IBM and AWS: IBM expands collaboration with AWS

IBM Consulting and AWS already advise customers from various industries on a wide range of AI solutions and services. Now, the two companies are expanding these solutions and services with generative AI to help clients rapidly integrate AI into business and IT operations on AWS. IBM Consulting and AWS plan to deliver the following specific solutions:

• Contact Center Modernization with Amazon Connect – IBM Consulting worked with AWS to develop capabilities for summarizing and categorizing digital and voice interactions using generative AI. These capabilities were developed to enable the transfer of information between chatbots and call center agents, as well as provide summaries to the agent to speed resolution times and improve quality management.

• Platform Services on AWS – Originally launched in November 2022, this offering has now been enhanced with generative AI to better manage the entire cloud value chain including IT operations, automation and platform engineering. The new generative AI capabilities provide customers with tools to improve the maintenance and availability of their applications hosted on AWS through intelligent problem-solving and monitoring techniques. Customers can achieve improvements in uptime and maintenance time, meaning they can respond quickly and effectively to potential issues.

• Supply Chain Ensemble on AWS – This planned offering will introduce a virtual assistant that can accelerate and complement the work of supply chain professionals in meeting customer needs, optimizing inventory levels, reducing costs, streamlining the flow of goods and assessing supply chain risks.

In addition, IBM Consulting plans to integrate AWS generative AI services with IBM Consulting’s proprietary Cloud Accelerator to accelerate the cloud transformation process for clients using AWS. This integration will assist with reverse engineering, code generation and code conversion.

Commitment to deepen expertise and expand AWS integration in watsonx

IBM has already built extensive expertise in generative AI services from AWS – including Amazon SageMaker and Amazon CodeWhisperer – and is one of the first AWS partners to use Amazon Bedrock. This is a fully automated managed service that makes industry-leading Foundation Models (FMs) available via an API, allowing clients to choose the model best suited to their use case.

AI expertise and a deep understanding of AWS capabilities are critical for clients looking to implement generative AI. IBM offers joint clients access to experts from IBM’s Generative AI Consulting Center of Excellence who have specialized generative AI expertise.

As of today, IBM Consulting plans to train and qualify over 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services by the end of 2024. They will have access to an exclusive, partner-only program that provides training on key use cases and best practices for customer engagement with AWS generative AI services. This will allow them to expand their knowledge, engage with technical experts and better advise clients using AWS solutions.

“Enterprise clients are looking for expert assistance in building and implementing a generative AI strategy and developing generative AI use cases that can drive business value and transformation – while mitigating risk,” said Manish Goyal, Senior Partner, Global AI & Analytics Leader at IBM Consulting. “Coupled with IBM’s AI experience and deep expertise in enterprise transformation on AWS, offering enhanced solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities can help our joint clients scale generative AI applications quickly and responsibly on their platform of choice.”

IBM is thus also responding to client demand for generative AI capabilities on AWS by watsonx.data, a ready-to-run data store built on an open lakehouse architecture, on AWS as a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that customers can also access in the AWS Marketplace. The company also plans to make watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance available on AWS by 2024. This builds on previous commitments by the two companies to make it easier for customers to leverage 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 deploy a generative AI strategy that drives business value across their entire cloud value chain,” said Chris Niederman, Managing Director, Global Systems Integrators at AWS. “We’re excited to work with IBM to deliver generative AI capabilities that will help our joint customers scale their applications – and help IBM consultants deepen their expertise in best practices for deploying generative AI services from AWS.”

Generative AI for Telecoms

Clients are already benefiting from the long-standing relationship between IBM and AWS. Bouygues Telecom, a leading French communications service provider with a strong history of industry-leading innovation, engaged IBM Consulting as part of the company’s evolving cloud strategy to design and deploy AI use cases at scale, while giving teams the flexibility to choose cloud and AI providers based on departmental and application needs.

Using the IBM Garage approach, the team has developed a customized data and AI reference architecture that covers multiple cloud scenarios and can be extended to all AI and data projects on Bouygues Telecom’s cloud and on-premises platforms.

“When we started using generative AI to gain insights from our customer projects, we faced some unfamiliar issues in terms of storage space, memory size and performance requirements,” said Matthieu Dupuis, Head of AI at 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 quickly into production while minimizing costs and risks. The platform also enables data scientists to work more efficiently, with greater focus and satisfaction, as they can spend more time on complex, high-value AI projects rather than launching one-off solutions.

An ever-evolving partnership

With more than 40 years of combined experience in AI solutions, IBM and AWS are working together to help clients leverage AI to reduce costs, increase efficiency and drive growth, whether it’s demonstrating the technology, defining potential use cases or co-developing customized solutions.

In addition, IBM is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with over 22,000 AWS certifications worldwide and has earned 17 AWS Service Delivery and 16 AWS Competency certifications. The expanded partnership builds on this long-standing relationship and shared understanding of the importance of AI to organizations. IBM Consulting helps clients create guardrails that align with the organization’s values and standards, reduce bias, and manage data security and provenance.

IBM Consulting accelerates business transformation for clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging the open partner ecosystem. With deep industry expertise in strategy, experience design, technology and operations, IBM Consulting has become the trusted partner of many of the world’s most innovative and valuable companies, helping them modernize and secure their most complex systems. Its 160,000 consultants are committed to an open way of working and use the proven co-creation methodology, IBM Garage, to turn ideas into results.

Statements about IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and intentions only.

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of hybrid cloud and AI solutions and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries leverage insights from their data, optimize business processes, reduce costs to gain competitive advantage in their industries. More than 4,000 government and enterprise organizations in critical infrastructure sectors such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to make their digital transformation fast, efficient and secure. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting provide our clients with open and flexible options. All of this is backed by IBM’s commitment to trust, transparency, accountability, inclusion and service.

Further links

👉 www.ibm.com   
👉 www.aws.amazon.com/de/