IBM Consulting, the professional services arm of IBM, has announced its plan to expand its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leverage generative AI for their joint solutions aimed at enterprise clients. The collaboration will focus on three key areas: contact centers, cloud value chain, and supply chain.
Driving Business Value and Transformation
“Enterprise clients are looking for expert help to build a strategy and develop generative AI use cases that can drive business value and transformation — while mitigating risks,” said Manish Goyal, senior partner and global AI & analytics leader at IBM Consulting. With IBM’s AI heritage and extensive expertise in business transformation on AWS, the re-engineered solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities will enable mutual clients to rapidly scale generative AI applications on their platform of choice.
Enhancing Contact Centers, Cloud Value Chain, and Supply Chain
IBM Consulting plans to upgrade its contact center modernization service, IBM Consulting CCM, which combines Amazon Connect’s contact center capabilities with IBM-specific features like Watson Assistant and omnichannel integration. The upgraded service will leverage generative AI to summarize and categorize voice and digital interactions, simplifying the transition from chatbot to live agent and improving overall contact center operations.
For cloud value chain management, IBM Platform Services on AWS will utilize generative AI technology to enhance IT Ops and automation, as well as platform engineering. Intelligent issue resolution and observability features powered by generative AI will contribute to improved business serviceability and availability for applications hosted on AWS.
In the supply chain domain, IBM Consulting plans to introduce a generative AI-powered virtual assistant on AWS. This virtual assistant will accelerate workflows, optimize inventories, reduce costs, streamline logistics, and assess risks for supply chain professionals.
Training Consultants and Making Services Available
As part of the expansion, IBM Consulting aims to train up to 10,000 of its consultants on AWS generative AI services. This initiative will ensure that their team is well-equipped to leverage the top use cases and best practices for these services by the end of 2024.
Furthermore, IBM Consulting will make AWS generative AI services such as Amazon SageMaker, CodeWhisperer, and Bedrock available on its proprietary IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator. This move will enable enterprises to modernize their operations on AWS with the support of IBM’s expertise. Additionally, IBM plans to bring its own data and AI to AWS through watsonx.data, a fit-for-purpose data store built on an open lakehouse architecture. This will be offered as a fully managed SaaS offering on the AWS Marketplace. In 2024, watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance will also be made available on the platform.
