Amanda McBride Wilk, managing director at Accenture Ventures, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2026.
Amanda McBride has been global investment team lead at Accenture Ventures, the strategic investment arm of consulting firm Accenture, for more than three years, during which time AI technology has really taken off. For her, there has never been a better time to be an investor.
“It is just such a cool time to be in this space,” she says. “I feel like if you are not excited, you must be dead.
“Physical AI and robotics are some of my focus points right now, and they are at this unique inflection point where you have got advances in autonomy, perception and learning. All of that is enabling totally new use cases you could never address before in real-world industrial environments.”
“Founders will tell you things about their market. If you really listen, you can not only get insight into that particular company, but also what is going on in the market that you might have missed”
Accenture hired McBride as a management consultant just over a decade ago and she joined Accenture Ventures as a senior principal in 2019. She has led about 20 of more than 80 AI investments it has made since 2021 and was promoted to managing director in 2022.
Tom Lounibos, who nominated McBride, led Accenture Ventures for five years before retiring in late 2024, and says she could be running a major unit right now. McBride says knowing how to be an active listener is the biggest factor in her effectiveness in the CVC world.
“We bring a very different perspective as a corporate investor,” she says. “I have learned that it is valuable to have that individual and unique perspective from one single company, and then it is also really valuable to have a perspective like ours, where we are working with companies across the board and are able to pull different perspectives.
“Founders will tell you things about their market. If you really listen, you can not only get insight into that particular company, but also what is going on in the market that you might have missed or the research is not telling you. These folks all have really unique perspectives.”
The Emerging Leaders are mid-career corporate venture professionals who are making an outstanding contribution to their teams and the industry.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders here.
