IBM today announced an expansion of its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help more mutual clients operationalize and derive value from the latest technologies, including generative artificial intelligence (AI). As part of this, IBM launched the Innovation Lab, in collaboration with AWS, at the IBM Client Experience Center in Bangalore.
The lab is a first of its kind for the IBM-AWS collaboration and is open to clients from around the world to explore joint IBM-AWS solutions and test prototypes and proofs of value that aim to help accelerate innovation across industries such as Banking and Financial Services, Automotive, Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities, Travel and Transportation, and Healthcare, among others.
The lab is divided into experience zones that focus on different technology areas underpinned by generative AI and machine learning. These areas demonstrate cloud modernization, SAP transformation, industry innovation, data and technology transformation, and cybersecurity. Customers will also have the opportunity to learn best practices from their peers globally through the sharing of case studies.
Anuj Malhotra, Vice President and Senior Partner, Growth Platforms, IBM India Client Innovation Centre for IBM Consulting said, “With the IBM Innovation Lab being launched in collaboration with AWS in India, our objective is to showcase the full potential of the joint value proposition that IBM and AWS offer to our clients from across the world. Clients can now experiment with the latest cloud-enabled technologies including generative AI in our lab, before actually implementing and scaling solutions on AWS. Our teams at the lab, consisting of technology and industry experts from IBM and AWS, will help build rapid prototypes that address client business and technology challenges. IBM and AWS have a history of driving client innovation leveraging the latest technology such as AI in India. We look forward to deepening our partnership with AWS and support even more clients across industries and across geographies to unlock the full potential of cloud and generative AI.”
Vaishali Kasture, Director and Country Leader, Commercial Sales, AWS India and South Asia said, “AWS is delighted to be launching a new innovation lab with our AWS Premier Tier Consulting Partner, IBM. By combining the AI and data analytics expertise of IBM and AWS’s broadest and deepest set of cloud-enabled solutions, we look forward to driving industry transformation and developing solutions that address real-world customer needs. AWS remains committed to investing in working backwards from our joint customers and leveraging advanced cloud technologies like generative AI and the innovation lab as sandbox environment, to ideate and scale industry-focused solutions.”
IBM Consulting and AWS already serve clients across a variety of industries with a range of AI solutions and services. Now, the companies are enhancing those solutions and services with the power of generative AI designed to help clients integrate AI quickly into business and IT operations building on AWS. IBM Consulting and AWS plan to start with these 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.
Additionally, for clients looking to modernize on AWS, IBM Consulting plans to integrate AWS generative AI services into its proprietary IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator to help accelerate the cloud transformation process. This will help with reverse engineering, code generation and code conversion.
Commitment to deepening expertise and expanding AWS on watsonx integration
IBM has already built extensive expertise with AWS’s generative AI services including Amazon SageMaker and Amazon CodeWhisperer, and is one of first AWS Partners to use Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes industry-leading foundation models (FMs) available through an API, so clients can choose the model that’s best suited for their use case.
AI expertise and a deep understanding of AWS capabilities are critical for clients looking to implement generative AI, and IBM is already providing mutual clients with access to professionals from IBM Consulting’s Center of Excellence for Generative AI with specialized generative AI expertise.
With today’s news, IBM Consulting plans to train and skill 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services by end of 2024. They will have access to an exclusive, partner-only program that provides training on the top use cases and best practices for client engagement with AWS generative AI services. This will help advance their knowledge, allow them to engage with technical professionals and better serve clients innovating on AWS.
“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 Manish Goyal, Senior Partner, Global AI & Analytics Leader at IBM Consulting. “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.”
IBM is also responding to client demand for generative AI capabilities on AWS by making watsonx.data, 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– which clients can also access in AWS Marketplace. The company also plans to make watsonx.ai and watsonx.governance available on AWS by 2024. This builds on previous commitments made by the two companies to make it easier for clients to consume 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 implement a generative AI strategy that drives business value from their entire cloud value chain,” said Chris Niederman, Managing Director, Global Systems Integrators at AWS. “We are excited to be working with IBM to include embedded generative AI capabilities that assist our mutual customers scale their applications – and help IBM consultants deepen their expertise on best practices for customer engagement with AWS generative AI services.”
