We wanted to explore the attitudes of business leadership as they navigate the tumultuous Digital era, one marked by the constant innovation, technological change and shifting consumer expectations that affect companies everywhere. Rather than conduct interviews with leaders and present the findings in a tried and true survey format, we sought to express those attitudes by using artificial intelligence methods to analyze the top stories in business and technology reporting, to assign musical attributes to sentiment data, and to present our findings as a finished three-movement symphony, performed live, and supported by real-time data visuals triggered by the musicians.

We used AI to look for emotionally charged words and overall sentiment from business reporting. That data was categorized into eight different sentiments and transposed into musical elements—key, tempo, pitch and note length—literally revealing the music of business.

A human Composer identified musical motifs from that data output from which to build the symphony, staying true to the spirit of the generated melodies, while intensifying the emotive tones to portray changing sentiment throughout the piece.

Arrangements were then shared with the Data Visualists, who cross-referenced key moments of the music with sentiment mappings from the source material. From this, they create real-time visuals to convey the emotional story of the symphony. Visual sequences mixed rendered imagery with live data inputs triggered by the orchestra. The debut performance by a 52-piece orchestra was held before 1000 international business leaders at the Louvre Museum, Paris.

• Captivated the attention of hundreds of C-Level decision makers

• Demonstrated Accenture Strategy’s acumen in AI to said target audience

• Developed a platform that showcases data, strategy and technology in the same form that Accenture solves problems for its clients