IBM Corp. said today its consulting division is partnering with Amazon Web Services Inc. to help customers deploy and operationalize generative artificial intelligence on its cloud computing infrastructure.

In addition to helping customers deploy some very specific use cases of generative AI, IBM will integrate its watsonx.data platform with AWS. It has also committed to training an additional 10,000 consultants on AWS’s array of generative AI services by the end of 2024.

IBM Consulting has worked with AWS for a number of years, helping clients across a range of industries implement AI and various other cloud services. With today’s news, IBM said it wants to step things up with regards to generative AI, the hot technology that powers humanlike chatbots such as ChatGPT and other services, such as image generators.

The partnership will initially focus on helping joint customers to integrate three very specific generative AI solutions. With Contact Center Modernization with Amazon Connect, IBM said it has worked with AWS to create various summarization and categorization functions that will enable customer service-focused chatbots to quickly summarize the details of their interactions with customers, enabling a seamless handoff of these calls off to human agents.

IBM is also expanding its Platform Services on AWS that first debuted in November. It has been enhanced with generative AI to better manage the entire cloud value chain, helping to automate tasks associated with information technology operations and platform engineering. IBM said 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.”

As for Supply Chain Ensemble on AWS, this is being enhanced with a new virtual assistant that IB says will help to augment and accelerate the work of supply chain professionals.

In addition to those specific generative AI services, IBM Consulting said it will integrate AWS generative AI services into its IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator to help customers accelerate their cloud transformation initiatives. The new services are said to be focused on reverse engineering, code generation and code conversion.

Expanded AI talent pool and tools

While it’s stepping up those new generative AI services, IBM plans to upskill its own teams of consultants. It’s planning to train and skill 10,000 of its consulting staff on AWS generative AI services by the end of next year. In effect, it’s building an army of AWS AI experts who will be able to engage with customers and help them identify ways to innovate and improve business processes with the new technology.

Customers won’t have to rely on only IBM’s experts, though. They’ll also be able to use specialist tools such as watsonx.data, a purpose-built data store for generative AI workloads that will be available as a fully managed software-as-a-service offering on AWS. Before the end of 2024, IBM’s entire portfolio of watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance services is expected to be made available on AWS.

Cloud AI providers and systems integrators are racing to expand their alliances so they can cater to the enormous appetite enterprises have for AI systems, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. Today’s partnership announcement is therefore good news for many companies, he added.

“It’s a notable coup for IBM too, as it becomes an exclusive partner for many of Amazon’s AI services, though it remains to be seen how long that will remain the case,” he added.

The availability of IBM’s watsonx offerings is also noteworthy, and perhaps even more important for many customers, the analyst continued. “IBM is making watsonx a first-class citizen on AWS, available in the AWS cloud marketplace,” he said. “This is key because data is the foundation of AI and so watsonx.data will be the place where many joint customers will start.”

French telecommunications services provider Bouygues Telecom SA said it has been one of the earliest beneficiaries of IBM’s expanded partnership with AWS. It engaged with IBM Consulting to design and implement an evolving cloud strategy that leverages the most advanced AI technologies.

Through the IBM Garage approach, Bouygues and IBM co-designed a custom data and AI reference architecture covering multiple cloud scenarios that can be extended to all of the AI and data projects spread across its cloud and on-premises platforms. With this, Bouygueus has been able to develop and scale up a variety of proof-of-concept generative AI models in rapid time, with minimal cost or risk, the company said.

“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 at Bouygues. “IBM Consulting and AWS have been invaluable partners in identifying the right model for our needs and overcoming these technological barriers.”

Photo: IBM