IBM’s newest consulting service pairs human experts with digital workers to scale enterprise AI – News

IBM Corp. said today it’s going to make its internal, artificial intelligence-powered delivery platform available to enterprise clients as part of a new consultancy service that aims to accelerate the deployment of customized AI models and services.

The new service, called IBM Enterprise Advantage, combines the expertise of IBM’s consultants with access to various AI tools and technologies to support businesses trying to develop and scale their own AI projects.

In essence, it’s a customer-focused version of IBM Consulting Advantage, which is an internal service catering to the company’s army of more than 160,000 consultants. It’s designed to help augment the work of these experts, giving them access to a suite of AI assistants, agents and generative AI applications so they can help build solutions for their clients faster and more efficiently.

IBM launched Consulting Advantage in January 2024, giving its consultants access to a library of both proprietary and third-party large language models, ready-to-deploy applications and industry-specific starter kits to support their advisory work.

The company is now making many of these tools available to customers directly through IBM Enterprise Advantage. It says clients will be able to use the service to redesign existing workflows and enhance them with AI agents and automations without having to do any major refactoring work. So they’ll be able to keep their workloads on the same cloud infrastructure, whether that’s Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or some other platform.

Because it’s a consulting service, clients will still have access to IBM’s expert consultants, but they’ll also be able to take on a more hands-on role. IBM Enterprise Advantage provides access to a growing library of AI agents and applications, with many of them customized for specific industries.

IBM Consulting Senior Vice President Mohamad Ali said most organizations are eager to invest in AI but struggle to achieve any real value from it. He admitted that IBM faced similar challenges early on, but solved them with IBM Consulting Advantage. “[It has] given us a proven playbook to help clients succeed,” he said. “Enterprise Advantage brings this framework to clients by combining human expertise with digital workers and ready-to-use AI assets, so they can achieve meaningful impact.”

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said the new service should appeal to any enterprise that believes it needs to leverage AI to remain competitive and accelerate its business operations. “Such companies need three things: proven AI models, an AI platform and AI services, and that is essentially what IBM is offering here,” he said. “Platforms that can bring AI models and services together are going to be critical for enterprise adoption.”

Early adopters of the new service include the educational services and publishing firm Pearson Plc, which used IBM Enterprise Advantage to develop a customized AI platform that combines human expertise with agentic AI assistants to manage its everyday business operations and enhance decision making.

Another client in the manufacturing industry is using IBM Enterprise Advantage to accelerate its generative AI assistant strategy, IBM said. The unnamed client has successfully identified high-value use cases for AI, deployed targeted prototypes and is now aiming to scale these assistants within a secure and governed environment that’s compliant with the strict regulatory framework it operates within.

Image: IBM