So Accenture is transferring into Latin America in a significant approach. Final week, the agency introduced it’s buying Verum Companions, a Belo Horizonte-based infrastructure and capital initiatives administration firm with 180 folks and critical on-the-ground expertise in mining, metals, vitality, chemical substances, and transportation. No worth disclosed, as is customary for this stuff.

Verum does one thing particular and genuinely troublesome. It takes the sort of industrial megaproject that routinely runs over funds and not on time and tries to make it not do this. Accenture’s personal analysis places the failure fee of huge infrastructure initiatives at round 90% in opposition to unique targets. That quantity is staggering each time you learn it. Verum’s worth is that it has individuals who really go to the location, coordinate throughout contractors, and resolve issues the place the issues are. Accenture’s worth is that it may well layer AI and digital infrastructure on prime of that. Collectively, the pitch is: sooner, extra predictable, much less wasteful supply of very giant, very advanced initiatives.

It’s a good pitch. Brazil’s funding cycle is accelerating proper now throughout mining enlargement, grid modernization, transportation, and vitality transition. There’s a lot to construct and a protracted historical past of it taking longer and costing greater than anybody deliberate. This acquisition is sensible.

Belo Horizonte is an fascinating place to anchor this. The identify of the state it sits in, Minas Gerais, means Basic Mines, and that’s not a historic footnote a lot as an energetic description. The area is likely one of the most resource-rich within the Southern Hemisphere and has been the location of a few of the most consequential infrastructure choices Brazil has made, good and in any other case.

The announcement stays targeted on the chance, which is truthful. Effectivity, productiveness, sooner operational handover. These are the phrases of the deal and they’re actual enhancements price making.

What doesn’t make it into the press launch, and barely does in these conditions, is the query of what sits alongside all this constructing. The Cerrado, the large biodiverse savanna that borders a lot of this industrial exercise, is underneath vital strain from precisely the sort of enlargement this acquisition is designed to assist. Brazil’s environmental licensing course of is stretched. These aren’t Accenture’s issues to unravel and the announcement was by no means going to boost them.

However they’re the backdrop. And the businesses whose initiatives Verum will now assist ship sooner are working inside that backdrop daily.

We aren’t saying don’t construct. Infrastructure issues, vitality transition is actual, and poorly managed initiatives have their very own prices. We’re simply noting that “environment friendly” is an outline of how one thing occurs, not whether or not it ought to, and people two questions are inclined to journey individually in bulletins like this one.

The Verum staff constructed one thing price buying. That a lot is evident.