Today IBM announced a significant expansion of capabilities in IBM Consulting Advantage, our first-of-its-kind AI-powered delivery platform leveraging IBM and strategic partner technologies that is designed to supercharge our consulting expertise. It has leading-edge software assets and methods that include agents and applications to deliver solutions at scale and accelerate time to value for clients.

IBM has made the newly released Granite 3.0 large language models the default for IBM Consulting Advantage. IBM’s third-generation Granite flagship language models can outperform or match similarly sized models from leading model providers on many academic and industry benchmarks, showcasing strong performance, transparency and safety scores. 

This means IBM’s 160,000 consultants around the world can easily put Granite to work in client use cases from customer service to IT modernization, helping maximize clients’ return-on-investment for AI. 

With our ongoing innovation on IBM Consulting Advantage, we are positioning IBM Consulting to be at the forefront of the consulting industry. 86% of surveyed consulting buyers report they’re looking for services that incorporate AI and technology assets, according to a new study¹ from the IBM Institute for Business Value. While buyers expect consultants to use AI to help them reimagine what’s possible, they also want AI to help them get more for their money.

According to David Cushman, Executive Research Leader, HFS Research, “With IBM Consulting Advantage, IBM is applying AI to make its consultants faster and more efficient while also delivering better results for clients at lower cost. They're at the leading-edge of the industry, building the future in which human expertise combines with AI-powered software to radically change how consultants support clients' business transformations.”

The platform expansion also includes domain capabilities: 

IBM Consulting Advantage for Cloud Transformation and IBM Consulting Advantage for Cloud Management:  To help clients define and execute cloud strategies that align with business objectives and help them derive tangible value from their cloud investments, IBM has introduced IBM Consulting Advantage for Cloud Transformation and Management. They include domain-specific AI agents, applications and methods that reflect IBM’s best practices from thousands of successful client hybrid cloud projects. These help IBM consultants accelerate and minimize risk in clients' cloud transformations and are focused on areas such as mainframe application modernization, product engineering, migration from legacy to modern platforms, quality engineering and development of industry specific solutions.

IBM Consulting Advantage for Business Operations: Enterprises are looking for a partner to help them reinvent their business operations with AI in areas like HR, finance and procurement and execute that transformation to enable growth. With IBM Consulting Advantage for Business Operations, our consultants can apply their deep technology, domain and industry expertise along with a portfolio of AI agents, applications and methods designed to help clients quickly and effectively transform and execute their business operations. This helps clients to radically simplify their ways of working; connect siloed processes, systems and data; elevate their employees’ skills and improve user experience. We are already using these capabilities for select clients and expect to have 50 clients onboarded by the end of 2024.

For example, at one global retail client, an IBM Consulting delivery team using IBM Consulting Advantage for finance process execution has seen a 60% reduction in invoice entry cycle time. 

IBM Consulting Advantage agents are accessed through an intuitive conversational interface powered by IBM watsonx, IBM's AI and data platform, in which consultants can toggle across IBM Granite and third-party generative AI models to compare outputs and select the right model for their task. 

We believe the future of consulting is people plus software, and the future of IBM Consulting is our consultants plus IBM Consulting Advantage. We’re making IBM Consulting Advantage the best workbench in the industry, supported by state-of-the-art generative AI models like the third generation of IBM Granite and other technology from IBM and strategic partners. It is designed to help our consultants deliver exceptional experiences and business outcomes for our clients – all grounded in our values around open innovation, trust and strong governance.

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

Client examples presented are illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.

1. Consulting Reimagined, Powered by AI” Study, October 2024, page 4. In cooperation with Oxford Economics, the IBM Institute for Business Value surveyed 400 C-level executives across 14 industries and 6 countries. Download the full report at https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/consulting-ai