Dive Brief:
- IBM and Microsoft deepened their collaboration around generative AI, deploying a large language model managed service in Azure Marketplace, the companies announced Thursday.
- The IBM Consulting Azure OpenAI Service gives developers and data scientists access to generative AI tools, including GPT and Codex, and provides organizations with a suite of pre-built enterprise use cases for the technology.
- The partnership advances IBM’s multi-model open-ecosystem approach to the technology, providing customers with multiple AI solutions across various hyperscaler platforms, as well as through watsonx, the enterprise AI and data studio deployed last month.
Dive Insight:
The new generative AI service is the latest in a series of collaborations between Microsoft and IBM. The two companies jointly deployed IBM’s Z and Cloud Modernization Stack on Azure Marketplace in June after launching a hybrid-cloud partnership in December around mainframe app modernization.
Expanding the scope of the partnership to generative AI has already produced enterprise-grade solutions, including a procurement and source-to-pay platform, according to the Thursday announcement. Designed to automate manual sourcing and generate supply chain insights, the solution leverages Microsoft Power Platform and Azure OpenAI.
IBM Consulting leaned on Azure generative AI capabilities to create a healthcare solution that provides nurses and physicians with a virtual assistant tool, the announcement said. The healthcare application ingests medical records and insurer policy documents to automate authorization processes.
Microsoft announced an electronic medical records cloud solution in partnership with Epic last week and is working with the EHR provider to ease patient data retrieval using generative AI.
“Businesses are looking for responsible ways to adopt and integrate multi-model generative AI solutions that augment the work their teams are doing in areas such as creative content and code creation, content summarization and search,” Francesco Brenna, global VP and senior partner, Microsoft Practice at IBM Consulting, said in Thursday’s announcement.
Another solution the two companies are looking to scale is a summarization tool for financial services and banking.
In a recent hackathon with wealth management firm Julius Baer Group, teams from Microsoft and IBM tested a generative AI application that, in addition to processing and summarizing financial documents, creates an audio file of the report.
