IBM Consulting Advantage provides new AI services for clients
IBM has expanded its AI-powered delivery platform, leveraging in-house and strategic partner technologies to supercharge its consulting expertise. IBM Consulting Advantage will allow for the firm’s global consulting team to easily use AI applications to accelerate their delivery to clients.
IBM Consulting Advantage is an AI-powered services platform aiming to enables IBM’s consultants to embed best in class technology and AI assets in solutions. To further expand this new capability, IBM has announced the Granite 3.0 large language models has become the default platform for IBM Consulting Advantage.
The third-generation Granite flagship language model can outperform or match similarly sized models from leading model providers on many academic and industry benchmarks, according to IBM. This means IBM’s 160,000 consultants around the world can now easily access Granite to assist in client use cases from customer service to IT modernization, helping maximise clients’ return-on-investment for AI.
Commenting on the news, David Cushman, executive research leader at IBM’s strategic partner HFS Research, commented, “With IBM Consulting Advantage, IBM is applying AI to make its consultants faster and more efficient while also delivering better results for clients at lower cost. They're at the leading-edge of the industry, building the future in which human expertise combines with AI-powered software to radically change how consultants support clients' business transformations.”
IBM Consulting Advantage agents are accessed through an intuitive conversational interface powered by IBM watsonx, IBM's AI and data platform, in which consultants can toggle across IBM Granite and third-party generative AI models to compare outputs and select the right model for their task.
This will support clients in two main areas. IBM Consulting Advantage for cloud transformation and IBM Consulting Advantage for cloud management will aid clients to define and execute cloud strategies that align with business objectives and help them derive tangible value from their cloud investments. Meanwhile, IBM Consulting Advantage for business operations will help enterprises reinvent their business operations with AI in areas like HR, finance and procurement – with the firm already using these capabilities for select clients and expecting to have 50 clients onboarded by the end of 2024.
It comes at a time when consultants are increasingly expected to offer services supplemented by AI technologies. According to recent research from IBM Consulting, almost nine-in-ten consulting buyers now look for firms which utilise AI in their solutions.