IBM recently announced it is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to help joint clients accelerate the deployment of generative AI and deliver a new offering that will provide clients with the expertise and technology they need to innovate their business processes and scale generative AI effectively.
In collaboration with Microsoft, IBM Consulting will focus on helping clients implement and scale Azure OpenAI Service. And the new IBM Consulting Azure OpenAI Service offering, which is available on Azure Marketplace, is a fully managed AI service that allows developers and data scientists to apply powerful large language models, including their GPT and Codex series. It aims to help businesses define an adoption strategy and an initial set of specific and value-add generative AI use cases.
Along with a new offering, IBM and Microsoft have been collaborating around AI, utilizing IBM Consulting skills and Azure OpenAI Service to create potential solutions and address specific use cases, including:
Procurement and source to pay – Together, the companies offer a solution that brings Microsoft Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Service to help businesses automate the highly manual and fragmented sourcing and procurement process and drive new insights about their supply chain. And the solution is designed to improve operational efficiency, save time, and generate new actionable insights for users.
Summarization and content generation – Financial institutions and banks are exploring how generative AI could accelerate personalized content development for their customers through summarization. For example, IBM Consulting and Microsoft worked on a case in a hackathon with the Julius Baer Group to efficiently process and summarize financial reports while automatically creating an audio version.
Streamline healthcare processes – IBM Consulting is utilizing Azure OpenAI Service to offer a solution designed to automatically ingest and analyze complex medical records and policy documents to help automate the prior authorization process. And it is built to provide nurses and doctors with a virtual assistant to help collect information from patient records. This solution aims to help decrease the time needed to process prior authorization requests, reducing administrative burdens and improving the clinician experience.
Enterprise search and knowledge base – For many organizations, the information employees need to do their jobs is dispersed and siloed. And working together, IBM Consulting and Microsoft helped Wintershall Dea implement a knowledge extraction tool designed for information retrieval within vast knowledge bases. By integrating OCR and Microsoft Azure OpenAI, a user-friendly tool is created that eliminates the need for manual browsing, allowing users to effortlessly search for valuable insights.
As part of the new solution, enterprise customers will also gain access to IBM Consulting experts, including 21,000 data, AI, and experienced consultants, who can help them effectively implement generative AI models to advance their business transformation.
This work builds momentum with IBM and Microsoft to help clients transform their businesses. And IBM Consulting – a dedicated global practice focused on Azure Data and AI – has focused on training its consultants, who now have over 40,000 Azure certifications. And IBM Consulting brings expertise and capabilities to help Microsoft clients by acquiring Neudesic, which specializes primarily in Microsoft Azure.
IBM Consulting and Neudesic have been recognized with Microsoft’s 2023 Partner of the Year Award in 13 categories. And IBM Consulting is this year’s U.S. Partner of the Year Winner for GSI Growth Champion, which distinguishes IBM as the partner with the most significant growth. This partner best offers solutions aligned with Microsoft’s in driving digital innovation and cloud transformation for our joint customers in the U.S.
IBM Consulting recently had announced its Center of Excellence for generative AI, which includes more than 1,000 consultants with specialized generative AI expertise ready to help accelerate its clients’ business transformations with enterprise-grade AI, including technology from Microsoft, IBM, and other ecosystem partners.
The Center of Excellence stands along with IBM Consulting’s existing global AI and Automation practice and leverages proven methods like the IBM Garage for Generative AI, where IBM consultants apply a comprehensive, collaborative method to help clients fast-track innovation in the emerging category of foundation models for generative AI. And this includes rapid use case ideation and prioritization, an open, multi-model approach to selecting architectures and training and fine-tuning and scaling models to unique business needs.
IBM Consulting drives business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. And with deep industry expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, we have become the trusted partner to many of the world’s most innovative and valuable companies, helping modernize and secure their most complex systems. The company’s 160,000 consultants embrace an open working method and apply our proven co-creation method, IBM Garage, to scale ideas into outcomes.
KEY QUOTES:
“Businesses are looking for responsible ways to adopt and integrate multi-model generative AI solutions that augment the work their teams are doing in areas such as creative content and code creation, content summarization and search. Our work with Microsoft is another example of IBM’s open ecosystem model designed to bring value to clients while helping them responsibly build and scale generative AI across their businesses.”
— Francesco Brenna, Global VP & Senior Partner, Microsoft Practice at IBM Consulting
“Together, Microsoft and IBM are collaborating to deliver innovative solutions, that will help customers responsibly accelerate deployment of generative AI. As a leader in the delivery of generative AI and data solutions, we believe that partners like IBM are critical to enabling customers successful use of generative AI to advance business transformation.”
— Dinis Couto, GM Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft
