Dive Brief:
- IBM launched an AI consulting service that gives clients access to expertise and technology gleaned from scaling in-house use cases, the company announced Monday. Enterprise Advantage Service aims to help businesses generate a return on their AI investments, IBM said.
- The new offering builds on an internal AI delivery platform that the company rolled out a year ago, called IBM Consulting Advantage. In November, IBM integrated the platform with Microsoft 365 applications, connecting its consultants with customized AI assistants and agentic tools in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and Outlook.
- AI assistants have helped IBM consultants boost their productivity by up to 50%, the company said in the Monday announcement. “Many organizations are investing in AI, but achieving real value at scale remains a major challenge,” Mohamad Ali, SVP and Head of IBM Consulting, said. “We have solved many of these challenges inside IBM by using AI to transform our own operations and deliver measurable results.”
Dive Insight:
An ongoing quest to wrest reliable returns on AI investments has put the onus on IT services providers and consultants to lead the way. C-Suite leaders remain intent on increasing AI budgets this year despite ROI uncertainty, according to a recent Accenture report. On a broader scale, a hyperscaler building boom is helping stoke fears of a potential market bubble, as global spending on the technology vaults past $2.5 trillion.
IBM has put its weight behind practical applications of the technology. The company was quick to train its watsonx LLM on more than 100 coding languages and added vibe coding to its menu of AI developer tools last fall.
IBM has also made considerable headway with AI knowledge assistants that can feed on massive enterprise data stores and quickly generate domain-specific insights. The company reported an estimated $35 million in efficiency gains from AI agents trained to chew through proprietary industry data, partnership agreements, and client outcomes stories, Ali said in the Microsoft Copilot integration announcement.
The Enterprise Advantage Service offering provides tools and guidance to help clients build an AI platform to support similar applications.
“Initially, this was for internal consumption, just to accelerate our AI adoption and now we are making it available for clients,” Javier Olaizola, global managing partner of hybrid cloud and data at IBM Consulting, told Channel Dive.
In keeping with IBM’s longstanding hybrid-cloud strategy, the platform is designed to integrate with multi-vendor estates and work with multiple commercial and open-source AI models.
“Our clients have already made significant investments in different technology platforms to accelerate AI,” Olaizola said. “Now they are struggling to get the business value and the outcomes of their AI and the technology investments right.”
