IBM Consulting, IBM’s professional services branch, and Amazon Web Services have added new generative AI solutions to three services for contact centers and the supply chain, the companies announced on Oct. 18.
The purpose of the expanded relationship between IBM Consulting and AWS is “to help more mutual clients operationalize and derive value from generative artificial intelligence,” IBM Consulting stated in a press release. In addition, IBM Consulting intends to provide exclusive training to 10,000 consultants and host the watsonx.data storage solution as software-as-a-service on AWS.
Jump to:
- Generative AI for summarization, IT Ops and more comes to contact center and supply chain services
- Competitors to Amazon Connect and AWS supply chain
- IBM plans to train 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services
- Watsonx.data added to AWS
Generative AI for summarization, IT Ops and more comes to AWS contact center and supply chain services
Joint IBM Consulting and AWS services that have been enhanced with generative AI capabilities include:
- Contact Center Modernization with Amazon Connect.
- Platform Services on AWS.
- Supply Chain Ensemble on AWS.
SEE: AWS committed $100 million to a Generative AI Innovation Center in June 2023. (TechRepublic)
Contact Center Modernization with Amazon Connect provides generative AI, which can summarize and categorize voice or text interactions. These functions are designed to enable hand-offs between a chatbot and a live agent; the agent will receive summarized details of the customer interaction to speed up resolution times. For details on pricing and international availability, go to this AWS page for Amazon Connect.
Platform Services, which AWS introduced in November 2022, will now include generative AI for IT Ops, automation and platform engineering. The generative AI applies to observability techniques and intelligent issue resolution.
Lastly, Supply Chain Ensemble on AWS will introduce a virtual assistant for supply chain professionals. It is designed to optimize inventories, reduce costs, streamline logistics and assess risks.
Pricing for AWS depends on which services are included. A price calculator can be found here.
All of the above offerings are available throughout AWS’s Availability Zones.
IBM Consulting plans to add generative AI for coding and reverse engineering to the IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator. This accelerator is available globally.
Competitors to Amazon Connect and AWS supply chain
Competitors to AWS’s supply chain services include Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, SAP Supply Chain Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM.
Competitors to Amazon Connect for contact center services include Talkdesk, Twilio Flex and Webex Contact Center.
IBM plans to train 10,000 consultants on AWS generative AI services
IBM Consulting plans to give its partners training on AWS generative AI services, including top use cases and best practices for client engagement. The end result, IBM proposes, will be 10,000 consultants trained and skilled in generative AI by 2024.
“Enterprise clients are looking for expert help [consultants] 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 and analytics leader at IBM Consulting, in a press release.
“In talking with clients daily, we’re seeing major demand from enterprises to help think through how they can best drive value using generative AI both rapidly and responsibly,” Goyal said in an email to TechRepublic.
“We know this is critical to build strategies that are informed, enhancing our ability to review end to end workflows and find opportunities where generative AI automation might be able to complement traditional AI for innovation, to cite one example,” Goyal said.
Watsonx.data added to AWS
Watsonx.data, a data storage platform, is now available on AWS as a fully-managed SaaS solution accessible through AWS Marketplace. This is one of the results of a 2022 agreement between AWS and IBM to more closely link their services.
Watsonx.ai, a platform for training generative AI models, and watsonx.governance, which assists with AI governance, are expected to follow watsonx.data by 2024.
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