IBM Consulting, Microsoft partners to rev up the adoption of Generative AI

IBM is broadening its partnership with Microsoft to expedite the implementation of generative AI for mutual clients. This extended collaboration will introduce a novel solution that equips clients with the essential technology and know-how to drive innovation in their business workflows and efficiently expand the reach of generative AI.

In partnership with Microsoft, IBM Consulting is dedicated to assisting clients in the implementation and expansion of the Azure OpenAI Service. This collaborative effort has led to the development of the IBM Consulting Azure OpenAI Service, a comprehensive solution accessible through the Azure Marketplace. This managed AI service empowers developers and data scientists to leverage robust large language models, encompassing the GPT and Codex series. Its primary objective is to aid enterprises in formulating an adoption strategy and identifying a foundational collection of distinct and value-enhancing generative AI applications.

Alongside the fresh offering, IBM and Microsoft have engaged in a collaborative effort centered on AI. This partnership harnesses the expertise of IBM Consulting and the capabilities of Azure OpenAI Service to craft potential solutions and tackle particular use cases, encompassing:

1. Procurement and source to pay:

Collaboratively, these organizations present a solution that merges Microsoft Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Service, aiming to streamline the labor-intensive and disjointed sourcing and procurement procedures for businesses. Additionally, the solution facilitates the derivation of fresh insights pertaining to their supply chain. Engineered with the intent of enhancing operational efficiency, conserving time, and furnishing users with novel actionable insights, this solution is a transformative approach.

2. Summarization and content generation: 

Financial establishments and banks are delving into the potential of generative AI to expedite the creation of tailored content for their clientele, primarily focusing on summarization. To illustrate, IBM Consulting and Microsoft collaborated on a hackathon-driven scenario alongside the Julius Baer Group. This endeavor aimed to streamline the processing and summarization of financial reports, accompanied by the automatic generation of an auditory rendition of the report.

3. Streamline healthcare processes: 

IBM Consulting is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to offer a solution that is designed to automatically ingest and analyze complex medical records and policy documents to help automate the prior authorization process. In addition, it is built to provide nurses and doctors with a virtual assistant to help collect information from patient records. The solution aims to help decrease the time needed to process prior authorization requests, reducing administrative burdens and improving the clinician experience.

4. Enterprise search and knowledge base: 

For many organizations, the information employees need to do their jobs is dispersed and siloed. 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.

“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,” said Francesco Brenna, Global VP & Senior Partner, Microsoft Practice at IBM Consulting. “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.”

As part of the new solution, enterprise customers will also have 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.

An open ecosystem approach to AI

IBM Consulting takes an open and collaborative approach to plan, build, implement, and operate generative AI solutions that embrace multiple models on multiple clouds from industry leaders. An open ecosystem approach helps clients define the right models and the right architecture to deliver the desired outcomes. As part of this open approach, IBM Consulting works with clients across industries to assess their generative AI readiness, define the right strategies for their business and help them implement and responsibly govern generative AI in production.

Getting to enterprise AI at scale requires a human-centric, principled approach, and IBM Consulting helps clients establish guardrails that align with the organization’s values and standards, mitigates bias, and manages data security, lineage, and provenance.

Proven work, expertise, and partnership momentum

To help clients prepare data to fuel their generative AI models, select IBM AI technology is currently available on the Azure Marketplace and can be deployed on Azure. Together we’re enabling clients to accelerate the impact of generative AI using their trusted data.

This work builds on recent momentum with IBM and Microsoft to help clients transform their businesses. IBM Consulting, which has a dedicated global practice focused on Azure Data and AI, has focused on training its consultants, who now have over 40,000 Azure certifications. Additionally, IBM Consulting brings expertise and capabilities to help Microsoft clients through its acquisition of Neudesic, which specializes primarily in Microsoft Azure.

IBM Consulting and Neudesic together were also recognized with Microsoft’s 2023 Partner of the Year Award in 13 categories. IBM Consulting is this year’s U.S. Partner of the Year Winner for GSI Growth Champion, which distinguishes IBM as the partner that’s demonstrated the most significant growth – a partner that best offers solutions aligned with Microsoft’s in driving digital innovation and cloud transformation for our joint customers in the U.S.

“Together, Microsoft and IBM are collaborating to deliver innovative solutions, that will help customers responsibly accelerate deployment of generative AI,” said Dinis Couto, GM Global Partner Solutions, Microsoft. “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.”

IBM Consulting’s AI Capabilities

IBM Consulting recently 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 alongside 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. That includes rapid use case ideation and prioritization, an open, multi-model approach to selecting architectures and training, as well as fine-tuning and scaling models to unique business needs.

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 modernize 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.