IBM is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to help joint clients accelerate the deployment of generative AI—while also delivering a new offering that will provide clients with the expertise and technology they need to innovate their business processes and scale generative AI effectively.
IBM Consulting, in collaboration with Microsoft, will focus on helping clients to implement and scale Azure OpenAI Service. The new IBM Consulting Azure OpenAI Service offering, which is available on Azure Marketplace, is a fully managed AI service that allows developers and data scientists to apply powerful large language models, including their GPT and Codex series. It aims to help businesses define an adoption strategy and an initial set of specific and value-add generative AI use cases, according to IBM.
In addition to the new offering, IBM and Microsoft have been collaborating around AI, leveraging IBM Consulting skills and Azure OpenAI Service to create potential solutions and address specific use cases, including:
- Procurement and source to pay: Together the companies are offering a solution that combines Microsoft Power Platform and Azure OpenAI Service to help businesses automate the highly manual and fragmented sourcing and procurement process as well as drive new insights about their supply chain. The solution is designed to improve operational efficiency, save time, and generate new actionable insights for users.
- Summarization and content generation: Financial institutions and banks are exploring how generative AI can accelerate the development of personalized content for their customers through summarization.
- Streamline healthcare processes: IBM Consulting is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to offer a solution that is designed to automatically ingest and analyze complex medical records and policy documents to help automate the prior authorization process. In addition, it is built to provide nurses and doctors with a virtual assistant to help collect information from patient records. The solution aims to help decrease the time needed to process prior authorization requests, reducing administrative burdens and improving the clinician experience.
- Enterprise search and knowledge base: For many organizations the information employees need to do their jobs is dispersed and siloed. Working together, IBM Consulting and Microsoft helped Wintershall Dea implement a knowledge extraction tool designed for information retrieval within vast knowledge bases. By integrating OCR and Microsoft Azure OpenAI, a user-friendly tool is created that eliminates the need for manual browsing, allowing users to effortlessly search for valuable insights.
"Businesses are looking for responsible ways to adopt and integrate multi-model generative AI solutions that augment the work their teams are doing in areas such as creative content and code creation, content summarization and search," said Francesco Brenna, global VP and senior partner, Microsoft Practice at IBM Consulting. "Our work with Microsoft is another example of IBM's open ecosystem model designed to bring value to clients while helping them responsibly build and scale generative AI across their businesses."
As part of the new solution, enterprise customers will also have access to IBM Consulting experts, including 21,000 data, AI and experience consultants, who can help them effectively implement generative AI models to advance their business transformation.
"Together, Microsoft and IBM are collaborating to deliver innovative solutions, that will help customers responsibly accelerate deployment of generative AI," said Dinis Couto, GM global partner solutions, Microsoft. "As a leader in the delivery of generative AI and data solutions, we believe that partners like IBM are critical to enabling customers successful use of generative AI to advance business transformation."
For more information about this news, visit www.ibm.com.