IBM Consulting is looking to be the industry's trusted source on hyperscale cloud provider Amazon Web Services' (AWS) generative artificial intelligence (genAI) services, with plans to train 10,000 consultants on AWS genAI by the end of next year.  The two companies are also extending their partnership to offer joint services with genAI upgrades designed for critical use cases.

The IBM Consulting and AWS partnership dates back six years, and global enterprises continue approaching these two vendors because they understand how complex it can be to integrate emerging technologies into their business. "Our clients rely on us to understand the technology we are advising them on and, to put it simply, the demand we’re seeing is massive, and the opportunities are ripe," Becky Carroll, IBM Consulting global AWS strategic partnership leader, told SDxCentral.

"Our joint team has a strong rapport that accelerates success for our clients, and we’re committed to meeting the demand from clients by bringing both our expertise and technology to the table," she added.

Since IBM clients look to the firm as trusted advisors, "a deep understanding of AWS capabilities is critical here," and the newly trained consultants will complement IBM's existing 22,000 AWS certifications and Center of Excellence for Generative AI, "which includes expertise spanning across Watsonx and other genAI technologies," Carroll said.

The new joint offerings are centered around helping clients quickly integrate genAI with business and IT operations while building on AWS. The first is a genAI-powered contact center tool that summarizes and categorizes voice and digital interactions to accelerate resolution times and improve quality management.

IBM Consulting also updated its Platform Services on AWS with genAI to improve cloud value chain management across IT operations, automation and platform engineering. The updates are aimed at improving serviceability and availability for applications hosted on AWS.

The two companies also teased a new virtual assistant that promises to accelerate supply chain professionals' productivity in terms of delivering on customer expectations, lowering costs and assessing supply chain risks.

Plus, IBM Consulting is integrating AWS genAI services into its IBM Consulting Cloud Accelerator in a move to "help clients accelerate their modernization or migration journeys to the cloud," Carroll said.

In a similar vein, IBM also launched its "fit-for-purpose" data store Watsonx.data, which is available as a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering on AWS. IBM's target Watsonx.data customers are enterprises with hybrid cloud environments that want to use existing technology, vendor-agnostic data formats and a unified governance structure. "We are seeing banking and insurance as standout use cases," Carroll said.

"A major benefit we see to making Watsonx.data available as a service in AWS Marketplace is our ability to address these client needs around hybrid cloud. With AWS, we can jointly provide clients the technology and expertise to maximize their AWS cloud investments, helping them build the best strategies for genAI capabilities with AWS," she said.

"We are excited to be working with IBM to include embedded genAI capabilities that assist our mutual customers with scaling their applications – and help IBM consultants deepen their expertise on best practices for customer engagement with AWS genAI services," said Chris Niederman, AWS managing director of global systems integrators.