Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has made an investment through its Accenture Ventures arm in Within, an AI platform company focused on mapping and automating business processes. The two companies are also entering a partnership to help enterprise clients deploy AI agents and identify automation opportunities. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Within's platform tracks how employees work across applications and captures undocumented processes, compiling that data into what the company calls a "Work Brain" — a context layer intended to help AI agents understand real-world workflows. The system covers functions including finance, HR, sales, supply chain, and customer service.

According to Accenture's latest Pulse of Change survey of more than 3,000 C-suite executives, 82% reported increasing investment in AI, yet only 23% said they were achieving widespread, sustained business value from the technology, down from 32% earlier in the year.

"One of the most persistent challenges in AI transformation is that organizations often don't have a clear picture of the starting point — the actual processes, the exceptions, how work actually flows through their teams," said Jason Dess, Accenture's Industry and Process Reinvention Lead.

Within is built on a private, sovereign architecture designed to meet data privacy and security requirements, which the company says makes it suitable for regulated industries. The platform is also intended to support ERP and operating model transformation programs.

"AI transformation works best when there's a system of record of work to provide visibility on what to automate and the ability to verify that agents are doing their work the right way," said Andrew Antos, Within CEO and Co-Founder.

Blackbaud EVP and Chief Commercial Officer David Benjamin, whose company used the combined offering, said the platform "surfaced the real process, not the one on the diagram — the hidden workarounds, the manual steps, the informal patches our people had built to get the job done."

The partnership is based on a press release from Accenture.