IBM expands AWS relationship

IBM is expanding its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help more mutual clients operationalise and derive value from generative artificial intelligence (AI). As part of this, IBM Consulting aims to deepen and expand its generative AI expertise on AWS by training 10,000 consultants by the end of 2024; the two organisations also plan to deliver joint solutions and services upgraded with generative AI capabilities designed to help clients across critical use cases.

IBM Consulting and AWS already serve clients across a variety of industries with a range of AI solutions and services. Now, the companies are enhancing those solutions and services with the power of generative AI designed to help clients integrate AI quickly into business and IT operations building on AWS. IBM Consulting and AWS plan to start with these specific solutions:

· Contact Center Modernisation with Amazon Connect – IBM Consulting worked with AWS to create summarisation and categorisation functions for voice and digital interactions using generative AI, which are designed to allow for transfers between the chatbot and live agent and provide the agent with summarised details that expedite resolution times and improve quality management.

· Platform Services on AWS – Initially introduced in November 2022, this offering is newly upgraded with generative AI to better manage the entire cloud value chain including IT Ops, automation, and platform engineering. The new generative AI capabilities give clients tools to enhance business serviceability and availability for their applications hosted on AWS through intelligent issue resolution and observability techniques. Clients can expect an improvement of uptime and mean time repair which means they can act quickly and effectively to potential issues that arise.

· Supply Chain Ensemble on AWS – This planned offering will introduce a virtual assistant that can help accelerate and augment the work of supply chain professionals as they aim to deliver on customer expectations, optimise inventories, reduce costs, streamline logistics, and assess supply chain risks.

Additionally, for clients looking to modernise on AWS, IBM Consulting plans to integrate AWS generative AI services into its proprietary IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator to help accelerate the cloud transformation process. This will help with reverse engineering, code generation and code conversion.

Commitment to deepening expertise and expanding AWS on watsonx integration

IBM has already built extensive expertise with AWS’s generative AI services including Amazon SageMaker and Amazon CodeWhisperer, and is one of first AWS Partners to use Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes industry-leading foundation models (FMs) available through an API, so clients can choose the model that's best suited for their use case.

AI expertise and a deep understanding of AWS capabilities are critical for clients looking to implement generative AI, and IBM is already providing mutual clients with access to professionals from IBM Consulting’s Center of Excellence for Generative AI with specialised generative AI expertise.

With today’s news, IBM Consulting plans to train and skill 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services by end of 2024. They will have access to an exclusive, partner-only program that provides training on the top use cases and best practices for client engagement with AWS generative AI services. This will help advance their knowledge, allow them to engage with technical professionals and better serve clients innovating on AWS.

“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, Global AI & Analytics Leader at IBM Consulting. “Paired with IBM’s AI heritage and deep expertise in business transformation on AWS, this suite of reengineered solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities can help our mutual clients to scale generative AI applications rapidly and responsibly on their platform of choice.”

IBM is also responding to client demand for generative AI capabilities on AWS by making watsonx.data, a fit-for-purpose data store built on an open lakehouse architecture, available on AWS as a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution– which clients can also access in AWS Marketplace. The company also plans to make watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance available on AWS by 2024. This builds on previous commitments made by the two companies to make it easier for clients to consume IBM data, AI and security software on AWS.

“Our customers are increasingly looking for the technical support and AI expertise they need to build and implement a generative AI strategy that drives business value from their entire cloud value chain,” said Chris Niederman, Managing Director, Global Systems Integrators at AWS. “We are excited to be working with IBM to include embedded generative AI capabilities that assist our mutual customers scale their applications – and help IBM consultants deepen their expertise on best practices for customer engagement with AWS generative AI services.”

Generative AI at scale for telecommunications

Clients are already benefitting from the longstanding relationship between IBM and AWS. Bouygues Telecom, a leading French communications service provider with a history of industry-leading innovation, engaged IBM Consulting to support the company’s evolving cloud strategy to explore, design and implement AI use cases at scale while giving teams flexibility to select cloud and AI providers based on departmental and application needs.

Leveraging the IBM Garage approach, the team co-designed a custom data and AI reference architecture covering multiple cloud scenarios that can extend to all AI and data projects across Bouygues Telecom’s cloud and on-premises platforms.

“As we sought to leverage generative AI to extract insights from our engagements with clients, we were confronted with some unfamiliar issues around storage, memory size and power requirements,” said Matthieu Dupuis, Head of AI for Bouygues Telecom. “IBM Consulting and AWS have been invaluable partners in identifying the right model for our needs and overcoming these technological barriers."

With the new AI platform on AWS, IBM Consulting enabled Bouygues Telecom to develop proof-of-concept models and scale them into production quickly while helping to minimise costs and risks. The platform also enables their data scientists to work with greater efficiency, purpose, and satisfaction by allowing them to spend more time on complex, high-value AI projects rather than launching standalone solutions.

An evolving relationship

With over 40 years of combined experience on AI solutions, IBM and AWS have been working together to respond to clients who are looking to leverage AI for cost, efficiency, and growth, whether they are looking for a demonstration of the technology, defining potential use cases or full co-creation of bespoke solutions.

Additionally, IBM is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with over 22,000 AWS certifications globally and has achieved 17 AWS Service Delivery and 16 AWS Competency designations. Today’s news builds on this longstanding relationship and a shared value of the importance of enterprise AI. Getting to enterprise AI at scale requires a human-centric, principled approach, and IBM Consulting helps clients establish guardrails that align with the organisation’s values and standards, mitigate bias and manage data security, lineage, and provenance.

IBM Consulting accelerates business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. 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 modernise and secure their most complex systems. Our 160,000 consultants embrace an open way of working and apply our proven co-creation method, IBM Garage, to scale ideas into outcomes.