IBM is adopting AI ‘because consulting is a profession that thrives on knowledge’

Artificial intelligence (AI) was the term of everyone’s lips in 2023.

However, organizations are only at the beginning of the journey to figure out how this technology can transform their businesses for the better.

Research from Alix Partners found that AI – and particularly the newest iteration, generative AI, best exemplified by OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool – is going to be the biggest disruptor in 2024.

This means that for CEOs AI preoccupies them more than ongoing economic challenges, continued geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and worries about climate change.

It’s clear this is an “existential moment”, where organizations have to decide it they are going to embrace AI, or run away in fear of the unknown.

For IBM Consulting’s global managing partner of assets, offerings and industries, Luq Niazi, there is no question that the tech giant would meet this challenge to transform its businesses and workplace.

“Business leaders who are not adopting AI risk falling behind,” Niazi shares exclusively with UNLEASH.

IBM is listening to its own research – three in four CEOs surveyed by IBM believe that generative AI brings a competitive advantage – and, as a result, the employer is meeting the challenge by leveraging AI to empower employees, and “augment their skills to better serve clients”.

AI and ‘the future of consultancy’

While AI is top of mind for IBM as a business and an employer, one business segment that is a particular focus for the tech giant right now is consulting.

Of course, consultancy is a huge part of IBM’s business – the tech giant’s revenue was $60.5 billion in 2022, with more than 70% of this coming from software and consulting.

Consulting makes up more than half of IBM’s workforce with 160,000 professionals working in this business segment. Consulting revenues were up 15% in 2022, while software revenues grew 12% over the same period.

But Niazi explains: “IBM consulting is one of the key places we’re applying AI because consulting is a profession that thrives on knowledge, and AI can bring collective knowledge of organizations to consultants’ fingertips.”

He continues: “AI represents the most fundamental shift in consulting that we’ve seen in decades.”

Luq Niazi, global managing partner of assets, offerings and industries, IBM Consulting.

Another beauty of AI and consulting is it enables IBM to serve its clients even better; “with AI, we have the opportunity to show and tell at the same time.”

“We are not only guiding clients around the use of new technologies, but we are also using them to transform ourselves.”

All of this explains why IBM has announced the internal roll out of a platform called IBM Consulting Advantage: “We see it as the future of consultancy,” declares Niazi.

IBM’s roll out only started last month – and it’ll be phased and ramp up over the course of 2024 – but “it’s exciting to see the traction so far”, shares Niazi.

Niazi couldn’t share the numbers who are leveraging IBM Consulting Advantage so far, but early adopters of IBM Consulting Advantage saw their productivity jump up to 50% – and they are passing these benefits onto clients.

‘Just the tip of the iceberg’ for AI at IBM

Those are impressive productivity gains – so, UNLEASH was keen to find out more about the secret to success, and precisely what IBM Consulting Advantage is.

In a nutshell, IBM Consulting Advantage it provides a “portfolio of methods, assets and assistants” that, once fully rolled out, will support the company’s 160,000 consultants in their day-to-day work.

“You can think about it as a workbench” – it is “designed so consultants can use whichever AI assets or models are best for the client and task at hand, whether the tech is from IBM” or a strategic partner, like Microsoft, AWS or Meta.

Ultimately, Niazi explains that IBM believes that “more collaboration and information sharing will help the industry innovate faster and more inclusively.”

A core part of this new approach is IBM Consulting Assistants, which are powered by IBM’s very own watsonx’s generative AI platform.

Niazi explains: “The Assistants are designed to help consultants with key consulting tasks.”

They can also be trained on proprietary IBM data (with appropriate guardrails and security) so they are “tailored to whatever task or challenge [the consultants] have at hand”.

IBM’s Garage tool comes into play here.

For instance, these Assistants can help with building business cases, or code generation and conversion thereby “bringing the expertise of the most seasoned engineers to the fingertips of junior coders”.

In this respect, IBM Consulting Advantage is a “grassroots platform for innovation”.

However, Niazi is clear that IBM Consulting Advantage’s current capabilities are “just the tip of iceberg” for AI at the tech giant.

“We fully intend to continue expanding the use of AI to help consultants in the long-term” and continue to support employees to deliver “with consistency, repeatability and greater productivity”.

I think the future of consulting is a true human-technology partnership, asset-based and AI-powered,” notes Niazi.

Watch this space!

Being responsible with AI at IBM

The conversation about AI in 2023 was all about experimenting with these new tools, often without company oversight.

But, as the dangers of these technologies become clearer – OpenAI’s own CEO Sam Altman has called for regulation and oversight – businesses are transitioning to thinking more about real uses, and how to use AI at work in a responsible, trustworthy manner.

There is also work for employers to do to alleviate ongoing worker worries about AI stealing their jobs.

UNLEASH was keen to find out how IBM is navigating these complexities for its 160,000 consultants, plus the other 120,000 employees sitting in other parts of the business. IBM is also rolling out AI for its HR and IT workers globally.

Niazi explains: “IBM has a heritage of trust, transparency and ethics in technology” – and AI is no different.

The tech giant has five pillars for AI ethics: explainability, fairness, robustness, transparency and privacy, and these underpinned IBM Consulting Advantage.

“From the beginning we considered potential issues like the outputs of models including copyrighted or sensitive data,” notes Niazi.

“As a result, our IBM Consulting Assistants have guardrails to alert users if personal identifiable information appears in prompts, and an option to check for bias in the AI’s outputs.”

Plus, the Assistants can be configured for the specific use, and limited at individual or team level  -this means “they can be set up with private instances of generative AI models that do not store data, or use it for training the models”.

On the job stealing point, Niazi believes “a lot of the general conversation around AI and automation replacing jobs has been misplaced”.

“The reality is that most jobs are going to change as we uncover new use cases for AI” and “the bottom line is AI won’t replace people, but people who use AI will replace who don’t.”

This mirrors the stance of Indeed’s chief economist Svenja Gudell in a recent UNLEASH interview.

As IBM has proven, “employees using AI can be more productive and deliver more value in the same amount of time”.

Upskilling and reskilling are necessary to ensure “employees are ready to work with AI creatively and responsibly”, according to Niazi.

For IBM Consulting, “we’re continually focused on aligning our consultant’s skills to our clients’ needs and the market demand today and in the future” – this is around generative AI, but also other in-demand skills.

This is part of a long-term commitment at IBM to create a culture where skills development and a growth mindset are top of mind.

There will always be some folks who are concerned about the future, but I take the optimistic view that generative AI is a positive opportunity for our profession,” concludes Niazi.

“Those that embrace it will have more time to do what they are most passionate about.”