Bringing the power of watsonx to our clients with IBM Consulting – IBM Blog

In our hundreds of generative AI engagements with clients around the world, enterprises are trying to balance massive value creation with risk mitigation—and they face a shortage of the necessary “AI for business” skills. Half of CEOs report they are already integrating generative AI into products and services, and 43% say they are using generative AI to inform strategic decisions, according to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) CEO study. Yet more than half of CEOs are concerned about the security of data, and 48% worry about bias or data accuracy.

Business leaders are seeking a trusted partner who:

• Understands the particular needs of the enterprise, with hands-on experience helping clients across industries scale AI and deliver real business value
• Can deliver any AI model, on any cloud, anywhere—and brings a strong point of view about which platform, model and deployment option is best suited for their needs
• Takes a human-centric, principled approach—with clients and internally—putting principles for trust and transparency at the heart of everything

Our clients also recognize the value of consultants with the inside track on IBM watsonx, the enterprise-ready AI and data platform built to enable enterprises to scale and accelerate the impact of the most advanced AI with trusted data. While watsonx started rolling out in July, it has already transformed the fan experience for IBM clients including the Masters and Wimbledon.

IBM Consulting’s watsonx practice brings expertise in the generative AI technology stack, as well as domain and industry experience that can help accelerate clients’ business transformations. In the same way that we established our successful Hybrid Cloud services business built on the Red Hat® OpenShift® platform, IBM Consulting intends to be the leading consulting services provider for watsonx.

Solving business problems with watsonx

IBM has identified three of the most high-impact use cases for generative AI that really matter for business in this moment—talent, customer service and application modernization—and we’re already at work helping clients get results with watsonx.

AI for HR and talent

HR leaders are facing enormous challenges, from the global skills gap to labor shortages to evolving employee expectations of their employers. They’re seeing the potential of AI to help dramatically across the HR lifecycle—recruiting, retaining and developing the skills and talent every organization needs to effectively compete in the new AI era. 41% of executives report their organization is already using generative AI in HR, according to recent IBM IBV research*.  

IBM Consulting brings together deep HR, industry and technology expertise with our AI for business solutions, Watson Orchestrate and watsonx, and an open ecosystem of partners. Watson Orchestrate can help automate and enhance the acquisition lifecycle from a single user interface that integrates with applications across our partner ecosystem. Watsonx amplifies the impact of AI throughout HR workflows, while ensuring responsible AI use to meet the highest ethical, privacy and regulatory requirements. And IBM is already applying this approach internally with IBM HR.

AI for customer service

The business leaders who manage sales, customer service and marketing need to meet increasingly high customer expectations for personalized and engaging experiences. Many leaders are starting to recognize that everywhere you have AI, you should combine it with an amazing experience—and everywhere you have experiences, you need to power and personalize them with AI. A recent study by Stanford and MIT Sloane found that access to AI increased customer service agent productivity, particularly among agents with the least experience and skills.

IBM Consulting specializes in end-to-end service transformations for customer and field service operations. Leveraging watsonx.ai, we train and fine-tune foundation models using company and customer-specific data, providing AI-driven insights for timely customer engagement and guided advice. With Watson Assistant, Watson Orchestrate, and Discovery, organizations can efficiently handle customer queries, integrate with call center technology, and adapt to preferred platforms. A 2023 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study, commissioned by IBM, showed an ROI of 370% over three years with IBM Watson Assistant. IBM Consulting is already at work with clients such as Bouygues Telecom, which has been working with IBM Consulting to transform its call center operations with enterprise-ready generative AI capabilities.

AI for application modernization

CIOs and CTOs are looking across an incredibly complex IT landscape, with technical debt and aging applications, siloed skills, high cost of cloud adoption, security concerns and more. Our clients are keen to tap AI to build or refactor applications, cope with skills gaps and reduce mundane, tedious tasks so staff members and teams can work more efficiently. AI can help address these challenges, improve productivity and scale quickly with decreased costs via code conversion, code generation, transformation planning and knowledge management.

IBM Consulting has a history of co-creating hybrid cloud strategies, fueling a deep understanding of how to modernize applications on hybrid cloud, manage hybrid cloud journeys with reduced risk and predictable outcomes, and operate IT autonomously with the help of AI. With the Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant offering, business leaders can drive the adoption of consistent and accurate generative-AI-driven IT automation throughout their organization. Using the IBM watsonx.ai foundation models, Watson Code Assistant will boost developer efficiency by suggesting code based on natural language input, simplifying the development of hybrid cloud code for IT professionals and enabling those experienced in writing automation code to work even more efficiently.

IBM Consulting is proud to be the only consulting organization at scale inside a technology company, at a time when technology is key for all transformations. Our team is backed by the technical depth and cutting edge capabilities of IBM Software and IBM Research. We’re honored to help our clients seize this exciting moment and bring the full power of IBM’s enterprise-ready watsonx technology to bear on our clients’ most pressing business challenges.

Learn more about IBM Consulting and watsonx

* IBM Institute for Business Value 2023 pulse survey of 100 CIOs and CTOs, unpublished data