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Rachel Barton shared thisMost executives assume a serious cyber incident means 10 days or less of downtime. The reality averages three to six months. That gap isn't a technology problem. It's a leadership alignment problem. Our new research with 1,000 CEOs and CISOs shows that protection and resilience are not the same thing and most leadership teams haven't had that conversation yet. 84% of CISOs say preventing all disruption is no longer realistic. Only 61% of CEOs agree. When leadership doesn't share a definition of resilience, or a plan for recovering from the inevitable, the impact to operations, customers, and the bottom line is significantly amplified. The organizations pulling ahead have done three things: defined what must keep running through disruption, decided in advance how to recover it, and tested that capability before they need it. That decision has to come from the top. If you're advising CEOs navigating this, I'd be interested in what you're hearing. You can read the full research here. https://lnkd.in/ewwERhvi #Accenture Harpreet Sidhu, Charles Hosner, Jason Lewkowicz, Yusof Seedat, Vikram Desai, Rouz Hashemi, Muqsit Ashraf #Cybersecurity #CyberResilience #InfrastructureResilienceRachel Barton shared thisMost CEOs believe they're investing in cyber resilience. Our research suggests that a lot of them are investing in something else. We surveyed 1,000 leaders, split across CEO and CISO roles, and found 87% of organizations now experience cyber disruption as a recurring operating condition. Yet many organizations are still anchoring their strategies in protection and compliance, not recovery. Those are different objectives. Protection lowers the probability of an attack reaching you. Resilience determines whether the business keeps running when one does. The organizations building resilience into their strategies are seeing more than risk reduction: they’re improving operational performance: lower compliance costs, right-sized cyber investments, optimized spend. It’s because these leaders have made a deliberate shift: They've identified the smallest set of operations that must keep running through disruption, decided in advance how to stabilize, sustain and recover them, and tested it under real conditions. This shift requires a shared understanding between CEOs and CISOs of what resilience actually means, and who owns it. This report can help forge that connection. Read the research to learn more: https://lnkd.in/g9NzJShV Accenture, Charles Hosner, Jason Lewkowicz, Yusof Seedat Rouz Hashemi, Vikram Desai #Cybersecurity #CyberResilience #BusinessResilience
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Rachel Barton shared thisExcited to join my colleague Oliver Light together with Tim Barlow and Trisha Taneja to discuss the role of sustainability in finance and private equity — and as moderator, I'll be steering us through what I think is one of the most timely questions on the table right now: what will it take for PE to turn resilience into returns? After Ukraine, the Iberian blackout and now Hormuz, resilience has stopped being a slide in the ESG deck. It's becoming a question about value — and PE, sitting across sectors, geographies and time horizons all at once, has a vantage point on it that few others do. Expect a candid conversation: are LPs genuinely repricing resilience or is it still more talk than capital, is the risk data finally good enough to move real decisions, how do you stop sustainability being the first thing cut when the macro shifts, and what's the one thing every PE GP should be doing differently over the next 12 months. Join us live at Accenture's Accent on Sustainability '26 on 17 June. The full agenda runs all day — our panel closes things out. Register 👉 https://lnkd.in/eRq_wry2 #AccentOnSustainability #PrivateEquity #ClimateResilience #Sustainability
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Rachel Barton shared thisIt was a pleasure to moderate a fabulous panel including Alex Kesseler, Lorenzo Levi, Selim Loukil and Helen Lee Bouygues to discuss how 100-day plans can play a vital role in value creation. The role of leadership, focus and learning patterns for success all featured in the discussion, which connects with insights from The Dawn of the Agentic Deal: https://lnkd.in/gns2kuDk A clear message emerged from both the panel and the audience: the shift from experimentation to scaled, disciplined deployment is well underway. #AI is not being used simply to do the same deals faster—advantaged buyers are rethinking how deals create value. Thank you again to the panelists and everyone who joined the discussion. #ValueCreation #PrivateEquity Alex Kesseler Lorenzo Levi Helen Lee Bouygues Selim Loukil
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Rachel Barton shared thisToday’s environment presents a much tighter operating reality for private equity. The market no longer rewards firms that try to do a bit of everything; it favors those that can translate an investment thesis into EBITDA impact quickly, repeatedly and across the portfolio. AI is creating new opportunities to do exactly that. We’re seeing leading firms embed AI into portfolio strategy, diligence, transformation and exit preparation—with measurable impact on growth and enterprise value. The firms that treat AI as a core lever of value creation, rather than a standalone technology initiative, will be better positioned to outperform in a more competitive deal environment. In my latest article, I explore where the biggest opportunities are emerging across the investment lifecycle. I’d welcome your perspective: https://lnkd.in/eMJ44huB Portfolio value creation in the age of AI | Accenture See how private equity firms use AI and portfolio velocity to drive faster diligence, quicker execution and stronger EBITDA growth. #privateequityaccenture #AI #valuecreationPortfolio value creation in the age of AI | AccenturePortfolio value creation in the age of AI | Accenture
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Rachel Barton shared thisLooking forward to connecting with operating partners at PEI Forum in London. Together with @Alex Kesseler, @Selim Loukil, @Lorenzo Levi, @Ines Delgado, @Helen Lee Bouygues, we’ll explore a key challenge: how to turn diligence insights into focused, executable 100-day plans. In practice, that means: • Clear ownership from day one • Forecasts you can actually steer against • Balancing quick wins with structural change • Laying foundations for scalable growth We’re also seeing agentic AI move from experimentation into the core of the deal lifecycle—from underwriting through to post-close value delivery. But the real gap isn’t ambition—it’s execution. Firms that are pulling ahead aren’t just deploying tools. They’re getting the fundamentals right: data foundations, governance, and workforce readiness. Curious to hear: where are you seeing AI actually move the needle in portfolio value creation? More insights: https://lnkd.in/e6T28Z6Q @FelixHessel @David Cullen-Jones #ValueCreation
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Rachel Barton shared thisCan't wait for Centaur Dealmaker series to come out from my colleagues, Austin Corbett, Stuart Nicoll and Jonathan Floyd!Rachel Barton shared thisTwenty-nine years ago this week, Garry Kasparov — the reigning world chess champion — lost a match to a machine. The year after, he invented a new kind of player. Not literally. But in the wake of losing to IBM’s Deep Blue — the first time a machine won a match against the reigning world chess champion — he created something new. Advanced Chess. Humans paired with AI engines, competing against other human-AI teams. For more than a decade, “centaur players” produced the highest quality chess ever played. Better than any human. Better than any machine alone. The combination was virtually unstoppable. Then it wasn’t. As the engines improved, the human contribution yielded diminishing returns. Eventually, in a closed system with finite rules and clear winning conditions, human intervention stopped being the asset. It became the bottleneck. The centaur era ended. Pure AI won. Every executive who has ever paired their own judgment with an AI tool, a model, or a platform is already a centaur. The question is which kind. Here’s the question this series is built around. Is corporate strategy a closed board? Is M&A? The pre-announcement phase — market scanning, target identification, scenario modeling, diligence synthesis — increasingly looks like one. Bounded, optimizable, pattern-matchable, increasingly AI-solvable. The centaur that wins here may eventually be the one that needs you the least. But post-close integration? Coalition management? The decision about which leader stays, which culture survives, who is accountable when it goes wrong? That’s something else entirely. Open. Adversarial. Irreducibly human. Most corporate strategy and deal functions were designed for the former — and have never seriously reckoned with the latter. That gap is about to become very expensive. — — — A series of articles. One question. Which half of the centaur are you building? — — — The Centaur Dealmaker series begins next week. Austin Corbett is a Managing Director in Accenture’s M&A practice. Amir Bagherpour, PhD is Global Managing Director, Agentic Modeling & Simulation at Accenture and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Stuart Nicoll is Senior Managing Director and Head of Corporate Development at Accenture, where he has led more than 300 acquisitions. Jonathan Floyd is a Managing Director, Head of Accenture Ventures, part of Corporate Development #MergersAndAcquisitions #Strategy #ArtificialIntelligence #CorporateDevelopment #PrivateEquity
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Rachel Barton shared thisMost value leakage in carve-outs doesn’t happen post-close. It’s already set in motion before Day 1. Too often, separation planning starts late, TSAs are loosely defined and interdependencies with the value creation plan remain unclear. The result? Extended TSAs, rising costs and delayed execution. Leading #PrivateEquity investors treat pre-close as a strategic phase—not a formality. They lean into separation early, define TSAs bottom-up and integrate carve-out planning with value creation from the start. I invite you to explore what differentiates top-quartile carve-outs in more detail here: https://lnkd.in/eBbYQNvN #accentureprivateequity Felix Hessel J. Neely Himanshu Patney
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Rachel Barton shared thisPrivate equity firms are moving 1.3x faster than corporate acquirers in embedding agentic AI into deal logic and execution. The shift is clear: AI is no longer just an efficiency tool—it is a structural value creation lever. I encourage you to read how leading acquirers are redesigning deals to build AI-enabled enterprises in The Dawn of the Agentic Deal. https://lnkd.in/e6T28Z6Q #PrivateEquity #MergersAndAcquisitions #AgenticAI J. Neely; Felix Hessel; Rajat Maaker; Steve Husaim; Matt Mcclelland; Himanshu Patney
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Rachel Barton reacted on thisRachel Barton reacted on thisIt’s all about building for the future really isn’t it? Enjoyable as it is to post about promotions and reports, we’d all like to feel we are doing our little bit .. This platform tends to err towards the purely professional but we all wear many hats all the time. Parenting is probably the biggest and hardest role you can ever take on. Joy today to see our daughter Elodie safely navigate A Levels and be accepted into her place at UCL for architecture. So proud of her and all her hard work. Just the start of her journey but looking forward to supporting it . Nicolas Levesque
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Rachel Barton liked thisRachel Barton liked this"Europe's security will no longer be decided solely on the battlefield. It will be decided much earlier – in Europe's production halls." This clear statement from Dr. Bodo Koch, CEO of Heckler & Koch GmbH, captures the core of a candid and forward-looking conversation I enjoyed – and one that I believe every European executive and policymaker should follow closely. Dr. Koch and I explored industrial resilience, deterrence, and what it truly takes to build and sustain a credible defense industrial base. Here are the key insights from our discussion: 🏭 Production capacity = deterrence: Deterrence no longer depends solely on the quality of weapons systems; it depends equally on whether states and their industries can deliver reliably over years. Those who cannot scale production in a crisis lose the ability to act. 💰 Invest before demand arises, not after the order is signed: H&K's competitive edge today was earned years ago. Industrial capability cannot be built overnight. The companies that are reliable partners now made that investment decision when demand was far from certain. 💪 More budget ≠ more capability: Europe needs skilled workers, modern machinery, industrial capacity, and profitable companies that can invest long-term. Budget without industrial foundation is a number on a page, not a weapon in the field. 🧭 Responsibility doesn't end at the product: Dr. Koch was clear: H&K operates on a value compass. Equipping those who protect freedom and security is the mission, and that requires choosing partners with equal precision. Dr. Koch's message to European heads of government was clear: Think long-term, create planning certainty, and treat industrial capability as part of your security architecture. Read the full interview in German below. _____ #AccentureStrategy #Defense #EuropeanSecurity #IndustrialResilience #GrowthInSight #AccentureDACH #tomorrowtoday
Honors & Awards
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Top 25 Global Private Equity Leader
The Consulting Report
#1 position globally
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Top 25 Global Private Equity Leader
The Consulting Report
Recognised as part of the top 25 global private equity leaders (#2 position)
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Trustee Kings College Hospital Trust
Kings College Hospital Trust
Board of Directors Appointment
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Red Women of the Year
Red Magazine
Shortlisted for Red magazine's women of the year award for contribution to charity
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Women of the Future Award
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Mentor of the Year for the Cherie Blair Foundation and shortlisted in the Women of the Future Awards
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Top 35 business women under 35
Management Today
Awarded the "35 under 35" most influential women in business in the UK in 2009 by Management Today and the Sunday Times
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