News

IBM to Train 10,000 Consultants in Generative AI Pact with AWS

• By David Ramel
• 10/18/2023

IBM has entered a pact with cloud giant Amazon Web Services that will see Big Blue skill up some 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services by the end of next year.

The deal seems a natural progression of IBM's famous decision years ago to spin off its managed infrastructure services in order to focus exclusively on hybrid cloud computing and AI. Though that decision was made well before the dawn of advanced generative AI systems like the ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI, such systems are at the heart of the deal.

IBM today (Oct. 18) announced an expansion of its relationship with AWS to help more mutual clients operationalize and derive value from generative AI. "As part of this, IBM Consulting aims to deepen and expand its generative AI expertise on AWS by training 10,000 consultants by the end of 2024; the two organizations also plan to deliver joint solutions and services upgraded with generative AI capabilities designed to help clients across critical use cases," IBM said.

The company added that the consultants will have access to an exclusive, partner-only program to provide training on the top use cases and best practices for client engagement with generative AI services in the AWS cloud in order to help advance their knowledge, engage with technical professionals and better serve clients using the AWS platform.

As far as those use cases, the partnership will start off addressing three specific solutions:

• Contact Center Modernization with Amazon Connect -- IBM Consulting worked with AWS to create summarization and categorization functions for voice and digital interactions using generative AI, which are designed to allow for transfers between the chatbot and live agent and provide the agent with summarized details that expedite resolution times and improve quality management.
• Platform Services on AWS -- Initially introduced in November 2022, this offering is newly upgraded with generative AI to better manage the entire cloud value chain including IT Ops, automation, and platform engineering. The new generative AI capabilities give clients tools to enhance business serviceability and availability for their applications hosted on AWS through intelligent issue resolution and observability techniques. Clients can expect an improvement of uptime and mean time repair which means they can act quickly and effectively to potential issues that arise.
• Supply Chain Ensemble on AWS -- This planned offering will introduce a virtual assistant that can help accelerate and augment the work of supply chain professionals as they aim to deliver on customer expectations, optimize inventories, reduce costs, streamline logistics, and assess supply chain risks.

Other aspects of the partnership will see IBM Consulting integrating AWS generative AI services into its proprietary IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator to quicken the cloud transformation process, helping with reverse engineering, code generation and code conversion.

What's more, IBM will make its watsonx.data offering -- a fit-for-purpose data store built on an open lakehouse architecture -- available on AWS as a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that can also be accessed in AWS Marketplace. IBM also plans to make other parts of its watsonx platform for enterprise AI -- watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance -- available on AWS by 2024.

"Enterprise clients are looking for expert help to build a strategy and develop generative AI use cases that can drive business value and transformation -- while mitigating risks," said IBM Consulting exec Manish Goyal in a news release. "Paired with IBM's AI heritage and deep expertise in business transformation on AWS, this suite of reengineered solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities can help our mutual clients to scale generative AI applications rapidly and responsibly on their platform of choice."