Today we are introducing our new AI Integration Services to help clients transform end-to-end business processes with agentic AI on their preferred AI and cloud platform.

Business leaders are excited about the potential of agentic AI because it can assess situations, gather and process data to problem-solve, autonomously execute tasks and learn from interactions, with minimal human input. This can be key to surpass incremental productivity gains to achieve real performance and value, yet there are still some major hurdles in the way.

Many early AI experiments focused on simple productivity tasks or bolting AI onto outdated business processes, which yield only marginal improvements. Often organizations are working with data that is fragmented, poor quality or outdated. Most organizations have legacy IT systems with disparate applications and complex integrations, which makes it harder to pull data from where it’s needed to support new AI-powered processes. Lastly, there’s a need for broad workforce re-skilling so employees understand and can apply AI in their daily work.

In the face of all those obstacles, AI agents alone are not enough. We believe enterprises need to take a comprehensive approach to re-engineering entire business processes, dramatically changing both user experience and the orchestrated system of AI assistants, agents and data that supports it.

We like to call this reimagined business process an “agentic app.” It has three layers:

• Persona-based user experience: enhance the everyday tools of employees with a new user experience, integrating AI assistants tailored to specific user personas
• Multi-agent orchestration: an orchestration layer powered by multiple AI agents that work together to transform how workflows are executed, monitored, and controlled, incorporating robust AI governance
• Optimized data management: data products that enable data that is organized, prepped for consumption, and readily available in real-time from distributed enterprise systems

To enable and support agentic apps, leaders also need to up-skill their teams and execute change management programs to encourage employee adoption, establish rigorous organizational governance and more.

Introducing AI Integration Services

IBM Consulting’s new AI Integration Services bring together key capabilities plus IBM’s open ecosystem of partners to help clients transform end-to-end business processes into agentic apps and help drive ROI from AI. There are three key components:

Deep expertise in scaling AI: Our consultants have deep technology, business domain and industry expertise, built upon experience helping clients scale AI with appropriate governance guardrails as well as building and implementing agentic solutions to transform business operations. More than 75,000 IBM consultants have earned generative AI certifications in IBM and strategic partner technology since 2023, and we’ve earned 135,000 industry credentials in sectors like banking and financial services, telecommunications, public sector and more.

Generative AI-powered technology solutions: We are also bringing capabilities in IBM Consulting Advantage, our first-of-its-kind AI-powered delivery platform that is designed to supercharge our consulting expertise. The new IBM Consulting Agents Catalyst technology solution enables IBM consultants and clients with a low code/no-code approach to design, build and deploy agentic apps to transform complex enterprise workflows on their preferred cloud platform. Using the foundational capabilities of IBM Consulting Advantage with this new solution, IBM consultants can accelerate the development of agentic apps using technology from IBM, Microsoft and AWS.

Library of pre-built Agentic Apps templates: A suite of pre-built templates for specific business domain and industry processes. The templates combine persona-based user experiences with AI assistants; a range of custom AI agents or pre-built agents from IBM and strategic partners like Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow that automate workflows; and are underpinned by operational and analytical data. With these pre-built templates, IBM consultants can give clients a jump start with transforming an end-to-end workflow like source to pay, customer service, supply chain or industry specific processes like banking operations and life sciences regulatory processes.

Helping clients transform core business processes with AI agents

IBM Consulting is already working with enterprises across industries to build and implement agentic solutions to transform their business operations. 

For one global life sciences company, that work has been aimed at transforming a critical end-to-end process to bring products to market faster. They worked with IBM Consulting to apply generative AI and agentic AI to accelerate a key element of that process – content generation for regulatory submissions. Their industry-pioneering, GxP-validated solution brings together a series of agents in a workflow to generate a first draft of technical documentation that's fact-based and traceable to clinical sources which human experts can review and finalize.

Clients like these rely on IBM to keep pace and foresee where AI innovations are headed next, while having the expertise they need right now to get business value from AI agents and their existing technology investments.