tapping into another source of talent that we haven’t done previously. We want to have a little bit more of an anchor around some of the longer-term managed services that our clients are looking for out of the Ballarat centre.”
The launch of the new hub follows in the wake of Accenture’s recently-announced seven-year joint venture with Telstra, which will see the telco invest $700 million on rolling out AI across its operations in a bid to improve efficiency and customer experience. Comprising experts from both organisations, the new entity will be tasked with building specialised AI tools to support the endeavour.