Dive Brief:
- IBM and OpenAI struck a deal to jointly deploy enterprise-grade AI services, according to a Thursday statement. Both companies declined to disclose financial terms of the deal in emails to CIO Dive.
- The two firms plan to develop industry-specific services for financial services, telecommunications, government and retail, as well as offerings geared toward specific functions such as finance, procurement, customer operations and HR.
- As part of the deal, IBM will embed OpenAI models and products into its AI consulting platform. IBM also promoted forward deployed engineers and consultants as a resource to enterprise customers for AI implementation efforts.
Dive Insight:
The IBM-OpenAI deal comes as vendors across the landscape work to address the top pain points of enterprise adoption efforts — including the dearth of specialized expertise.
Without available staff to tackle complex AI implementation efforts, some of the largest providers have begun offering teams of forward deployed engineers that embed themselves within customer organizations. In the IBM-OpenAI case, engineers and consultants will be trained through the OpenAI Partner Network, a global program launched in June to help technology partners and vendors accelerate AI adoption.
The partnership’s inclusion of FDEs builds on IBM’s May introduction of forward deployed units, pods of specialists equipped with agents that embed within customer organizations to solve complex adoption challenges.
IBM isn’t the only tech vendor adding FDEs to its AI arsenal. Amazon in June earmarked $1 billion to launch an FDE unit that teams up human engineers with agents to ease enterprise adoption effort. A few days later, Microsoft pledged $2.5 billion to establish the Microsoft Frontier Company, a 6,000-expert unit to work directly with customers. Google has also opened up dozens of roles for FDEs to help accelerate customer AI adoption in its cloud services unit.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a LinkedIn post earlier this year that FDEs were not new to the hyperscaler, but the model responded to rapid demand growth from customers and partners.
By the end of the year, more than 4 in 5 tech providers will have launched FDE programs as the core method for delivering AI, according to Gartner projections. In part, the move seeks to address a labor market imbalance — the demand for specialized tech workers with enterprise AI know-how far outweighs the supply.
The OpenAI partnership is the most recent example of IBM teaming up with large providers to ease customer transformation. In June, the company inked a similar deal with Google Cloud to launch a targeted consulting practice around hybrid cloud, legacy modernization efforts and AI adoption.
