The News: IBM Consulting and Salesforce announced in late August a collaboration designed to assist enterprises accelerate their adoption of AI that can be incorporated within their customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. The companies will work together to support shared clients to accelerate business transformations with generative AI, while ensuring their data is properly safeguarded.
The collaboration leverages IBM Consulting’s deep business transformation and AI experience across vertical markets, and, where appropriate, will also incorporate IBM watsonx, its enterprise-ready AI and data platform that embraces open standards. You can read a press release containing details of the partnership on the IBM website.
IBM, Salesforce Collaborate to Accelerate Generative AI Adoption
Analyst Take: IBM Consulting and Salesforce announced they are joining forces to help organizations accelerate their adoption of generative AI across Salesforce’s product platform, including Einstein, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Slack. According to the announcement, IBM Consulting will leverage its industry expertise and innovative delivery models, including its IBM Garage business transformation methodology, to help guide clients through the adoption and deployment of Salesforce’s AI technologies.
Offering Access to IBM’s Transformation, Domain, and AI Knowledge and Experience
Driving adoption of AI technology, IBM Consulting will use its industry expertise and innovative delivery models, including its IBM Garage methodology, an operating model for business transformation, to guide clients through the adoption and deployment of Salesforce AI technologies. This approach is designed to help drive efficient integration across Salesforce’s AI technologies, including Einstein, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Slack.
Further, through IBM Consulting Managed Services for Salesforce, these shared clients will gain access to a suite of AI experience and implementation accelerators, such as IBM Data Classifier, an AI-powered application trained on industry-specific data models, which helps to reduce the data mapping process. Further, IBM Consulting can complement those solutions with IBM watsonx, an enterprise-ready AI and data platform that embraces open standards. IBM watsonx can be used to reveal the data locked in backend systems to help create dynamic user and employee experiences.
Many of the reasons that AI transformation projects fail are due to organizations charging ahead to deploy generative AI without considering the data that is being utilized, its current state, and whether it is truly accessible. Deploying teams that have experience conducting this initial due diligence can improve the odds for success, while improving project efficiency and time-to-value.
Offering AI Partner Ecosystem Access
IBM Consulting also works closely with a diverse AI partner ecosystem through an open and collaborative approach to plan, build, implement, and operate generative AI solutions that embrace multiple models on multiple clouds from industry leaders. This open ecosystem approach helps clients define the right models and the right architecture to help deliver their desired outcomes, and likely will be a valuable resource for customers seeking to deploy models that balance capability against data security, privacy, and accuracy concerns.
In addition, earlier in 2023, IBM Consulting announced its Center of Excellence for Generative AI, which has more than 1,000 consultants with specialized generative AI expertise ready to help accelerate its clients’ business transformations with enterprise-grade AI, including technology from Salesforce, IBM, and other partners through a collaborative and open ecosystem approach.
This open ecosystem approach helps clients define the right models and the right architecture to help deliver their desired outcomes and should benefit Salesforce customers seeking to develop novel use cases across various sales, marketing, commerce, and other back-end use cases.
IBM Partnership Is a Big Win for Salesforce Customers
This is a win for Salesforce and its customers. IBM has demonstrated that it is taking a responsible approach to generative AI, having laid out its vision for automating model management and audit trails, as well as for automating workflows to better detect fairness, bias, and drift within the models it uses. Working with an organization that addresses these issues head-on will be a must for enterprises that increasingly will face questions from customers, partners, and activists on how they are using AI.
The addition of the Center of Excellence, combined with IBM Consulting’s existing global AI and Automation practice – which has 21,000 data and AI consultants – will provide customers with an unparalleled network of expertise and experience. Notably, IBM itself leveraged generative AI through Salesforce, Slack, and IBM watsonx for its own transformation journey to create a 360-degree customer experience. This experience will also help reassure customers that the two organizations truly understand the challenges and innovative thinking that will be required to undertake an AI transformation, while being mindful of data privacy, data security, and trust issues.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
