NEWS

Co-workers in a meeting

IBM Introduces IBM consulting advantage

IBM Consulting is rolling out IBM Consulting Advantage, an AI services platform designed to support IBM consultants in delivering consistency, repeatability and speed for clients.

It includes a portfolio of proprietary methods, assets and Assistants that leverage technology from IBM and strategic partners. When using aspects of IBM Consulting Advantage in an application design, development and testing client pilot, early adopter teams saw productivity improvements of up to 50%.

Core to the platform is a library of role-based IBM Consulting Assistants to support the company’s teams in their day-to-day tasks. This includes assistants trained on IBM proprietary data and composed of tailored prompts, models and output formats to put the collective knowledge of IBM and the wider industry at the fingertips of 160,000 IBM consultants. Employees can use strategy assistants to support use case prioritization and business case development, business analyst assistants to support creating personas for user-centric design, or developer assistants to support code generation and conversion.

IBM Consulting Assistants are accessed through an intuitive conversational interface powered by IBM watsonx, IBM’s AI and data platform. Consultants can toggle across multiple IBM and third-party generative AI models to compare outputs and select the right model for their task, and use the platform to rapidly build and share prompts and pre-trained assistants across teams or more widely across the consulting organization. The interface also enables easy uploading of project-specific documents for rapid insights that can then be shared into common business tools.

“Generative AI is driving the most fundamental shift in the consulting model in decades, motivating us to rapidly innovate how we serve clients,” said Mohamad Ali, COO, IBM Consulting. “The IBM Consulting Advantage platform lets us harness more of our intellectual property, including an array of AI assistants, in our client engagements. This allows our consultants to be even more creative and productive as they use the platform to deliver greater value faster to thousands of our clients.”

IBM Consulting Advantage has embedded capabilities for data security and privacy, including the ability to create spaces configured for and limited to a project team. IBM Consulting Assistants can be set up with private instances of generative AI models that do not store data or use it for training the models. They can also alert users if personal identifiable information (PII) appears in prompts. In addition, the Assistants have integrated AI guardrails to help mitigate bias and enable auditable use, such as the ability for a consultant to ask one of the Assistants a question and select an option to check for bias in the answer.