Dive Brief:
- Salesforce will integrate IBM’s watsonx large language model platform and Granite family of open-source LLMs into its Einstein 1 CRM solution, the two companies announced Tuesday.
- IBM is also building industry-specific AI prompt templates and copilots for the Einstein 1 Studio developer platform and the Einstein Copilot natural-language assistant, the companies said. Salesforce expects the tools and integrations to be deployed by early next year.
- The partnership helps cement a bring-your-own-LLM strategy as technology vendors race to create AI marketplaces stocked with a variety of models and tool-building capabilities.
Dive Insight:
The Salesforce integration represents just one front in IBM’s push to deploy the Granite family of open-source LLMs and watsonx platform in multiple clouds and ecosystems.
The Granite models are now available under Apache 2.0 licenses on Hugging Face and Github, the industry standard for open source, IBM said in a separate Tuesday announcement.
In addition to the Einstein 1 integration, the company partnered with AWS to infuse Amazon Sagemaker with the watsonx governance solution, deployed the platform on Azure and partnered with Adobe around hybrid cloud AI development, the company said.
ERP giant SAP tapped IBM to embed industry-focused AI solutions across its cloud-based Business Technology Platform in May.
“This ecosystem concept is extremely important and one that we've embraced,” Mohamad Ali, COO for IBM Consulting, said during a virtual briefing Monday.
Model choice and open source are also central to the IBM approach, Ali said, noting individual models are good for different purposes.
IBM isn’t alone in that strategy. Public cloud giants AWS, Google and Microsoft all have platforms where enterprise customers can shop around for models that suit their AI needs.
“We’re learning that the model that is good for the most things could be the most expensive model,” Ali said. “So this idea of multimodel is extraordinarily important.”
As part of the Salesforce partnership, IBM joined the CRM vendor’s Zero Copy Partner Network of Data Cloud integration solution providers. Salesforce reciprocated, signing on to the AI Alliance, a global AI safety organization IBM launched with Meta in December.
IBM plans to deploy new watsonx application modernization copilots for its Z systems mainframes in June and a Java coding tool in October, the announcement said.
