At the beginning of the year, I shared my belief that successful AI adoption depends on making AI easy to use within the processes and tools employees rely on every day. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we’re continuing to equip IBM consultants with the best software and tools across every platform to maximize productivity—now strengthened by the combined capabilities of IBM and Microsoft.

Our collaboration with Microsoft enables IBM consultants to access our AI-delivery platform IBM Consulting Advantage from within Microsoft 365 apps—including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Outlook—providing them with direct access to IBM’s deep repository of AI assistants, assets, and applications all within their everyday Microsoft tools. With Copilot as the interface, consultants can more easily navigate tasks, streamline workflows, and save time while delivering projects on behalf of clients.

This integration of IBM Consulting Advantage with Microsoft Copilot is already being used by thousands of IBM consultants, generating the equivalent of more than 250,000 hours saved annually—an estimated $35 million in new value because our consultants are able to use that time on other revenue-generating tasks. In fact, one example saw consultants complete four information gathering tasks with the agents in just 13 minutes, compared to nearly three hours, without compromising quality.

Through Copilot, our team can access IBM Consulting Advantage agents including:

• Assets Agent: identifies IBM AI-powered tools and assistants to help deliver high-value work to clients.
• IBM Institute for Business Value Agent: provides industry data and insights from IBM’s research library.
• Ask Offerings Agent: delivers insights on IBM offerings such as AI Integration Services and Customer Service Transformation, to accelerate deployment and boost productivity.
• Partnerships Agent: provides C-suite ready insights and visuals on strategic industry collaborations that showcase IBM’s value in key sectors like AI and digital transformation.
• Ask WOW Stories Agent: retrieves top client stories illustrating IBM’s offerings and partnerships to apply AI at scale in collaboration with IBM Consulting.

And we continue to innovate. We plan to launch a custom agent that leverages ContextForge and IBM’s Consulting Advantage Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to automatically select the right assistant, agent or document collection for the consultant’s task at hand, helping our consultants access and find the right tools they need with trust and governance.

This work builds on our long-standing strategic alliance with Microsoft, focused on helping clients accelerate their digital transformations by combining IBM Consulting’s industry-specific capabilities with Microsoft’s cloud and AI platforms. Through IBM Consulting’s dedicated Microsoft practice, with thousands of certified consultants worldwide, we provide deep industry expertise and advanced technical skills to design, deploy, and manage secure, cloud-based solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.

Together, we’re empowering IBM consultants to combine human expertise with advanced digital workers to scale AI confidently and responsibly on behalf of clients.

IBM Consulting Advantage is a multi-model multi-framework AI platform. It encapsulates IBM's enterprise knowledge and skills as AI assistants, agents, and applications. Now, our consultants and clients can leverage this enterprise knowledge easily through Microsoft Co-pilot.